Catholic schools get tough on Internet plagiarism

There was a time when even plagiarism took a little effort.

If students wanted to cheat on term papers or other projects, they had to locate books on their research topic, copy or paraphrase key passages and pass the work off as their own. If that was not an option, cheaters had to get someone else to write their papers for them.

These days, it takes less than five minutes to log onto the Internet and download whole papers complete with footnotes and bibliographies. Several Web sites offer such a “service” for free or a small fee, posting hundreds of papers on topics ranging from American literature to Shakespeare to world history.

“It’s very, very tempting,” said Alexander Kline, a 17-year-old senior at St. Maria Goretti High School in Hagerstown. “When I was doing my term paper last year, I found sites that had exactly what I was looking for. It was discouraging that I couldn’t use those eloquent words as my own. But I knew that we can’t plagiarize. It’s wrong.”

While Alexander, a parishioner of St. Ann in Hagerstown, was able to resist the temptation, some of his peers throughout the Baltimore Archdiocese have not.

Several Catholic schools have decided to get tough with plagiarists by instituting honor codes and introducing anti-plagiarism computer services for teachers. Many are taking more time to explain what plagiarism is to their students before it becomes a problem.

Loyola Blakefield School in Towson will screen every student paper this school year for signs of plagiarism through an online service called www.turnitin.com. The papers will be compared with a database of existing documents and other sources. Evidence of plagiarism will be highlighted and the original source will be quoted for the teacher.

“It was becoming very difficult for teachers to tell when students actually wrote the paper and when they picked it up off the Internet,” explained Gail Kujawa, Loyola’s acting head. The online service will help teachers know where there is strong evidence of plagiarism while also encouraging students to be more mindful about using resource material without proper citation, Kujawa said.

Melanie Lipscomb, a spokeswoman for www.turnitin.com, said Towson Catholic High School is the other school in the Archdiocese of Baltimore that is currently using the service.

When www.turnitin.com was founded in 1998, most of its clients were colleges. But as plagiarism has become more pervasive, the number of secondary schools subscribing to it has increased “exponentially,” Lipscomb said.

“There’s a great deal of pressure on students to succeed,” said Lipscomb, noting that there are currently 5,000 institutions worldwide that use www.turnitin.com — including all the secondary schools and colleges in the United Kingdom.

“Unfortunately, many students are looking at other avenues besides putting hard work and diligence first,” she said. “We provide an objective report. It’s up to the instructor to determine if it (evidence of plagiarism) was a fluke or if it’s something they should follow up.”

Depending on the size of the school, subscribing to www.turnitin.com costs about 50 cents per student each academic year, according to Lipscomb.

As the principal of a small school in Washington County, Christopher Siedor said it is too expensive to introduce online anti-plagiarism services at St. Maria Goretti. Instead, he is emphasizing fundamentals like honesty.

Two years ago, Siedor introduced an honor code at the school where students accused of plagiarism are required to stand before an honor committee made up of three of their peers and a faculty member. If found guilty, they face a variety of punishments including suspension and expulsion.

“It’s very difficult for our teachers to be Sherlock Holmes,” explained Siedor, who was instrumental in introducing a similar honor code four years ago at another Catholic high school.

“But if you give a kid an essay test, you know what the writing ability and style is,” he said. “If they later turn in a paper that has vocabulary you’ve never seen that student use before, red lights go off in your brain.”

During the first week of class, every student is given a packet of information explaining what plagiarism is, Siedor said. The topic is also covered in religion classes, where sections on honesty outlined in the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” are highlighted.

“Just because society’s norms say it’s OK to fudge things doesn’t make it right,” Siedor said.

Sandra Ballantine, an English teacher at St. John’s Literary Institution in Frederick, said correcting students about plagiarism needs to start at younger ages. Too many students still believe that if they cut and paste snippets of information from the Internet it does not count as plagiarism, she said.

At St. John’s she said, students are taught what plagiarism is in their English classes and in library class, and the honor code also remains in effect.

“There’s a blurring of the line of what I did on my own and what I borrowed,” said Ballantine. “We emphasize the importance of attribution.”

Email George Matysek at gmatysek@CatholicReview.org

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