February 1, 1998

The two papers were identical. There was no question about

it. Word for word, paragraph by paragraph, the assignment turned in by

the two young men was the same.

`My first thought was that they had collaborated on the assignment,”

said Christopher

Morray- Jones, who taught the introductory religion class at the

University of California at Berkeley.

Actually, the students didn’t know each other at all: They had

independently gone to the Internet and downloaded the same report.

Across the United States, universities — and even in some cases, high

schools — are getting increasingly nervous about the potential for

cheating from the Internet. Wire up, plug in, and log on: Technology

on The Gate.

Once, in the days when computers took up a mere floor in

the science building, cheating students often looked for illicit help

from old tests tucked away in fraternity houses. Now, however, students

can plagiarize from their laptops, pointing and clicking their way

into a term paper treasure trove.

“This is the same basic thing as the frat house term paper file,

except that it is much more high tech, much more convenient and

therefore much more tempting,” said Doug Zuidema, manager of the

Office of Student Conduct at UC Berkeley.

“You don’t have to walk up to someone and ask for the paper . . .

You’re anonymous and you can access this material much more quickly and

easily.”

In October, Boston University took action against several Web sites that

had sold term

papers to a school employee posing as a student. The Web sites were all

charged in federal court with wire fraud, mail fraud, racketeering and

violating a Massachusetts law that bans the sale of term papers.

But California doesn’t have a law dealing with fake term papers,

which means that teachers and professors have to rely on instincts,

experience and sometimes, a little luck, to catch offenders.

In the Berkeley case, Jones said it was pure coincidence and long odds

that the first two students turned in the exact same paper. The students

had a choice of 10 books for review and the reports were read by two

graduate students.

“They were actually pretty unlucky,” he said. Eventually, Jones

found another student who had turned in a paper he had downloaded from a

Web site, and a fourth who had partially plagiarized his report from

material taken from the Web.

“There may have been a few others, too, but we couldn’t prove it,” he

said.

“NOTHING can be taught without stepping on somebody’s sensibilities.”

–a comment from the What should schools teach? topic in the The Gate

Conferences.

Jones said his type of course was particularly vulnerable to the

temptations of plagiarism because of the composition of the students

and size of the class.

He said there were 132 students in the class. Nearly one-half of the

students in the course were science and engineering students taking it

to complete a humanities requirement. In other words, there were a lot

of students enrolled in the class who may not have wanted to take it

but needed it to graduate.

“I’d say there were a fairly large number who were both highly

computer literate and may not have been very interested or have much

understanding of what goes on in a humanities course,” he said. The

penalties imposed on the students, all first offenders, were stiff. One

who partially plagiarized his report was failed on the paper, but

allowed to finish the rest of the course.

The other was failed for the course and along with the first two

students was given a censure, a black mark on their record that will be

available to graduate schools and

employers for five years from the time of the offense.

The plagiarism problems are not limited to universities.

`If doesn’t take that much to find what you want and when you’ve got a

kid who is under stress and who is a high achiever there is a

temptation to take a shortcut,” said Clarence Bakken, a physics teacher

at Gunn High School in Palo Alto.

“We had a situation where someone had copied something off the

Internet, virtually

verbatim. The teacher was checking the citations and son of a gun,

there it was on a Web site.”

Jane Healy, an educational psychologist who has written several books on

students and computers in education, said that junior high and high

school students are more likely to crib copy from CD-ROM encyclopedias

or take pieces of research whole cloth off a Web page rather than buy a

term paper.

“It’s easier for younger students to cheat than it once was, but the

warning signs are what they’ve always been and good teaching habits can

deter this,” she said.

Healy said a good teacher knows the quality of a student’s work and

should be able to

easily detect anomalies in the child’s assignments. “If you know your

kids it’s hard to slip something past.”

Thomas Rocklin, director of the Center for Teaching at the University

of Iowa, said that

plagiarizing work, no matter how it is done, “is an act of

desperation.

The difference between this and simply copying something out from a

book is that these papers arrive in an electronic form that you can

massage very easily to make it look original.” Bill Rukeyser, director

of Learning in the Real Worl (www.realworld.org), an informational

clearinghouse for educators, said some students try to rationalize

copying or buying material from the Web as just another form of

research.

“But there is a big difference between just downloading a paper and

turning that in and going out on your own and assembling your sources,

synthesizing ideas and producing your own idea,” Rukeyser said. “All

this is doing is moving copy from your eye to your fingertip to a

keyboard and to paper. That process doesn’t disturb the cerebral cortex

at all.

– Ramon G. McLeod, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tags: cheating