Plagiarism.org's Barrie -- a neurobiology graduate student at UC-Berkeley -- acknowledges that the service fails to properly differentiate between quoted materials and original writing. He argues that the analysis can still be useful for professors who want to know how much of a paper was quoted or who want to verify that quotation marks were properly placed.

"It is just an informational tool," says Christian Storm, a biophysics graduate student who helped develop Plagiarism.org. But it's an invaluable tool, he says, because "it'd take a decent amount of effort to associate or correlate the two documents" by hand.

But then why is the program so quick to throw the word "plagiarism" around?

Barrie, Storm and other UC-Berkeley students and alumni created Plagiarism.org after papers submitted via a Web-based peer-review system began to resurface; students were downloading their peers' work and turning it in as their own, in different classes and during different semesters. They realized it was time to develop a "technological solution to the problem the Internet was breeding," Barrie says.

Though anyone can run a few papers through Plagiarism.org free of charge, the business model, of course, requires universities to pay for the service. Professors at small colleges can analyze a class's worth of papers for $20, while larger universities will pay $1 per student, plus $1 per paper. To date, Plagiarism.org has been used at Berkeley and by hundreds of individual instructors around the globe, Barrie says.

The Office of Student Conduct at UC-Berkeley tried the service while investigating a handful of plagiarism cases this year. But the university isn't paying while it tests the system's capabilities. "We want to try it for at least a full year before committing," says Doug Zuidema, manager the student conduct office at Berkeley.

Zuidema says he has found Plagiarism.org to be a "very effective tool" for proving or disproving an allegation of cheating. "What tends to happen is that once we show students the capability -- if in fact they've pulled something from the Web -- they pretty much confess to it," he says. And as faculty members learn of this automated search for instances of plagiarism, they become "more likely to report a case," adds Zuidema. "It saves a lot of time" and makes some cases possible, which would have been prohibitively time-consuming using traditional searches through old papers and other sources.

While Plagiarism.org bills itself as "the only automated Web site cataloging and academic paper originality checker in existence," there are several similar services.

The Essay Verification Engine (EVE), uses a downloadable program (free for 15 days, and then $34.95) that searches the Internet for matching phrases in the text. The makers of EVE boast that it "has been developed to be powerful enough to find plagiarized material while not overwhelming the professor with false links" -- a promising assertion. And IntegriGuard promises an overall "passed" or "failed" mark along with sentence-by-sentence analysis of the paper.

To test these automated plagiarism-detectors, I constructed a mini-essay with randomly selected sentences from works by four major authors: Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I also included a slightly revised version of the sentences from Marx's "The Communist Manifesto," changing words and punctuation to see if it could be identified.

Plagiarism.org found the revised Marx paragraph, but completely missed the direct quotes from Wilde, Stoker and Emerson. Overall, Plagiarism.org found the paper -- composed entirely of plagiarized material -- to have a high degree of originality.

EVE, however, found everything -- the sentence from Wilde's "Birthday of the Infanta," the portion of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" that I copied from the text, and the sentence from Emerson's "The Transcendentalist." But what EVE offers in searching power, it lacks in interface and usability. Rather than providing you with a side-by-side comparison of the paper you're analyzing and the matching phrases it finds from other sources, the software simply generates a list of URLs for sites where it has located matching phrases -- it's up to the user to determine what was really plagiarized.

With quirks like these and the difficulties the different programs have differentiating between quotations and plagiarized text, each service offers a cautious disclaimer explaining that the analyses aren't definitive. IntegriGuard's sample reports say, "Results provided by IntegriGuard should be researched before concluding that plagiarism has been committed."

UC-Berkeley's Zuidema says he's well aware of Plagiarism.org's flaws. "You have to really be careful what you look at," he says, because even if a quote is properly attributed, the passage can be identified as plagiarized material. It's clear that while the program can be a helpful tool for detecting potential plagiarism, it is not as an absolute test of originality.

"A human being must take that report and interpret it," says Plagiarism.org's Barrie, to "make sure that what we're saying jibes with reality." In the case of my thesis, there sure wasn't much jibing going on. Had a professor inexperienced in the ways of plagiarism detectors consulted the service about my work, I could have been branded a plagiarist and maybe even expelled moments before I walked across the stage to collect my $80,000 diploma. As educators begin to rely more on technology, hopefully they'll realize that -- at least for now -- nothing can completely replace the watchful eyes of human beings.
salon.com | June 14, 1999

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