As the availability of online resources expands, colleges across the globe such as the University of New Hampshire, Northwestern University and Singapore Polytechnic are turning to online plagiarism detection websites to combat the threat.
The UNH Faculty Senate passed a motion in 2005 to adopt Turnitin.com and MyDropBox.com as the official plagiarism detector for the 2005-2006 school year. The faculty is testing both programs university-wide to decide which service should be used in future, according to an email from Terri Winters, director of Academic Technology at UNH.
The programs would implement a plagiarism search process so professors can scan students’ works into the programs and check the papers’ content against sources found on the internet and in past website archives, published magazines and scholarly journals, said Alex Yaskin, account manager of the Mydropbox Family of Products.
More than 900 universities use MyDropBox, Yaskin said.
“When the paper is submitted, it goes through a complicated process of databases,” he added.
According to the Turnitin website, 70 percent of students do not plagiarize, while 29 percent of students had “significant plagiarism,” and only 1 percent had copied their entire papers.
Websites like SchoolSucks.com give users access to paper-writers for as little as $19.95. Users can input the number of pages they desire for their papers, the minimum number of sources needed and the due dates.
According to the PaperStore website, “[It does] not endorse nor tolerate any form of whole or partial plagiarism and will not engage in any activity that will facilitate cheating.”
College of Communication freshman Jillian Jorgensen said she supports the idea of plagiarism detection technology, acknowledging that cheating is a serious academic problem. However, through her previous experience with Turnitin, she said plagiarism websites fail in practice.
“The paper submission process was a little confusing, and many students had trouble submitting their work,” Jorgensen said about Turnitin. “The site identified silly, trivial common phrases among our papers instead of finding any serious plagiarism, and I think that the [teaching fellows] and the students found that the process was more trouble than it was worth.”
Jorgensen said that despite any efforts to detect plagiarism electronically, some students will ultimately attempt to cheat.
“If they don’t have a diligent professor, they’ll probably get away with it,” Jorgensen said.
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