School term papers may be going the way of the typewriters once used to write them.
"It's so easy to cheat and steal from the Internet that I don't even assign papers anymore," said Bobbie Eisenstock, an assistant professor of journalism at Cal State Northridge. "I got tired of night after night checking for cheaters."
Across the country, teachers and professors are abandoning the traditional academic chore of tidy margins and meticulous footnotes because the Internet offers a searchable online smorgasbord of ready-made papers.
"Students are using the Internet like an 8-billion-page, cut-and-pastable encyclopedia," said John Barrie, owner of a company that makes software to detect plagiarism.
So as the academic year wraps up in Southern California and elsewhere, students increasingly are having their knowledge tested with oral exams and in-class writing exercises. Or they're being asked to demonstrate their knowledge in unconventional ways -- say, by assuming the role of a colonial pamphleteer railing against the Stamp Act.
Teachers who still assign long papers -- 10 pages or more with footnotes and bibliographies -- often require students to attach companion essays that describe every step of their research and writing. Even then, teachers scour the Internet for suspicious turns of phrase. And some schools are paying thousands of dollars a year for software such as Barrie's that scans work for plagiarism.
Those programs reveal that about 30% of papers are plagiarized, either totally or in part.
"It's a massive, massive problem," said Barrie, whose Turn It In service evaluates 60,000 submissions a day.
To be sure, the urge to cheat is as old as school. Students have long recycled their friends' and siblings' papers with their own names on top. But the rise of the Internet has made it easier than ever: Just type in a search term and up come hundreds of cheating choices that can be assembled into a paper with a couple of mouse clicks.
A 2003 study by Rutgers University found that more than a third of college undergraduates had cut and pasted passages from the Internet without attribution. High school teachers and even elementary school instructors said that kids were starting younger, as easy access to the Internet becomes almost as ubiquitous as television.
Rather than spend all of their grading time trying to catch cheaters, teachers are changing their lesson plans.
