Plagiarism used to require hard work: trips to the library, photocopies, typing material in by hand. Fortunately, those dark days are long behind us. The Internet, which has done so much to democratize the spread of knowledge, has also democratized plagiarism. It's easy enough to be a digital pirate that anyone can do it—and many have. The last week alone brings us the story of an Australian judge who plagiarized sections of her legal rulings, the current national scandal of Chinese professors ripping off the work of other colleagues, and the admission that Oxford University is rife with student plagiarists.

But it didn't stop the 16-year-old high school junior from using phrases from Web sites - without attributing them - for a research paper on Lance Armstrong last year. "I needed it for my paper and I didn't feel like writing down where it was from," said Potrzuski. "I was just worried about the paper and getting it in."

Several of us in the Orbiting HQ have spent time at the head of college classrooms and can testify that this is a real problem. From master's students copying whole pages out of books to freshmen writers who cobble papers together from unlisted Internet sources, we've seen it all. The most amazing thing about the phenomenon of plagiarism is that most students think that it is undetectable.

The reality is that when a student's writing style shifts from awkwardly constructed sentences to flowing paragraphs stuffed with jargon, it's not hard to figure out what's going on. Since many students are too lazy to plagiarise from books or online databases (I have had students who did not actually know how to find a book on the shelves of the college library), Google usually makes it easy to dig up their sources. What the Internet giveth with one hand, it taketh away with another.

But this is a lot of work, and not every teacher will catch every instance of plagiarism. To make things simpler on the teachers, and to give students more of an incentive to do their own work, many schools are turning to online services such as Turnitin.com, a company which looks at the work of more than "seven million students in over fifty countries." They search every sentence in the paper against multiple databases as well as their own copy of the Web (both live and archived versions), and send teachers a list of flagged sentences and paragraphs for further review.

Given the ease with which it can be done, plagiarism certainly won't go away, but knowing that someone is watching can make it easier for students to do the right thing. And if they don't—well, there's always the Honor Court.

written by Nate Anderson
found on arstechnica.com