When we think of college students plagiarizing, we tend to think of undergrads buying short essays off the internet and handing them in on their own. But at Chico State, plagiarism has been raised to an entirely new level. Three--count them: three--Master's degree candidates were caught turning in entirely plagiarized MA theses this year.

To their credit, Chico State administrators admit that there is a huge problem of academic dishonesty on their campus, one that grows out of a broader national culture of educational cheating and that is enabled by professors who are both careless about watching for cheaters and reluctant to report those they do catch. According to Duke's Center for Academic Integrity, "On most campuses, over 75 percent of students admit to some cheating. In a 1999 survey of 2,100 students on 21 campuses across the country, about one-third of the participating students admitted to serious test cheating and half admitted to one or more instances of serious cheating on written assignments."

To combat the problem, Chico State admins are planning to institute an honor code (along the lines of West Point's "A cadet will neither lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do") in the hope of changing the culture of the school. A professor who used to be a firefighter recommends severe punishment for cheaters. Comparing fighting plagiarism to stopping fires, he told the Chico Enterprise-Record that "If we can't prevent it, we need to jump all over it and put it out."

May they stick to their guns (or their hoses). I've known several college teachers who have caught students plagiarizing, only to be told by administrators to lighten up when they turned the students in: it was clear that the punitive teachers were considered to be the problem, rather than the plagiarizing students. And then there is the case of the University of Virginia, where the honor code recently became a means of facilitating cheating rather than preventing it.

On a related note: Berkeley's prestigious Haas School of Business recently dropped 5% of the applicants it had slated for admission upon discovering that they had falsified their applications. Most lied about their employment history; one submitted a faked letter of recommendation and invented promotions he had never received. Haas instituted background checks on all applicants this year in order to reinforce the importance of ethical business practice.

I had no idea plagiarism was so widely accepted. When I was an undergrad (95-99) a woman plagiarised her senior essay (an essay required of all Seniors who wanted to graduate and subject to public examination by three profs). "Her" essay won the prize for best essay that year; apparently the essay she had copied had also won the prize, sometime in the 70s. I remember the student body being outraged and the debate was not whether her grade would be lowered, but whether, after her diploma was stripped, she should even be allowed to earn another diploma. Even though her education had costed upwards or $100,000 at the time, the student-as-consumer sentiment was nowhere to be seen.

I used to be a professor at a decent college and I can say that at my institution it is never worth bringing a plagiarism charge. A colleague of mine caught a student cheating, failed him and then was sued by the parents and was investigated by the administration. One time a student came up to me and told me that there was a lot of cheating going on in one of my exams. I found that the only way to control that was to make the gains to cheating small. For example, I started allowing all students to bring in crib sheets. I also gave multiple version of my exams where the questions were altered and the order changed (I also put them on different color paper). I gave the exams out in a way that made it very difficult for a student to see another student with the same exam. This seemed to work.
Although my courses did not have a lot of papers, when they did I always made sure the students gave oral presentations. Doing that would show whether the student actually understood the paper or whether he had just copied it from somewhere else.

There's a fabulous website called, www.turnitin.com, which compares e-copies of student papers to what's available on the internet and what's been submitted to that site previously. The report actually pulls up the website (original source) and compares it side by side to the student paper. It's very powerful. Many schools have licenses already. If not, ask you admins to consider one.

By the way, some teachers announce use of the site up front (to deter cheating), while some lay in wait to catch cheaters. It's a difference in philosophy, I guess.