A disclaimer adorns each site. Cheats, however, may soon learn that what the Internet giveth, it can taketh away. But now, e-mail messages identify search engines that can find strings of text that plagiarists might have used, and faculty members are much adept at using the software. Plagiarism.org, a service that helps professors fight plagiarism, has a database with tens of thousands of essays, available at various sites on the Web, as well as papers turned over to it by instructors. The technology can also identify papers cobbled together from bits and pieces of material from several texts.
Colleges often pick up the tab.
Glatt Plagiarism Services takes a different approach, offering a computer-assisted program to instruct students about what constitutes plagiarism and help them identify unintentional borrowing. Suspicious teachers may also use the program. By all estimates, most cheating remains undetected. But programs at colleges, like a campus-wide discussion on cheating at the University of California at Davis, can have an impact. At Davis, freshmen see skits about what can happen if they violate the code.