Plagiarism and the internet

Plagiarism has never been easier than it is today. Before the internet, cheating was labor-intensive and obvious. Potential plagiarists had to find appropriate works from a limited pool of resources, usually a nearby library, and copy them by hand. Since these resources were almost always professionally written, the risk of detection was very high.

The internet now makes it easy to find thousands of relevant sources in seconds, and in the space of a few minutes plagiarists can find, copy, and paste together an entire term paper or essay. Because much of the material online is produced by other students, it is often difficult or impossible for educators to identify plagiarism based on expectations of student-level work.

Even when an instructor does suspect plagiarism, the sheer size of the internet seems to work in the plagiarist's favor. Search engines can be useful for tracking down suspect passages, but even they have their limitations, given the number, variety, and password-protected nature of many websites. Even where search engines do prove useful, manually searching the internet for matches of hundreds of student papers can be a formidable task.

	According to a recent US News and World Report poll, 90% of students believe cheaters are either never caught or have never been properly disciplined

Additionally, the seemingly "public" nature of online content blurs the distinction between publicly and privately owned information. Electronic resources, by nature easily reproducible, are not perceived as "intellectual property" in the same way that their material counterparts are. Just as file transfer programs such as Napster make it easy to trade copyrighted music files most people would never think to steal in physical form, the internet makes plagiarism easy for students who might have thought twice about copying from a book or published article.

Perhaps the greatest resources for would-be plagiarists are the hundreds of online paper-mills, or "cheatsites", that exist solely for the purpose of providing students with quick-fix homework and term-paper solutions. Many of these services contain hundreds of thousands of papers on a wide variety of topics, and some even offer customized papers for an additional fee. The fact that many of these sites have become profitable ventures (complete with paid advertising!) only attests to the unfortunate truth that plagiarism has become a booming industry.

Turnitin created Resource Resources because we believe preemptive education is the most effective way to prevent plagiarism. We also know some students will plagiarize regardless. If you are an educator and have used plagiarism education preemptively in your classroom, but still suspect many of your students are plagiarizing, automated plagiarism detection can be an enormously effective deterrent. Click here if you would like to find out more about Turnitin's plagiarism prevention system and other online learning tools.