Battling Term-Paper Cheats

By Julie Rawe

Affordabletermpapers.com charges a minimum of $9.95 per page for a custom-written essay. Rush jobs cost $24.95 a page. The site, which dutifully states that its papers should be used for "assistance purposes only"--uh-huh--guarantees that customers won't run into trouble with plagiarism or they'll get their money back and a free rewrite. There are hundreds of online paper mills like this one, catering to all the stressed-out, disaffected or just plain lazy students with Internet access and a credit card or money order. But just as the Internet has made it easier for kids to cheat, it's also helping high schools and colleges ferret out the flimflammers. Every day more than 100,000 papers are fed into Turnitin.com a plagiarism-detection site that compares each submission with billions of Web pages, tens of thousands of journals and periodicals and a growing archive of some 40 million student papers. More than 7,000 educational institutions use the system, including Harvard and Oxford. But while Turnitin lets faculty level the playing field, many students--even the straight arrows--see its use as a breach of trust.

Amid startling data on the prevalence of cheating--in an undergraduate survey conducted this academic year at a dozen colleges by Rutgers professor Donald McCabe, 67% of the 13,248 respondents admitted to having cheated at least once on a paper or test--some students are getting administrators to rethink their use of gotcha tools. Nova Scotia's Mount St. Vincent University went as far as banning Turnitin after the student-union president complained that it created "a culture of mistrust, a culture of guilt."

Aside from the guilty-until-proved-innocent argument, many students are apoplectic that a for-profit entity--which charges 87-c- per student per year for plagiarism detection--is making money off their homework. As soon as a paper is vetted for cut- and-paste plagiarism, it joins a database against which every new submission will be compared. Thus, argues a recent Op-Ed in the Texas A&M newspaper, the company should have to pay to use these works, "without which their service would be crippled." Concerns about intellectual-property rights as well as cost led the University of Kansas to announce last fall that it was turning off Turnitin. Faculty protested so vehemently, however, that the school quickly signed up again.

But many teachers are torn when it comes to Turnitin. "How do you reconcile this [service] with a place that's trying to presume honor?" asks Bob Thompson, Duke University's vice provost for undergraduate education. Duke, which recently endured a cheating scandal at its business school, no longer uses Turnitin--in part because it did not like adding to the company's database--and this spring expanded its honor code by obligating students to take action if they observe or hear about cheating. "We will truly lose the battle if we think we're going to fight technology with technology," says Tim Dodd, executive director of the Duke-affiliated Center for Academic Integrity. "Kids will always be two generations ahead of us."

Meanwhile, students at a high school in McLean, Va., are trying to bring down Turnitin by suing its parent company, iParadigms, for alleged copyright infringement. To file such a lawsuit, a writer has to pay $45 to register a copyright, be it for a Pulitzer prizewinning novel or a ninth-grader's meanderings on Animal Farm, and the penalty per copyright violation can be as much as $150,000. So if the McLean High School students prevail with their copyrighted essays--a trial will probably begin this fall--ambulance- chasing lawyers will start tailing school buses, and Turnitin may have to close up shop.

"We've got to come back to reality," iParadigms CEO John Barrie says of the copyright suit. "These aren't nuclear-missile secrets." Papers are being archived at the same time as testing sites install cell-phone detectors to keep students from text-messaging answers or finding them online. One result of the high-tech cheating wars: paranoia. McCabe says fewer students are filling out his anonymous surveys. "Students started accusing me of getting their IP address," he says.

But given how easy it is to pluck a term paper off the Web, it's hard to argue against using Turnitin to curb academic dishonesty. That's why some schools, including McLean, rely on both honor codes and plagiarism-detection software to keep students on the up-and-up--without seeing these methods as being at odds with each other. The Air Force Academy, which expelled 15 first-year cadets this month for cheating, takes great pride in its honor code but also checks for plagiarism. Says Joey Smith, 22, chairman of the cadets' honor committee: "It's the whole idea of trust but verify."

Which is why it would be a shame if the McLean Committee for Student Rights succeeds in dismantling Turnitin. Yes, it is important to trust students. But an equally important lesson is that cheating shouldn't be rewarded. What's so terrible about making students think long and hard when an affordable term paper is just a click away?