Plagiarism in a high-tech age

But so is plagiarism.

"We live in a cut-and-paste world," said Deb Ciochina, English department chairwoman at Crown Point High School. "We can move things around so easily."

A 2005 report by the Center for Academic Integrity found that more than 60 percent of surveyed high school students admitted to plagiarism, according to the Washington Post. There are even Web sites, such as schoolsucks.com, that offer tens of thousands of term papers online, on topics ranging from accounting to zoology.

But high schools and colleges in Northwest Indiana, and across the country, are using technology and other methods to their advantage in the ongoing battle against plagiarism.

Ciochina and several other Crown Point High teachers have been using the anti-plagiarism online service Turnitin in their classrooms for the past school year.

Students are required to submit their papers to Turnitin. Their work is then cross-referenced with the service's extensive database of papers as well as billions of other Web pages, articles and periodicals, according to Turnitin's Web site.

Teachers then receive their students' papers with highlighted passages that appear to have been lifted or may have been poorly cited.

Deborah Cuffia, assistant principal at Crown Point High School, said Turnitin helps teachers and students alike.

"It's served as an educational tool," Cuffia said. "They have to be more vigilant in what they write."

Turnitin may be highly praised, and according to founder John Barrie, highly used, at over 7,000 schools in 90 countries. But it's also highly criticized in some circles.

Critics, primarily students, say they lose their intellectual property rights to their papers, which are stored in Turnitin's database, and are upset the California-based company makes money off their work.

In protest, a pair of students at McGill University in Quebec refused to submit their work to the service. And a group of students at McLean High School in Fairfax County, Va., formed an anti-Turnitin organization last fall that lead to a lawsuit in March.

Turnitin creator John Barrie did not return calls for comment by deadline.

Ciochina and Cuffia said they have not heard any complaints about the service. The Post-Tribune contacted several Crown Point students, who all said they had never used Turnitin themselves, nor had they heard of it.

Ciochina said it will be used again in the fall, likely in more classes.

Turnitin may be an easy solution, although it comes with a price. Jan Osika, an English teacher at Hobart High School, uses a free, more hands-on, and ultimately more time-conducive method to stop plagiarism.

Osika and her students pick one topic when doing research papers. Their source material includes a pool of articles Osika selects as well as some articles or sources the student finds, provided they're teacher-approved.

Together the students work on outlines, note cards, and even write the actual papers in class. When they turn in their papers, they also have to turn in their notes, their sources, their outlines, their drafts, and they have to link citations to information in their source materials.

Osika then grades the work -- only one paper a day -- for the sake of fairness, since all the papers revolve around the same topic.

It's an extensive process, but a necessary one, Osika argues.

"What technology has done for me is make my job a lot harder," she said. "If you want to do a conscientious job where the kids are really writing, you have to be a detective."

Gone are the days when students can turn in papers without sources. And book reports are no longer assigned in her classroom -- it's too easy for students to plagiarize, or simply read about the book online, instead of reading the book itself.

Plagiarism doesn't just happen in secondary schools. It's a problem at colleges as well.

Indiana University Northwest in Gary tries to stop cheating with Turnitin, said spokeswoman Michelle Searer. But students are not required to submit their papers to the service. Instead, professors turn in suspicious papers themselves on a case-by-case basis.

Professors also scan sites like schoolsucks.com to make sure they haven't received any plagiarized papers.

Valparaiso University also uses technology, but they don't use Turnitin.

Dennis Trinkle, chief information officer for the university, said it's better to teach professors how to catch plagiarists through search engines like Google and Yahoo, rather than having them rely on Turnitin to do the jobs for them. The university holds educational seminars once a year.

"Our approach has been, 'It's as easy to catch students who are plagiarizing as it is to plagiarize,' " Trinkle said.