Ball State University's Department of Telecommunications now has access to a Web site designed to prevent and catch plagiarism.
A one-year subscription was purchased to turnitin.com for the TCOM department this fall by Barry Umansky, the Edmund F. and Virginia B. Ball Distinguished Professor of Telecommunications.
Almost 80 percent of college students have admitted cheating at least once, according to Turnitin. "It's not a secret that there has been a growing concern about plagiarism, not just about Ball State but in the academic community [in general]," Umansky said.
Professors are obligated to help students learn not to plagiarize either unconsciously or consciously, he said.
"I have encountered several different levels of plagiarism." Umansky said. "Some [examples] amount to wholesale copying of Web sites with no attribution, to the less dramatic examples where students simply had offered thoughts and concepts as their own when the thoughts and concepts had come from somewhere else."
The Internet has increased the ease with which students can copy papers online, including those published by students at other universities, he said. Out of an estimated 20,000 papers analyzed by Turnitin each day, 30 percent of them contain a significant amount of plagiarized material, according to the Web site.
It has access to billions of pages from the Internet, millions of previously written student papers and databases of books and journals.
"At a Broadcast Education Association meeting I learned about plagiarism Web sites and software," Umansky said. "It was the consensus of those making the presentation that Turnitin was the most efficient and best value."
Being caught plagiarizing can ruin a student's future career, telecommunications professor Phil Bremen, who has used the software on a test basis, said.
"Plagiarism is death to a career," Bremen said.
He said he catches at least one student a semester plagiarizing, and one time is too many.
Traditional search engines are limited in their ability to detect errors, Umansky said.
"For example, if one was to use Google search, one or two changes [to a paper] would not result in a match," Umansky said. "This software is not so easily fooled. [It's] a fairly robust tool that can determine what percentage of a paper has been acquired from other sources."
Paper mill Web sites such as essayrelief.com and elephantessays.com will write essays for students for a fee ranging from $10 to $36 per page. The sites claim to write original, non-plagiarized essays. The Web site oppapers.com provides other people's pre-written works for free.
Besides being used by teachers to find plagiarism, Turnitin can also be used by students to check their work to make sure they haven't plagiarized, Umansky said.
"It was my feeling that Turnitin offered both benefits, detecting plagiarism and offering students an explanation of what they have done," Umansky said. "Hopefully give them a lifelong caution of the perils of plagiarism."
Students can only use the Web site by getting the proper access, Umansky said. They can use it to see whether they have inadvertently plagiarized by not including attribution, he said.
Theoretically students could use the site to make a plagiarized work undetectable by making sufficient changes, but that process would require more effort than writing an original work, Umansky said.
The TCOM department is not trying to focus on catching more students, but rather on educating them on the dangers of plagiarism, he said.
"It can haunt them through life," he said. "There are too many examples, we know, that journalists and other professionals have plagiarized others' work and have ruined their own careers."
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