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Cheating is just a click away -- but so are the anti-cheating police By
Marcie Young
Term paper assignment: Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet: Love and tragedy. Due in one week. The five-page analytical essay comparing two of William Shakespeare's most famous plays is due in less than seven days. Neither of the plays has been read. In fact, the book hasn't even been taken out of its plastic covering. There's still time to squeeze in sonnets and that "old English" between the midnight Slurpee runs. Term paper: Due in four days. So what if the book hasn't been opened yet? At least the cellophane wrapping has been ripped off and tossed into the trash. That's a good start and it's late, almost 2 a.m., better get to bed now and read the plays later. It's OK, there's still four days left before the essay is due, anyhow. Term paper: Due tomorrow. It's 11:34 p.m., the night before the grade-deciding term paper is due. The book still hasn't been opened; the plays still haven't been read; and the paper isn't anywhere close to finished, let alone started. It's a pretty tight situation -- this could mean the difference between a C and an F. What to do? It's called procrastination, and it happens all the time on college campuses throughout the country. With the hustle of campus life, it's easy to put that major paper off until the last minute, but what happens when there just aren't enough hours in the night to pull through with a decent and complete paper? Internet cheat sites offer a solution that is mighty appealing to thousands of students nationwide. Papers covering topics from Shakespeare to the atomic bomb are just a click away, thanks to the Internet and entrepreneurs like Kenneth Sahr, the author of a website called School Sucks. The site, created in 1996, offers thousands of term papers, some of them at no charge, to put students' last minute worries to ease. Unfortunately, most universities don't look at it that way. The practice of buying term and research papers from Internet marketers is an act of plagiarism, according to the Utah State University Academic Policies and Procedures manual. USU isn't standing by itself with this definition, either -- most colleges and universities would agree. Sahr, however, says the site was not created to become a forum for plagiarism. "School Sucks is not here for you to plagiarize. If you cannot write a paper, you shouldn't be in school," Sahr told The Washington Post when his website caught the attention of universities in 1996. "Any student who turns in a paper from this site should be thrown out of school for sheer foolishness." Although the site began with one essay in 1996, School Sucks has exploded to include thousands of papers over the Internet. In 1998, two years after the site was launched, the site boasted more than 2,000 student-written essays and averaged more than 3,000 hits a day. This semester the site offers nearly 5,000 free papers and averages about 5 million hits daily, according to the the homepage. The concept of selling term papers to anxious students is not a novel idea. Around the same time Sahr was creating his site, dozens of other marketers were creating sites such as The Evil House of Cheat, Genius Papers, Specialty Research and The Paper Store. In less than five years, more than 200 cheating sites have popped up on the Internet. John Barrie, a University of California at Berkeley doctoral student, has taken a major step to stop these sites from replacing hard work. He and a group of eight others from UC Berkeley joined together to create Plagiarism.org, a site designed to catch and track plagiarized papers from the Net. The site has been programmed to compare term papers to the Internet, and where multiple phrases match, Barrie knows he's caught someone. "From 1993 to 1997 cheating at UC Berkeley increased 744 percent, and I'll tell you why," Barrie told The Fresno Bee in 1999. "All a student has to do is cut and paste and type their name on it." In addition, 80 percent of college-bound students admitted to cheating, according to 1998 survey by Who's Who Among American High School Students. The idea for Barrie's site was launched in 1994 when he was a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley. It was two years later that School Sucks became a concern for professors across the world, and in October 1999, Barrie and Sahr had a chance to meet face to face on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. "We will crush him like a bug," Barrie said of Sahr and School Sucks. Sahr did not seem worried about Plagiarism.org and Barrie's efforts to stop Internet cheating. "I appreciate his innovations," Sahr said. "Thanks to Plagiarism.org, School Sucks is getting another great round of PR." It's not as if School Sucks needs more PR. The quickly expanding site has become a million-dollar corporation. The site, now offers "good" papers for $8.95 a page. The "bad" term papers are still free. Last year, Barrie had made contracts with more than 30 universities and colleges to stop Internet plagiarism. UC Berkeley Professor David Presti caught 45 of his 320 neurobiology students in 1999 by using Barrie's site. Before last year, Presti, a teacher or 12 years, had never caught a student plagiarizing. "Plagiarism has always existed, but it was almost impossibly hard to detect because it was only where a professor recognized, 'Oh, this looks familiar' or if it seemed more sophisticated than what the student had been doing," Presti told The San Francisco Chronicle. The issue is affecting institutions of higher education across the map, and USU isn't excluded. "Students take a big risk by using a paper, not their own," Julie Foust, a USU English professor, told The Statesman in 1998. "It is just as easy for me to access the term-paper Web sites." Although USU students might find the cheat sites appealing, junior Mary Thorne said it's something she thinks students would be afraid to actually go through with. "I know that I might be tempted, especially when I've put a paper off," Thorne said. "But I think I'd probably wimp out and just end up pulling an all-nighter or handing the paper in late. I think most people are that way." Associated Students of USU Academic Vice President Jim Stephenson agreed with Thorne, but he also said it's the responsibility of teachers and administration to deter students from cheating. "We should encourage students to learn the material," Stephenson said. Bradley Bishop, the ASUSU student advocate, said using sites like School Sucks only allows students to waste time. He said using cheat sites would cut out research and writing time, but taking a few hours to do a paper is better than risking expulsion, an action the university can take when students have been academically dishonest. "It's cheating yourself," Bishop said. "What are you learning if you cheat?"
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