Journal of College Student Development

Student cheating has garnered much public attention recently. A perception reflected in media accounts is that acts of academic dishonesty among students in college as well as high school have increased sharply. The cover of the November 22, 1999 issue of U.S. News & World Report, for example, announced that “a new epidemic of fraud is sweeping through our schools” (“Cheating, writing, and arithmetic,” 1999). Nearly universal access to the Internet has been cited as a reason for this perceived decline in academic integrity, in particular regarding plagiarism. A July 6, 2001 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that “several indicators point to widespread plagiarism on campus,” and that “officials at some colleges say that in recent years they have seen a sharp increase in students cutting and pasting material into papers from Web sites without attribution, or purchasing term papers from online term-paper mills” (Young, 2001, A26). Four years ago a count of term paper mills on the Web—including A-Plus Termpapers, Paperz.com, School Sucks, and Research Assistance by Collegiate Care—set the number at 70 (Basinger & McCollum, 1997). One further indication of growing concern over Internet plagiarism is the development of plagiarism-detection software, such as that employed by Turnitin.com, a service that scans student papers for text lifted from Websites and marks each suspect passage with a link to its probable online source. The use of plagiarism-detection software by professors “appears to be growing” (Young, 2001, A26). The Internet may be exacerbating the long-standing problem of student plagiarism on college campuses. Moreover, Internet plagiarism raises important questions of academic integrity as students—as well as faculty—frequently turn to online sources, and it foregrounds issues related to the correct handling and citation of online sources. Therefore, university administrators, faculty, and staff should be concerned about the impact of the Internet in shaping a new generation of students’ conception of what does and does not constitute fair use of the countless texts so readily available at the click of a mouse. Although student academic honesty has attracted considerable scholarly notice for some time, the probable impact of Internet access on student plagiarism is mostly a matter of conjecture and has not yet been studied sufficiently or systematically. Therefore, a measure of the incidence of student online plagiarism will provide a needed map of the territory and an indication of whether or not matters are as bad as many apparently fear they are. Also helpful will be a better understanding of several contextual factors