Teachers use a high tech tool to check students' papers for originality. Part two of "CyberCrime's" special report.

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To use the tool, a university or high school must first register with iParadigms.com, the company that operates Plagiarism.org.

Teachers are issued a password to use at a different website, called TurnItIn.com. At this site, the instructor creates an electronic drop box for the class. When it's time for students to turn in their papers, they locate their class on the site and submit their papers electronically.

From there, the tool pulls out key phrases in the paper and performs an Internet metasearch of more than 1 billion pages, Barrie explains. Next, it creates a digital fingerprint of the paper, which allows the checker to quickly determine whether it came from the vast amount of documents within Plagiarism.org's own databases or those from the Web.

After the paper is run through the Plagiarism.org protocol, the results appear on a color-indexed bar that indicates what percentage has come from online sources.

"It's a completely unambiguous representation of whether or not the student wrote those words or obtained those words from some other source," Barrie says.

"We never say whether a paper is good or bad," he insists. "We never say that a paper is original or it's plagiarized. We just say we found these words or these phrases or these entire papers, from either our database of from the Internet and we give that information to the instructor. Then the instructor makes the call."

But what do students think about teachers using an electronic tool to check their papers for originality?

"Cheating is not allowed," Irshov says. "It's their class, so they should have whatever means at their disposal to check. Since it's stated that cheating's not allowed, then nobody should really be surprised if they're checking for cheating."

Stacy Houlguin, who is with the UC Berkeley's office of student life, says the students' reaction to the technology has "been more amazed than anything else." Her department handles all plagiarism cases reported to the university.

"They're like, 'Whoa! you can actually do that?'," she says. "[They have] been able to find the information, and now we can too, much more easily than in the past, where we'd have to search different websites and different search engines individually."

Not so popular

As for Barrie, critics do not concern him. He asserts that the tool helps level the playing field.

"To a fraction of the students, maybe I'm not such a popular person," he admits. "Maybe this technology is not such a popular technology. But, I couldn't care less.

"I'm not trying to say that students shouldn't go to the Internet and students shouldn't cut and paste information into a term paper. I think it's a valid way of doing research," he adds. "To be intellectually honest, those students should reference the material that they got and include a little bit of their own thought."

This article is based on original reporting by "CyberCrime" segment producer and co-host Jennifer London.

Editor's Note: This story was first published on September 22, 2000.


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