Plagiarism is the most common infraction of the SMU Honor Code, thanks to the nearly 200 cheater-friendly web sites that offer term papers to any student willing to hand over his credit card number.
With sites such as SchoolSucks.com and BigNerds.com equipped to sell archived term papers, 36 percent of undergraduates in the United States have admitted to plagiarizing written material, according to a recent Psychological Record survey. And SMU is not exempt from these figures.
Lauren Tarbox, president of the SMU Honor Council and a senior chemistry major, says plagiarism is a major concern on campus.
“We [the Honor Council] saw more cases of plagiarism last year than any other form of cheating,” Tarbox said.
And these cases deal with more than a few lines of text copied from a book in the library. Whole paragraphs and even whole papers have been submitted by students as original work.
Jenny Passow, administrative advisor to the Honor Council, agrees with Tarbox, adding that the most common means of plagiarizing is the “cut and paste” method, meaning a student downloads information and adds it directly to his or her term paper.
For many teachers, identifying plagiarism can be difficult, if not impossible, thanks to the extensive resources now freely available on the Internet. Yet, as is often the case, one business has given birth to another, and anti-plagiarism Web sites are gaining popularity in the education sector.
Faculty at SMU have embraced the Oakland, Ca., based TurnItIn.com to help police their classes.
“[TurnItIn.com] is a subscription service, and we [SMU] are going to do a trial this fall to see how effective it is,” said Melissa Barden Dowling, associate professor of history. According to Dowling, should SMU decide to subscribe to TurnItIn.com following the trial period, the university would pay for all professors to have access to the site.
TurnItIn.com, founded by John Barrie, a former biophysicist, is the most widely used anti-plagiarism service on the Internet. Using brain-wave analysis techniques, submitted term papers are chopped into small pieces and compared to a growing database of similarly analyzed documents available on the web.
Passages suspected of being plagiarized are highlighted and the annotated document is returned to the teacher. Suspected copied passages are also sent with the document, leaving the teacher with the ultimate decision of what is and what is not plagiarism.
Professors at SMU who report cheaters are required to file a written complaint to the Honor Council, including any evidence of the infraction. An annotated document from TurnItIn.com is nearly indisputable evidence.
“Professors are using [TurnItIn.com] a lot,” Passow said. “It was our main resource against plagiarizers last year.”
If caught breaking any part of the Honor Code, students are brought before the Honor Council and given a confidential trial. In the case of plagiarism, if found guilty, a student is placed on deferred probation and receives an honor violation that is placed on his or her transcript and is not removed until three years after graduation.
In addition, the student may not accept any scholarship awards, unless need-based, while remaining at SMU. The final grade for the assignment, however, is left to the discretion of the professor.
Yet many professors think the fight to get rid of cheating on college campuses is a futile one. According to a study published by Donald L. McCabe in his book Faculty Responses to Academic Dishonesty: The Influence of Honor Codes, 55 percent of faculty in the United States “would not be willing to devote any real effort to documenting suspected incidents of student cheating.”
Should SMU decide to subscribe to TurnItIn.com, professors on campus may have no choice.
