Plagiarism

ONCE UPON a time, there was a very little boy with a very large forehead who lived in West Baltimore. One day his mommy moved him and his five brothers and sisters to the Forest Park section of Northwest Baltimore. The kid with the big forehead - me - attended Mordechai Gist Elementary School. As a sixth-grader, I and the rest of the class were given an assignment: Write an original story. My lazy, no-good bum side got the better of me. Rather than think of an original story, I decided to repeat one I'd read in a book when I attended one of the schools in my old neighborhood.

WASHINGTON - Last week, school officials in Piper, Kan., adopted an official policy on plagiarism - with punishments ranging from redoing an assignment to expulsion. Unfortunately, all that comes too late to help Christine Pelton. She used to be a teacher. Taught biology at Piper High, to be exact. Then, last fall, she assigned her students to collect 20 leaves and write a report on them. The kids knew from the classroom syllabus - a document they and their parents both signed - that cheating would not be tolerated.

In less time than it takes to say "copycat," a computer program can scan a student's work and determine whether a paragraph, a page or an entire project is original, or plagiarized from one or many sources. Faculty members have become just as sophisticated as their students when it comes to using technology: They can detect and deter cheating. Some professors, such as those at Georgia Tech, developed their own programs to catch cheaters. Their program alerted the professors that 187 students in two computer classes might have submitted copied or collaborated-on work.

A columnist and a historian have accused best-selling author Stephen E. Ambrose of copying passages in his recent book, The Wild Blue. The two cite details and phrasing very similar to descriptions in The Wings of Morning, a book by one of the accusers, the historian Thomas Childers. Both books tell the stories of World War II bomber pilots. Ambrose included footnotes in his book acknowledging that Childers' book was a source of information in the relevant pages. But Ambrose does not acknowledge quoting from the book or borrowing phrases or wording.

A consultant hired to work on an independent review of the Howard County school system's practices and operations resigned last month because he said he had doubts about the integrity of the effort. The consultant, John Baldwin, said the lead consultant of the six-month study told him to "plagiarize from another report done for the Galveston, Texas, school district rather than try to write an honest assessment of the work going on in Howard County schools." Baldwin did not identify the consultant.

When two department colleagues of mine were hit by a rash of cheating incidents near the end of the spring semester this year, my reaction was one of surprise and sympathy, but with a measure of smugness mixed in, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit. As the lone journalism professor in a 10-member English department, I had persuaded myself that the safeguards I had set up were sufficient to prevent plagiarism and other forms of cheating on writing assignments. Boy, was I wrong. Before relating my own horror story, I should point out that the six instances of plagiarism that sent my two friends reeling in mid-April were all committed by first-year students who had pilfered the essays they handed in from the Internet.

Paul Chwelos teaches information systems at the University of California, Irvine, so he knows better than most the power of the Internet. And not just the way it is affecting businesses, but also the way it affects his graduate students. "It certainly gives them the ability to do better research, but it makes it easier to cheat," he said. "I think it's naive to think the Internet has given such access to information and that it doesn't increase cheating as well." So this month Chwelos joined a growing number of professors who are using the Internet to fight back.

NEW YORK -- Suppose you were rambling around the Internet and stumbled across a Web site devoted to the works of Euripides, the ancient Greek dramatist. Maybe you'd think this was the obscure hangout of professors exchanging ideas about things written on scrolls.Well, you would be wrong. You would find typical yet tightly wound college students, burdened with homework, pressed for time, cheating their hearts out with ingenuous amorality. You'd find scholars such as Jeremy, whose last name is being withheld to spare him a scowl from his instructor, in deep research.

Baltimore's mayoral race may have failed to get off to a fiery start, but at least one candidate is hurling accusations of "political plagiarism."Democrat A. Robert Kaufman of the City Wide Coalition is taking exception to opponent Carl Stokes' calling for a $1 tax on tickets to sporting events at Camden Yards. The money would be used to help pay for city recreation programs.Kaufman said the ticket-tax idea belongs to Southeast Baltimore City Councilman Nicholas C. D'Adamo, who introduced a bill calling for the same tax two years ago. That proposal has been languishing in a council committee.

St. John's College in Annapolis, known for teaching liberal arts students to think creatively, has revoked a student's 1997 bachelor's degree for plagiarism in what college officials say is the only such incident in recent memory.The student also was expelled and her senior essay prize taken away, college officials said. One of three senior essay prize winners last year, the student copied substantial portions of a prize-winning senior essay that was written about 20 years ago on the same work of fiction.