Editorial: When targeting plagiarism, Internet can be an asset

Instructors, take note: Should you ever assign a term paper on plagiarism, be sure none of your… Instructors, take note: Should you ever assign a term paper on plagiarism, be sure none of your students copy and paste material from this editorial.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 55 percent of college presidents believe student plagiarism has increased in the past 10 years. Of these respondents, 89 percent believe “computers and the Internet” have facilitated the resurgence of the practice.

Although we have no way of ascertaining whether plagiarism has indeed spiked — the 2010 New York Times article “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age” seems to indicate it has — what we can say definitively is that it’s a major problem on campus. We all know someone who has copied and pasted a Wikipedia article into their paper, and more often than not, we know because they bragged to us about getting away with it.

Nevertheless, claiming the Internet merely exacerbates plagiarism seems myopic. While it provides students with a plethora of material to steal — and libraries accomplish the same function — it also affords instructors invaluable preventative tools.

Pamela O’Brien, the Associate Director of Pitt’s Public and Professional Writing certificate, believes that, in her experience, plagiarism has indeed risen in the past 10 years — largely due to the Internet. At the same time, she feels better equipped to stop it.

“There has been more put online for us to make us aware of what resources we have and what the policies are,” O’Brien said.

One such resource is turnitin.com, a site that cross-references a given text with 14 billion web pages, highlighting portions that prove particularly suspicious. SafeAssign, a service free to all Blackboard enterprise clients, accomplishes a similar function.

Administrators need not resort to special software, however, to determine whether certain passages have been lifted.

“Students don’t realize that teachers carefully read their work,” O’Brien said. “If I’m reading something they wrote, I can tell when all of a sudden it sounds different.”

At the very least, simply typing a sentence into Google will reveal with fairly dependable results the sites containing the same sentence — an unheard-of convenience in the pre-Internet era.

The Web may or may not be the culprit for this supposed spike in plagiarism; it’s possible instructors have merely begun identifying it more, thanks to the aforementioned techniques. In any case, the Internet’s advantages outweigh its downsides — for both teachers and students.