University of California-Berkeley officials estimate cheating on the campus increased 744 percent from 1993 to 1997. But as the Internet has exacerbated academic cheating, it also has spawned a solution. It also searches the Internet at large to look for copied passages. The resulting Web-based report allows instructors to see how much of a student s effort is original and where any purloined work was obtained. Every phrase, paragraph and page taken from another source is underlined and color-coded.
Instructors can click on the underlined text to view the source from which the passage was copied.
While Plagiarism.org s pattern-matching algorithms are powerful, Barrie points out that actual plagiarism can be identified only by a person. That decision lies completely with a human being. Plagiarism.org is used by faculty at Cal, Stanford University, several University of California and California State University campuses and numerous other institutions throughout the United States and Canada, England, Spain, France and the Philippines. The increased usage has caught the site s founders off guard. Every paper submitted for checking becomes part of the database against which future papers are checked.