Annette Nellen had her most personal encounter with plagiarism last year after doing a Google search. The San Jose State University tax professor pulled up an award-winning student paper from a New York University web site and – surprise! – she wrote it two years before for a law conference.
Her experience shows how the Internet has heightened both challenges and opportunities for inhabitants of universities. For Nellen, the web provides a chance to share research with students and colleagues around the world. But for students who either don’t know how to write an academic paper or want a quick fix, it offers nearly limitless opportunities to steal other people’s work.
At universities across the nation, officials are looking for ways to reverse what seems like an epidemic of unethical behavior.
San Jose State is taking an active approach in battling academic dishonesty. This is where Debra Griffith steps in.
As the university’s chief judicial officer, Griffith is the point person in the new offensive. She was a force behind the adoption last spring of a revised academic integrity policy and organized the first annual Academic Integrity Week, which was held recently.
Griffith has revamped the Judicial Affairs web site, packing it with information to help students and faculty. She spoke to incoming freshmen about why academic integrity matters, and asked the new students to sign an honor pledge.
Anonymous surveys of high school and college students across the country find a large percentage admit cheating – in some cases, more than 75 percent.
They write answers on the inside of cap bills, smuggle information on graphing calculators and trade answers by text messaging on cell phones. With just a click, they can find thousands of essays and term papers, free and for a price, on more than 250 web sites, from AceYourPaper to SchoolSucks.com.
The majority of students reported to Griffith’s office last year for academic dishonesty were accused of plagiarism, which overtook cheating as the school’s No. 1 academic offense.
For every one cheater, there were two plagiarists – students who pass the work of others off as their own. Many students don’t understand what plagiarism is and don’t know how to write a research paper, Griffith said.
Last year, the campus had only 165 reports of academic dishonesty to Judicial Affairs. That was down from 186 the year before, double the number in 1996-97. With 30,000 students, Griffith suspects there are more violations than reported.
When students stumble, Griffith refers them for counseling or academic help – in addition to whatever penalty she assigns.
“Students make mistakes all the time,” said the former New York City social services worker, who became chief judicial officer last year. “My job is to hold them accountable, but then I help them succeed.”
Students in political science professor Terry Christensen’s writing class said students cheat and plagiarize for a variety of reasons: because they are lazy; because they work 20-40 hours a week and have too many responsibilities; because their families pressure them to get good grades. They are more likely to do it, some students said, if the professor doesn’t seem engaged or allows cheating by looking the other way.
“I don’t think there are too many students who think it’s OK to do all the time,” said Danny Martinez, a political science major. Cheating would be less likely, he said, if teachers emphasized that learning is what’s important, not the grade or how the work is done.
Dealing with academic dishonesty is the worst part of the job for many teachers.
“It’s unpleasant to accuse someone of plagiarism,” said Julio Soto, an assistant professor of biology. “A large number of faculty members don’t want to do it.”
Plagiarism detection systems, such as the one at Turnitin.com, have helped. Turnitin checks the originality of student papers against a database of 4.5 billion pages, highlighting links between words in a student’s paper and the original source.
In addition to using Turnitin.com, Soto takes the extra time to teach his writing students about plagiarism and how to avoid it. He also asks them to turn in their notes and source materials. His work paid off last year when none of the more than 100 students in his science writing class plagiarized.
Soto reports offending students and also assigns his own grade penalties. He hopes it will embarrass them into compliance.
“It is important to keep a record,” he said. “I have had students who were not embarrassed enough by the experience and have plagiarized or cheated in other classes.”
___c 2004, San Jose Mercury News.

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