ylvania is currently educating its faculty, teaching assistants, and instructors to recognize plagiarism. They have circulated memos to train faculty how to search for key terms to verify that sources came from other sources than students’ own words. Professors at Yale University are also being given training on how to detect computer-aided plagiarism (Boas). These incidents usually occur among Computer Science (CS) majors in which they copy large portions of programs, or even programs in their entireties, and then pass them off as their own work.In 1997, Boston University (BU) encountered its first computer-based cheating scandal. During a summer session, it was discovered that several students attempted to pass off papers downloaded from the Internet as their own. As a result, BU hired a paralegal to pose as a university student and requested a term paper on Toni Morrison’s Beloved from multiple Internet sites (Boas). Several of these Internet paper mills sent neatly printed papers that were ready to be turned in. One company even offered to put the student’s name, professor’s name and course number on the cover sheet. Upon receipt, BU filed a federal lawsuit against eight Internet term paper companies in seven different states. They claimed that these companies devalue the university’s degree programs. The lawsuit alleges wire fraud, mail fraud and racketeering. It seeks a court order barring the companies from doing business in Massachusetts (USA Today).Luckily for professors, just as the Internet has made it possible for students to buy ready-made term papers online, it is now being used by universities to help rat out these plagiarizers. Professors and other academics are now turning to anti-plagiarism web sites such as “plagiarism.org” and “findsame.com” that promise to analyze a term paper and deduce whether parts of it or all of it have been lifted from a previou...
