Only 40 percent of faculty and 35 percent of students think that failure to include footnotes is worthy of disciplinary action, according to McCabe. Thus, many students get away with lesser degrees of plagiarism because there are no fixed guidelines. Deterrents, detection Clear expectations and consequences tend to diminish the number of offenses. Many colleges and universities have revived honor-code systems or created new ones. Smaller classes and more specific or creative assignments that cannot easily be skimmed off the Web also draw students away from the temptation to plagiarize.
Technology can help, too, ironically.
Professors suspicious of certain papers turn to such Web enterprises as Plagiarism.org, which searches the Web and an extensive internal database for plagiarized material. A number of universities have signed up for the service. Although the total number of plagiarism cases has not noticeably increased recently, Internet-related cases have mushroomed. The Campus Judicial Board at UC-Davis sees an average of 100 plagiarism cases each year. Five years ago, the Internet was not a factor in plagiarism cases, while today, it accounts for 25 percent of the offenses, Wilson reports.