By Alisha Wyman

(U-WIRE) MISSOULA, Mont. – When a student handed in a paper that was obviously plagiarized, Jocelyn Siler, a professor in the Department of English at the University of Montana, searched the Internet for phrases from his paper. She found the paper came from a student in Connecticut who posted papers online for others to use for free.

When Siler contacted the owner of the Web site by e-mail, he claimed his site was for research purposes only, Siler said. Frustrated with his snide response, she researched further and was even able to zoom in on his house using a mapping Web site.

“I felt like if I had been a superhero of anti-plagiarists, I would have been able to nail this guy,” she said.

Internet plagiarism is a rising trend on college campuses, according to a recent study. Donald McCabe, professor of management at Rutgers University in New Jersey, surveyed 18,000 students, 2,600 faculty members and 650 teaching assistants at 23 campuses across the country, excluding Ivy League schools.

He found 38 percent of undergraduate students who participated had paraphrased Internet articles, taken a few phrases or sentences from online text or not cited an article they used for research one or more times in the past year. Two years ago, the amount was 10 percent.

A UM sophomore in pre-law who asked to be left unnamed admitted to using a few lines from an Internet article in a paper he wrote his freshman year. While he doesn’t do it anymore because “they’ve cracked down on it,” he doesn’t think his actions were delinquent.

“I was just using a few big words, but I wasn’t taking their idea,” he said.

Another sophomore wanting to remain anonymous said she rearranged text from an article on the Internet for a paper.

“I was running out of time, and I’m a procrastinator,” she said. “I needed something quick.”

The student, who studies health and human performance, occasionally borrowed from the Internet in high school when writing papers she didn’t consider important, she said.

Plagiarism, in all its forms, is something Siler has always dealt with in her composition courses. While she hasn’t noticed a distinct increase, she encounters about 20 cases each year, she said. Students have always cheated, she said, but with improving technology, the methods have changed.

“I think the Internet has made it, unfortunately, more seductive,” Siler said. “Opportunity makes for sin – not sin – crime.”

Charles Couture, UM’s dean of students, said there are eight to 10 cases filed at the Office of Student Affairs each year. It’s not possible, however, to draw a conclusion from this number about increased or decreased plagiarism at UM, he said. Cases go unreported when professors choose to deal with them on their own. And many students aren’t caught, he said.

Increased Internet plagiarism is a phenomenon that has professors and teachers nationwide taking measures to prevent it. Some departments have responded by subscribing to Web sites such as turnitin.com, where they can check students’ papers for plagiarism. Turnitin.com compares a paper with two billion Web pages, millions of published online works and every student paper ever submitted to the Web site. Any plagiarized material appears underlined, color coded and linked to the original source when a professor reviews it.

While the English department at UM does not subscribe to the site, Siler said plagiarism is easy to detect.

“Every writer has a personal voice,” she said. In a plagiarized paper “you can pick out the sentences that are not written by the author.”

She can also tell when students aren’t using their own work when the topic of their papers aren’t exactly what she asked for, if they change their topic at the last minute or if they haven’t made errors where they typically do, she said.

Punishment for plagiarism is up to the professor and depends on the situation. The composition department’s policy is to give failing grades for the classes in which students plagiarized an entire paper. Sometimes students are forced to rewrite the paper if the plagiarism is dispersed throughout the paper, Siler said.

Professors can go beyond failing a student in the class by reporting the offense to the dean of the school and the provost. A written report is filed at the Office of Student Affairs. Probation, withholding of a degree, suspension and expulsion are possible sanctions depending on each case.

“[Disciplining a student for plagiarism] is the worst part of my job. I mean, we hate it,” Siler said. “It’s horribly embarrassing.”