With that URL there, it was hard for her to deny it. The company then sends a report to the professor. The iParadigms site, which went up about a year ago, already has some 50,000 term papers in its database, Barrie said. So far, the program has been tested in science and literature classes at the University of California at Berkeley. Glatt Plagiarism Services, a ten year-old company based in Chicago and Sacramento, Calif., produces computer software programs designed to detect plagiarism.
Teachers can use the company's main product to delete every fifth word from a student's paper.
The student is then asked to fill in the blanks. Although no site comes close to having all of the papers posted on the Internet, Brantner said his service and others like it are useful for another reason. There's sort of an element of mystery to it. The idea is for the site to serve as a deterrent to cheating. Like most Internet companies, IntegriGuard and iParadigms have not yet turned a profit.