Nevermind the old image of the plagiarist as the freshman who turns in a composition in his girlfriend's handwriting. Today's cheat can search the Web for essays and background information on an assignment topic and swipe others' ideas straight out of a browser window, cutting and pasting various sources together in a montage of stolen prose. Worse yet, the cheat can buy his term paper from an online mill, complete with title page and properly formatted references. Beyond the issues of cheating, these incidents constitute laziness, contempt for others' rights and an intellectual failure that vacates the reason for and the act of learning.
In response to the pervasiveness of online plagiarism, university professors must exercise more than a little vigilance to avoid allowing fraud to pass undetected. Some plagiarism comes to light simply because the plagiarist steals material far beyond her innate writing ability. The student who typically writes stilted, unimaginative prose but who suddenly turns in a well-written paper filled with lively ideas raises an immediate red flag in the professor's mind. While it may be time consuming to plug passage after passage of an essay into a search engine, looking for purloined prose one paragraph at a time, today's Web-based resources include plagiarism detectors that can accept an entire essay in one upload and return a reliable report on the writing's legitimacy.
Students aren't the only plagiarists on campus. Some professors use their graduate assistants' research results in scientific papers without fully and correctly crediting their sources. Others commit the same forms of unattributed citation or idea theft in their publications for which they would give a student a failing grade. From laziness to the age-old pressure to publish or perish, professors are human, too, and just as able to cheat as any student. Assuming or asserting that professors are exempt from plagiarism is naive, if not arrogant.
Rather than focus solely on detection and punishment of plagiarism, at least where student work is concerned, professors can take steps to reduce the temptation to cheat or the opportunities to do so. Many students are unprepared for the creation of a college-level semester paper. Professors who break the task up into smaller interim assignments reduce the risk that students simply go on the Web and pay for prose. Students who plagiarize usually are unprepared to discuss the work they've turned in. Professors who invite suspected plagiarists for an appointment during office hours and privately ask them to talk their way through the ideas they supposedly have expressed will find out soon enough whether the work is authentic. Above all, refusing to condone plagiarism at any level sends a clear message that no one is exempt from scrutiny, regardless of credentials, degrees, honors, awards or status.