Jonathan Lethem had a wonderful essay, The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism, in the February 2007 Harpers. The twist to the essay, which discusses the copying of words, gift economies, and public commons, was that it was mostly plagiarized – a collage text – something I didn’t realize until I got to the end. The essay challenges our ideas of academic integrity and plagiarism.
In my experience plagiarism has been getting worse with the Internet. There are now web sites like Customessay.org where you can buy customized essays for as low as $12.95 a page. Do the math – a five page paper will probably cost less than the textbook and it won’t get detected by services like Turn It In.
These essay writing companies actually offer to check that the essay you are buying isn’t plagiarized. Here is what Customessay.org says about their Cheat Guru software:
Custom Essay is using the specialized Plagiarism Detection software to prevent instances of plagiarism. Furthermore, we have developed the special client module and made this software accessible to our customers. Many companies claim to utilize the tools of such kind, few of them do and none of them offer their Plagiarism Detection software to their customers. We are sure about the quality of our work and provide our customers with effective tools for its objective assessment. Download and install our Cheat Guru and test the quality of the products you receive from us or elsewhere.
Newspapers have been running stories on plagiarism like JS Online: Internet cheating clicks with students connecting it to ideas from a book by David Callahan, The Cheating Culture (see the archived copy of the Education page that was on his site.)
There is a certain amount of research on plagiarism on the web. A place to start is the The Plagiarism Resource Site or the University of Maryland College’s Center for Intellectual Property page on Plagiarism.
I personally find it easy to catch students who crib from the web by using Google. When I read a shift in writing professionalism I take a sequence of five or so words and Google the phrase in quotations marks. Google will show me the web page the sequence came from. The trick is finding a sequence short enough to not be affected by paraphrasing while long and unique enough to find a web site the student used. This Salon article, “The Web’s plagiarism police” by Andy Dehnart, talks about services and tools that do similar things.
Perhaps the greatest use of these plagiarism catching tools is that they might show us how anything we write is woven out of the words of others. It’s possible these could be adapted to show us the web of connections radiating out from anything written.
Note: This entry was edited in Feb. 2018 to fix broken links. Thanks to Alisa from Plagiarism Check for alerting me to the broken links.