“Then you guess, they’re plagiarised.” Sometimes there’s no need to guess – he once received a submission that even had the ILO seal on top, the way it appears on the website!

So, plagiarism is easy to detect?

“It may be easy if teachers are seriously looking for it – which very few are,” comments Preeti Shahane, studying MBA at a premier Indian institute. “We always download a lot of matter from the net for our assignments, but have never been caught. But we don’t act stupid. Even if we’re lifting large chunks of matter, we mix and match a lot, make it relevant to our topic, and ensure the whole report is flowing well. So, yes, we definitely put a lot of work into that!” she grins.

Some students do it differently. “Of course, we’re expected to refer and research. So we do look at the Net for information,” says Dhaval, an arts student. “But it’s so easy to copy-paste, we just take whole paragraphs, while putting only a line or two into quotation marks,” he adds.

Aren’t they scared they will be caught, or at least suspected? “I don’t think our professors read our assignments so carefully,” another student comments.

But several teachers are aware, even if unable to prove, that their students are submitting Internet downloads for projects. Trying to prevent the problem in the first place, some are proactive. Rakesh Singh, Associate Professor of Business Economics and Environment at the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies says, “I surf a lot myself; so students are automatically careful. “Besides, there are other things to judge. Even if I find some parts of an assignment are lifted, I don’t bother too much about it so long as they’re in context, and well incorporated into otherwise original work.”

Mrs B Nathan, Higher Secondary teacher at St Francis D’Assissi High School, says, “I give my students a set of relevant sites to refer on a given subject. They need to incorporate matter from these sites, so it’s difficult for them to lift wholesale from anywhere else.”

But most importantly, Mrs Nathan teaches them citation – using quote marks, footnotes, endnotes and a bibliography that give credit for a particular idea or sentence to its original author. This itself eliminates a lot of plagiarism.

Professor Mathew also suggests teachers can make straight downloads more difficult by giving shorter assignments, with more focused, innovative or analytical topics.

But prevention is not always cure, and if you still suspect a paper has been lifted online, copy-paste the matter (or a part of it) in the search window at Findsame. This search engine turns up a list of Web [ages that have sentences or whole paragraphs matching your entry. A double window interface actually allows you to compare side-by-side the plagiarised parts. The site is a free demo for Digital Integrity’s more sophisticated commercial tracking services.

Else, you can type some keywords or unusual phrases from the assignment into any of the search engines like RediffSearch, Google, All The Web or Alta Vista. This would usually turn up the source document, as students usually look for information this way. Plagarized.comis a forum for educators concerned about Internet plagiarism. Though rather US-oriented, Indian academicians too would find the articles and advice on the site very useful. Turn It In is a paid service that gives a “document source analysis” for a given assignment. This program checks its local database containing thousands of academic papers, as well as searches the Web for possible matches. It then gives an “originality report” with complete colour-coded links for each paper.

Eve2 is another commercial service that accepts essays in plain text or Microsoft Word and returns links of WebPages with matching passages from the document. It reports on the percent of the essay plagiarised, highlighting all copied parts in red.

Word Check Systems is a unique software that allows you to create an archive of papers, journals and assignments submitted in the past. When you enter a suspect document into it, the program scans the entire database and brings up matching documents, if any. A great resource, considering that borrowing a senior’s project is the easiest route available to students.

At higher student levels like a PhD in any field, in the medical sciences or say, in institutions like the IITs, plagiarism appears comparatively controlled since professors are more aware of the field and students need to substantiate every idea they present.

At school and college levels, where plagiarism is more rampant, catching the student might sometimes be as simple as asking to explain a phrase in the assignment: “What exactly do you mean here by 'rigours of functionality'?”

However, what worries serious academicians most is the extensive plagiarism at individual levels in society – models lifted by our social scientists, not enough empirical verification by physical science researchers, the lack of originality in books authored, even textbooks. “Who is questioning that?” one of them asks.

More Like This:
 --Keyboard Teachers
Why more teachers are opting for cyberspace
 --Learn@home
Sites to get a degree online
 --Making the grade
Crack the Sun Certification test