ORLANDO - After 25 years as an economics professor, Djehane Hosni has a good radar for student papers that include plagiarized material, even if it's only a paragraph or two.
Proving it is another story.
With each student turning in several papers a semester, Hosni is far too busy reading to check for cheating, which these days usually involves cribbing from the Internet.
So the University of Central Florida professor turned to a cutting-edge tool to solve an age-old problem.
Like a growing number of her colleagues across Florida, Hosni now submits her student papers to a private company that compares every page to millions of documents online.
Last year, 300 UCF professors submitted a total of 20,000 papers. This year, most of the state's other large schools, including the University of Florida, Florida State University and the University of South Florida, are using Turnitin.com, the California company that has carved out a profitable business searching for plagiarists.
"It's part of the ABCs of teaching," says Hosni, the economics chairwoman at UCF. "How else would you control cheating?"
Plagiarism is nothing new on college campuses. But in these days of lightning-fast search engines and cut-and-paste technology, it has never been easier.
"Students in college now have grown up with the Internet," says Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University business professor who has done extensive studies on cheating. "The Internet has just become another weapon in their arsenal."
Turnitin.com says its clients include thousands of high schools, colleges and universities in 51 countries. About 400 schools are in the United States. The company expects to do $10-million in business this year.
Not bad for something created just five years ago by students at the University of California at Berkeley.
Some educators are refusing the technology. They worry the company's practice of keeping scanned papers in their database is illegal. Others say the company focuses too much on punishment and not enough on education.
"It's one of the ways to stop cheating," says Dennis Trujillo Johnson, the president of the Center for Academic Integrity and an administrator at Pueblo Community College in Colorado. "To me, it shouldn't be the only vehicle."
Idea "needed to happen'
Nine years ago, Berkeley students complained to teaching assistant John Barrie that some of their classmates were plagiarizing papers.
Barrie, who was studying biophysics at the time, thought his discipline might offer a solution. But instead of searching for irregularities in brain waves, he used computer software to look for regularities in lines of text.
In other words, he looked for word matches.
They weren't hard to find.
Recognizing a business opportunity, Barrie borrowed startup money from family members and in 1998 created iParadigms LLC, which administers Turnitin.com. Several other Berkeley graduates are partners.
"Something needed to happen," Barrie says from his California offices. "Someone needed to come up to the plate."
Turnitin.com has exploded in the years since. It is now used to check the papers of 7-million students in the United States.
Universities, including Duke University and UCLA, pay a few thousand dollars a year for its services. Individual professors and academic departments also contract with the company.
"We want to make sure we can harness the Internet," says Diane Williams, who runs USF's Center for Teaching Enhancement. She began offering Turnitin.com software to professors last week.
Here's how the process works:
Students send their papers electronically to their professors or directly to the company.
A computer program then converts the words into numbers, which it compares to online books and journals, millions of other student papers and 2-billion Web sites that are updated daily.
Within minutes, passages are color-coded and underlined when more than six words match a source.
Each paper is then categorized by how much of the text is taken from other sources. Barrie estimates that 30 percent of the papers that are scanned come back with matches. Of those, 85 percent involve students cutting and pasting from the Internet.
He says only a small number come from the hundreds of online mills where papers cost $50 to $100 each.
The software is extremely sensitive, which means it picks up all matching references, even those that are correctly cited. Faculty must closely examine the marked text to determine whether a student really plagiarized.
Jaap Vos, a professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, said almost all of the student papers he ran through the program last spring appeared to have been plagiarized in some fashion. He chose to pursue only those with substantial problems. He determined that three of the 30 were actually plagiarized.
"Some (students) don't take it seriously. They don't think you'll actually catch them," said Vos, FAU's chairman of urban and regional planning. "But since the proof is so clear there's really nothing they can say."
Last year, almost 700 of the 20,000 papers checked at UCF were found to be 75 to 100 percent plagiarized, said Patricia MacKown, director of UCF's office of student rights and responsibilities.
Officials say some students intentionally plagiarize. Others don't realize what they are doing is wrong, or feel they have no other choice, given the pressure to perform.
"I think people do get careless. They take a sentence from here, a sentence from there," says Marilyn Wiley, an FAU business professor who began using Turnitin.com in January. "There is a more casual attitude of many students than there used to be. There's no excuse for that."
It's impossible to tell if Turnitin.com is preventing plagiarism at Florida schools because none of the schools keep comprehensive data. Decisions on discipline are usually left to individual professors.
At UCF, where the checks have been going on the longest, students are split on whether the scrutiny is necessary.
"I think it's horrible," says Greg Rollett, 20, a junior from Fort Lauderdale. "I think it's kind of bad to go to that extreme."
But sophomore Natalie Hernandez, 19, says she doesn't have a problem with Turnitin.com because she writes her own papers, and doesn't want to compete with students who don't.
"It's not fair for kids who spent days on a paper," she says.
Not all believe
Not everyone is a fan of Turnitin.com.
Some professors don't want to double check every paper. Some say it misses matching words, and doesn't catch students who use old papers or copy huge chunks of text out of books at the library. Some say a simple Google search is just as effective.
"It's a tool," says UCF philosophy professor Nancy Stanlick. "It's not an answer to all problems of academic integrity."
The most common complaint concerns the company's practice of including student papers it receives in its database. Some think that's a copyright infringement and a violation of privacy laws.
That's one of the reasons UC Berkeley, the place where Turnitin.com was born, decided not to use the software.
"We had questions about the ability to do that without violating copyright," says Mike R. Smith, assistant chancellor for legal affairs. "The administration didn't want to do it as a matter of policy."
University and Turnitin.com officials say they don't know of any student who has sued the company for copyright infringement or invasion of privacy.
Rebecca Moore Howard, a Syracuse University professor who specializes in plagiarism, says it is going to happen. She expects a student to sue under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which prevents schools from releasing personal information about students without their consent.
Barrie, of Turnitin.com, says his lawyers maintain the company can keep student papers because it doesn't transfer ownership or harm a paper's market value.
"It's providing a public service, a social good," he says.
At most universities that contract with the company, individual faculty members decide whether they want to use the software. If they do, they must notify their students on a class syllabus.
Students who are against it can always opt for another class, administrators say. But most students who were asked say they don't have a problem with the company keeping their papers, though they might have problems with professors checking on them.
"I think it's a big scare. It's muscle," says Miguel Coleon, 23, a UCF junior majoring in music production. "They trust technology more than us."
- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.
