"Web of Deceit"

When Christine Pelton, a high school teacher in Piper, KS, flunked 28 sophomores who had copied parts of their botany projects off the Internet, she unwittingly exposed her community's-and by extension, the country's-ambivalence about online plagiarism. Pelton's decision to enforce her written policy of failing students who cheat made national headlines in February, after the principal and superintendent flip-flopped on their support of Pelton, eventually siding with the students and their angry parents. The incident highlights a disturbing culture of permissiveness among a cut-and-paste generation of students and parents who lack an understanding about why it's wrong to copy.

Many librarians have already taken decisive steps. They're showing students how to define plagiarism, how to recognize when they're committing it, and how to credit and cite others' works correctly. They're also working with teachers in setting plagiarism policies and checking search engines to determine whether or not an assignment has been copied. However, despite the Internet explosion, says Carol Kuhlthau, a professor of library and information science at Rutgers University, schools have yet to establish nationwide rules to guide educators in dealing with this growing problem.

Sadie Longood, a librarian at Dallas (OR) High School, thinks now is a good time to start laying down those guidelines. Longood has conducted research on plagiarism policies in schools across the country and learned that 'many schools do not address the issue of academic integrity at all.' Longood was surprised to learn that the Oregon School Boards Association didn't have plagiarism policies for local school districts. And when she investigated further, she found that most local district policy handbooks didn't cover other forms of cheating either. Longood took it upon herself to outline the following recommendations for school librarians who are concerned about plagiarism:

• Increase student awareness of cheating and plagiarism.
• Define and determine the threshold of cheating, plagiarism, and academic integrity.
• Train faculty on how to recognize cheating, how to document suspicions, and how to create assignments that don't lend themselves to cheating.
• Disseminate information on cheating and plagiarism to parents and the community.
• Support the idea of swift and sure consequences.
• Recommend that the school board address academic integrity in its district's policy.

Kuhlthau suggests that librarians begin the school year by defining plagiarism in detail, and explaining to students why it's unethical. 'We need to teach students what intellectual property is,' she says. 'When students think of themselves as authors working with an idea they've constructed, it becomes personal. Once they've created an original idea, we need to ask them, 'Do you want your neighbors using your idea as their idea in their paper?'' Kuhlthau believes teachers and librarians should work as partners: the teacher devises an assignment that requires students to answer questions that an encyclopedia or Web site can't answer, and the librarian demonstrates how to use available research materials to create and support an original idea.

But even with instruction, some students will still plagiarize. When they do, the extent of the punishment should be determined by individual school districts. That's why it's increasingly important for schools to spell out the consequences of plagiarism in their student handbooks. David Lininger, a library media specialist for the Hickory County (MO) Schools, offers his school's student handbook's statement on plagiarism as an example: 'Any student who plagiarizes material from any source, print or multimedia, shall receive an F for the project. The student shall also receive disciplinary action deemed appropriate by the principal or assistant principal. Legal action will be pending.'

Lininger credits the small size of his school and the tight-knit community as the prime reasons he's had to deal with only three cases of online plagiarism in four years. If a student cheats, Lininger says, 'It would be known throughout the area very quickly. The speed at which the news would travel is the biggest deterrent we have.' In Lininger's case, he was able to match two of the copied passages with encyclopedia CD-ROMs, and the third was found online. It's so easy to copy from electronic resources, he and other librarians say, that many students don't bother to change even a few words of the copied text they turn in. Others don't bother to change the fonts. Consequently, identifying a plagiarized paper is often amazingly easy. Not surprisingly, the biggest red flag that alerts teachers about plagiarism is when students hand in work they normally wouldn't be capable of doing.

One of plagiarism's greatest detriments is that students miss out on learning useful research skills, says Susan Jones, an academic development specialist at Parkland College in Champaign, IL, and a former high school teacher. Internet search tools have made it possible, she says, for students to graduate high school without learning these essential skills. Jones recalls teaching students how to use the library before the advent of the Internet. 'Just figuring out what kind of print resources had information about your topic was an education in and of itself,' she says. 'Computers didn't read billions of words to look for the phrases you were seeking. You had to narrow it down.' Jones encourages librarians to do whatever they can to teach kids research skills, and emphasizes that they do it early.

There are also cases in which the motivation for cheating becomes increasingly complex. Teachers often ask Janell Brown, a librarian at the Ohio State School for the Blind, to review student reports that may be plagiarized. But cheating involving students with special needs addresses a different set of motives. 'Most [visually impaired] students have issues other than their vision,' she says. 'Our kids know they are not working at a competitive level, and it's an ego problem.' To impress other students, they will sometimes plagiarize on a research project or creative writing assignment. Brown says students in her school are most likely to 'borrow' poetry from the Net. Her response is often the old Google test used by many school librarians; she takes the most distinctive phrase in the assignment and searches it in the Google Advanced Search as an exact phrase. 'We almost always catch them [plagiarizing] because the work submitted is perfect-no misspellings, no punctuation problems.'

Other educators are signing up for Internet plagiarism-detection services. John Barrie, a founder of one of those services, Turnitin.com, says he's been interviewed by the media at least 30 times since the Kansas incident, and has witnessed a boom in interest in anti-plagiarism detection from middle schools, high schools, and colleges. Barrie claims more than 1,200 high schools around the world use his service, and that 50 to 75 requests to check assignments for plagiarism come in daily. While researching the sources of students' plagiarized materials, Barrie found that 70 percent of them came from the Internet (as in the case of the Kansas students); 25 percent came from 'swapped' papers (for example, when an older sibling hands a well-graded paper to a younger sibling); and five percent came from other sources, such as papers purchased from online 'cheat' services. Pelton, the teacher at the center of the Kansas plagiarism controversy, discovered her students had been cheating during a free, 30-day trial of Turnitin.com.

Deborah Stafford, a librarian at the Gen. H. H. Arnold High School in Wiesbaden, Germany, who often conducts the Google test for teachers at her school, has been investigating Turnitin.com and several other anti-plagiarism services. But she says some teachers are simply resigned to their students copying and pasting research. 'I have also had teachers say that they don't assign reports because the kids just copy,' says Stafford.

Rather than accepting plagiarism as inevitable, educators need to give students assignments that require traditional sources of research that don't revolve around the Web. Students should also be required to list their references. Marcia Jensen, a library media specialist at Davenport (IA) West High School, agrees with Jones about the importance of students learning the critical thinking process involved in conducting research. Elementary school teachers, Jensen says, should design assignments that discourage copying and pasting, and school librarians should be the key people they collaborate with. As an example, Jensen suggests redesigning a simple, standard assignment-the 'animal report' for primary kids. Most teachers assign primary school students animal reports in which students look up information about a particular animal and answer questions like: What does my animal look like? What does my animal eat? Where does my animal live?

Assignments like this, says Jensen, practically invite students to copy and paste. 'I would take this one step further,' she says. 'I would have students [record] the information they located in the search portion of the report on a large class graph, instead of making a report. Or they could paste the answers written on paper squares in the appropriate box.' The students, with the teacher's guidance, would then group the animals in different ways. Do the animals with sharp teeth all eat meat? What other traits do the animals share when you group those with hair or feathers? Questions that arise during the discussion can be used to conduct additional research that isn't so easily copied from an online encyclopedia or a Web site. The goal of this kind of assignment, Jensen says, 'is an opportunity to teach students how to interpret information.' Learning how to interpret information requires teachers and librarians who care whether their students know how to think. And knowing how to think is not an easy thing to copy and paste into students' minds.