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Many teachers feel that the arrival of the Internet into homes and schools has made plagiarism easier. And they are right. Copying and pasting text from a web page to a class paper is much easier than copying paragraphs longhand from the encyclopedia. And the resources available for copying online are so much larger and wide-ranging than the books in the library that the chances of being caught are much less -- there's no way that the teacher can be familiar with billions of web pages. The Internet has enabled a new closet industry of school paper-peddlers who provide students, for a fee, ready-written papers on a variety of the most common assignment topics. These crafty businesses prey on high school and college students through email advertising and other high-tech market channels that contribute to an atmosphere that makes plagiarism seem acceptable.

Many educators have fought this trend by restricting the use of technology and online sources in student work. For example:

Others have employed companies like TurnItIn to examine every student paper for evidence of copying. For a fee, this company will compare each paper against its huge database of text, looking for literary immorality. This may not be the best way to deal with the perennial problem of plagiarism in the newly-arrived digital age. But many teachers, whose students seem to be able to manipulate the megabytes much better than they, know of no other way to combat their fear of computer-assisted cheating.

Plagiarism is wrong. It's lazy, dishonest, immoral, and in some cases illegal; it prevents learning and spreads guilt and distrust. Yet many students are tempted by it, and in the midst of the pressures to succeed in school succumb to its easy solutions. Are there ways to discourage plagiarism without denying our students the benefit of the online information revolution?

Here are a few suggestions:

It's easy for students to find already-written papers on stereotypical general topics. A quick look at the Research Papers Online site, for instance, finds these titles listed under the history department:

• The British Industrial Revolution with Emphasis on Child Labor (6 Pages) $29.70
• The Political Career of Daniel Webster (13 Pages) $64.35
• The Rape of Nanking, (4 Pages) $19.80
• Italy: Its Social, Economic, Political and Historical Background, (4 Pages) $19.80

Topics like this, that have been the subject of assignments in many classes in many locales over many years, make plagiarism easy. Their bland nature fails to promote student interest, and their ready availability online encourages copying. Perhaps a better way to frame your students' study of these same topics is with a unique assignment for which copying and pasting would be virtually impossible, such as:

• Write a description of a day in the life in a British textile factory in 1840, from the point of view of a 12-year old child worker, in the first person.
• Read the front page of this morning's newspaper. Describe how Daniel Webster would react to each story, and cite your sources for his reactions.
• Compare the Rape of Nanking with the recent American assault on Falluja.
• If the Italian hero Garibaldi were teaching Italian history in a high school in Rome today, how would he summarize his country's economy and history?

Not only are these approaches to the same topics more likely to elicit creative thought and varied researches on the part of students, they are also relatively immune to the influences of the paper-peddlers and less susceptible to copying and pasting.

One way to discourage instant online plagiarism is to monitor and grade the process of developing the paper as much as the paper itself. Require a planning outline, and grade it. Call for notes to be turned in (in whatever form -- see the article on writing a paperless paper in this series), and comment on them. Have students discuss their first drafts with their peers. Compare the draft to the original outline. Comment on the draft and expect revisions. Ask students to explain the source of the ideas in each paragraph. By monitoring the process like this, you make plagiarism very difficult, and encourage good study habits.

Learn to recognize plagiarism and know how to test your suspicions. When you read a paragraph that doesn't seem to be in the student's own words, select a sentence or two from it. Then copy the selection. Now go to your web browser, and call up Google. Paste the selection into the search field. If you find a web page containing the suspect text, or something very close to it, you may have found the source of the unexpected phrases. Once your students know that you can do this, they are less likely to practice the most common form of copy-and-paste plagiarism.

• Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism, by Lisa Hinchliffe
• Plagiarism, by Sharon Stoerger
• Deterring & Detecting Online Plagiarism, from the North Harris College Library