Professors know that the sites are out there, but few have the time to search through them for evidence when they suspect a student of plagiarism. Nobody has time to do it. Plagiarism.org maintains a data base that it says is filled with works available from term-paper mills and elsewhere on the Web, as well as with papers submitted by professors. When a professor uploads a paper to the site, its computers try to match the paper with texts already included in the data base. Professors get back an originality report, which highlights parts of the text that may have been copied from other sources and also cites the source material.
Professors can use their own judgment about whether material was plagiarized.
The process is intended to detect not only a student who submits a paper entirely written by someone else, but also a student who turns in a paper composed of bits and pieces of different texts. Plagiarism.org isn't the only company eager to offer professors a way to detect cheating. Integriguard Inc. also allows students and professors to check the originality of a paper against a data base of assignments turned in previously. The strength of the Glatt software, she adds, is that when a professor suspects plagiarism but can't locate the original work, the program provides an objective means of determining whether the student did the work. It's sort of like random drug testing.