High-Tech Plagiarism: Cutting and Pasting Your Way to an "A"

One of the first computer skills kids learn is how to cut and paste. So we shouldn't be terribly surprised that plagiarism and the battle to counteract it are on the rise. When I was growing up, being a plagiarist was hard work. You had to sit in the library and copy the contents of some research source by hand. Today, with cut and paste and digital text, it may take more effort to avoid plagiarizing than it does to succumb. As a matter of fact, I'll bet many of us plagiarize without even thinking about it—a little cut here, a little paste there.

High profile celebrity plagiarism incidents abound, the most recent being the Harvard graduate Kaavya Viswanathan who wrote "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." Academics and intellectual property attorneys continually debate what constitutes plagiarism versus what constitutes a derivative work or research (remember DaVinci Code author Dan Brown's recent win?), but the fact is that the Internet makes stealing bits and pieces of other people's work almost a reflex action.

When I speak to school groups, I tell parents that there are three things they can do to help minimize their kids' temptation to borrow whole passages of text. One is to have them start their papers away from the computer screen, outlining their plan of attack. With an outline in hand, students are more likely to steer their own course and not just plop whatever research they turn up into their papers. The second is for parents to read their children's papers. If every paragraph sounds as if it's written in a different voice, they can either suspect schizophrenia or, more likely, plagiarism. The third, and perhaps most important, is to understand the difference between plagiarism and citing your sources. When in doubt, cite your source.

At school, the best weapon a teacher has for spotting plagiarism is his or her own knowledge of the student. ("That sounds too well-written for Johnny, doesn't it?") Sometimes they'll do a search on a particular passage or phrase, but that often leads nowhere. (Maybe it'll be easier once digital libraries are more comprehensive.) Andrew Kantor reviewed the high-tech alternatives in a recent USA Today column. One of the first software solutions on the market was Turnitin, which allows teachers to submit a piece of work and have that work checked against a database of works for copied passages of text. For a fascinating look at Turnitin's usage in the NYC public and private schools read The New York Sun account. For some statistics about the depth of the problem check out Plagiarism.org.

My guess is that teachers are going to get more creative with non-research paper assignments like pop quizzes and oral presentations. At the same time, as we amass our knowledge in digital form, it will be harder and harder for the plagiarists to go undetected. The web might make it easy to plagiarize today, but it's going to make it much harder tomorrow.