With the wealth of information that's just within reach of any popular search engine, the temptation for students to easily plagiarize couldn't be more prevalent.
While professors and instructors once used the same search engines to catch plagiarism, some at The University of Memphis are using the Web site Turnitin.com to do the work for them.
"Turnitin.com has highly effective tools for detecting plagiarism," said Ross Sackett, anthropology instructor.
By scanning the Internet, as well as previous student submissions, the site can detect where students have copied directly from other sources or have paraphrased too closely to the original work, he said.
"It presents the professor with both an overall plagiarism score representing the percentage of copied material and a side-by-side comparison of the students paper and the potentially plagiarized sources," Sackett said.
But some students aren't as excited about Turnitin.com as their professors.
"I think it's unfair," said Precious Fields, freshman hotel and hospitality major. "It's possible that you and someone else have the same view on a certain topic."
No matter how well a student writes, they're bound to use phrases that have been used before, according to history professor Maurice Crouse, so it is important for professors to double check what the Web site finds.
One of the drawbacks of Turnitin.com is that it scores properly attributed quotes and paraphrasing as plagiarism.
"A paper can receive a plagiarism score of 10 percent simply because it contained a quote, even though it was fully attributed and appropriately referenced in the bibliography," Sackett said. "Professors using this valuable tool need to be aware that most of the 'hits' may well be false positives."
Crouse said he has seen scores higher than 20 percent, but after checking the paper himself found there was no plagiarism.
"I don't have a magic number, but if I get back a score of 87 percent it's a pretty good indication of unoriginal work," he said.
Another drawback of Turnitin.com is that it can't match a student's work against material that is only available in print, Crouse said.
"It's not as good as it claims to be," he said. "I don't think it finds all the matches that exist on the Internet."
The professor has to know the material already in order to recognize it, he said.
Sackett agreed and added that the Web site's database grows every time a student submits a paper.
Some professors, however, choose not to use Turnitin.com's services.
Since the Web site became available to The U of M, Leigh Anne Duck, assistant professor of English, said she hasn't had the need for it.
"During the past year, I've tried to write assignments in such a way that students might not be able to find good ready-made papers," she said.
Some students find good and bad aspects of Turnitin.com.
"(Turnitin.com is) great to catch plagiarism as long as the teacher reviews what the program indicates," said Olivia Hulsey, senior history and English major. "However, as far as grading is concerned, no computer program should ever try to replace the human element of a real live teacher."
Although the site does offer tools to electronically add comments to submissions, there is no basis to students' concerns that Turnitin.com is grading their papers, Sackett said.
"It is primarily an instrument for detecting unoriginal material," he said. "All scoring decisions are left entirely up to the professor."
Having to use Turnitin.com made Fields feel like she was under suspicion.
"It made me really cautious," she said. "It made me nervous about how I wrote my paper."
And in a way, Turnitin.com does place the student under suspicion, Crouse said, because the ability to cut and paste material from the Internet and into an assignment has created good reason for suspicion.
Turnitin.com's biggest benefit to students is removing the temptation to plagiarize, Sackett said.
"Plagiarism is not only dishonest, more importantly it short circuits the learning process and, in doing so, undermines the entire point of a university education," he said.
