Faculty have begun using an online plagiarism prevention service in the hope of stopping academic dishonesty before it happens.

An incident in Spring 2001, in which philosophy teaching assistants discovered 12 students had plagiarized parts of their papers, emphasized the need for a solution, said Stephen Fisher, associate provost for undergraduate education.

“There are some students who take an easy road,” Fisher said. “We hope that this will reduce the possibility that that might happen again.”

The service costs about $6,000 for the first year of use and is supplied by Turnitin.com, an education technology company based in Oakland, Calif.

The service boasts 15,000 users from colleges and high schools, said Prof. Dan Garrison, chairman of the Undergraduate Academic Conduct Committee.

To use the service, professors obtain a password and then cut and paste the text of papers into Turnitin.com’s system.

Within a few days, the service sends a “report” to the professor with Internet URLs or database locations of any paper passages that matched the text.

The service provides a thorough plagiarism check because it keeps a database of all the papers it receives, Garrison said.

“The longer they’re in business, the bigger their database and the more likely they are to have the paper (a student) just bought,” Garrison said.

Using search engines such as Google – the way TAs did to find the culprits in the philosophy class in the spring – is free, unlike Turnitin.com.

But search engines find papers published only on the Internet or advertised with brief descriptions on “paper mill” sites, Garrison said.

Administrators have not yet monitored the system, Garrison said.

To be successful the system will require faculty participation.

“You have to have a level of credibility,” Garrison said. “If students know that we use the state-of-the-art detection software, they will say: ‘This is not a risk we can take.'”

The philosophy incident occurred among undergraduates, but Turnitin.com will be available to both undergraduate and graduate faculty, Garrison said.

Graduate faculty put in requests for the software because the ramifications of graduate plagiarism often are worse than those of undergraduate plagiarism, he said.

“If you’re in med school and get caught you may never be able to enter the profession,” Garrison said. “Ethics violations in law school and med school are very costly.”

Turnitin.com has come under fire for infringing on students’ copyrights, according to an article in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education.

The company has tried to circumvent the criticism by encouraging professors who subscribe to the service to warn students ahead of time that their papers will be checked, according to the article.