BERKELEY USES WEB TO DETECT PLAGIARISM
The University of California is using the Internet as well as the
threat of lawsuits to fight plagiarism.  The U.S.'s largest
university system last spring began using the Plagiarism.org Web
site to check the validity of papers against an online database
compiled from previously written term papers, books, and
journals.  The site was the idea of a Berkeley doctoral student
and was put together with the help of eight other graduate
students.  The site allows teachers to search the database for
exact matches of phrases of at least eight words.  The site was
tested on a neurobiology class at Berkeley, where students were
required to upload their papers to the Web site.  After comparing
the students' papers to the online database, one in eight papers
were found to contain plagiarized material.  The site is now
being tested at various other colleges.  (Washington Times 12/19/99)


WEB MAKING PLAGIARISM A STICKIER ISSUE
A number of Web sites offer research papers that students can
download and hand in as their own work, making plagiarism a
larger problem than ever before on college campuses.
SchoolSucks.com, for example, charges by the page for reports on
a wide range of topics.  Another site, Lazystudents.com, sells
research and other items.  With an estimated 2.1 billion pages on
the Web, professors are unlikely to catch plagiarism by
conducting their own searches.  However, several companies now
offer services that compare a student's research or papers to
past work by the same student to detect plagiarism.  By analyzing
characteristics such as the length of sentences and how often a
particular adjective is used, the software determines whether the
work matches the style of the student's previous assignments.
IParadigms, founded by two former University of California at
Berkeley professors, offers a service called Plagiarism.org that
compares a student's work with its database of about 125,000
research papers, material from academic Web sites, and files
tagged by search engines.  Other companies that offer services
and software to help apprehend cheaters include Information
Analytics, Glatt Plagiarism Services, and IntegriGuard.
(Investor's Business Daily, 9 Aug 2000)