Biology professor Ross Feldberg was struck by an article he read in the Daily a year ago. It was about a female student who cheated to improve her grades and was proud of it.
"That's a terrible message to give to people..." he said. "I was so upset by this article...of this girl who thought she was being clever."
Tufts administration and faculty members hope to deter students from this student's example by expanding the use of an anti-plagiarism online program this semester. Feldberg is one of about 75 faculty members in the Biology, Psychology and English departments now using the subscription-only internet search engine, Turnitin.com, to check for plagiarism in their undergraduate classes.
Either students or professors can submit papers to Turnitin.com, depending on the professors' preference.
The program checks student papers for similar word strings against the Internet and against academic content from over 10,000 journals and periodicals, its Web site read. It also looks for matches in any paper that has been submitted to its database by nearly 10 million high school, college and university students.
After papers have been checked, professors receive originality reports which show if papers match any material on the search engine.
Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman said that this program is a useful new tool, but does not represent a changed approach to tackling plagiarism for Tufts.
"Our hope is not just to catch students cheating, but to create a strong incentive to do work and to avoid the
temptation to cheat," Reitman and Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser wrote in a letter to the faculty at the beginning of the semester.
Reitman said that between 100 and 150 students have typically been caught plagiarizing each academic year. Based on what other universities using Turnitin.com have experienced, he expects that number to swell over the next few years before leveling off.
Last year Tufts tested Turnitin.com in the Biology department, which reported almost as many cases of plagiarism as all other undergraduate departments combined, according to Reitman.
"Even if people try to change a word here or there, it still comes up," Feldberg said.
"The faculty members use [the reports] as a clue," Reitman said. It is "the basis for a conversation between a student and a faculty member."
Professors are free to use the search engine in multiple ways, Reitman said. Some will require all students to submit their papers directly to the search engine. Others may randomly submit a few papers to the program, which Reitman said, also works as a deterrent.
Professors can also pick and choose which papers they check for plagiarism if "there's a suspicion that the work was not written for this class or by that student," he said.
Feldberg, who used the program last year, did not enjoy the conversations he had with students whose papers appeared to be unoriginal.
"It was a nightmare," he said. "The parents don't want to believe it's their kid...It's the absolute worst part of our job."
One of his students withdrew from Tufts after being caught plagiarizing last year, Feldberg said. "I knew [him] very well," he said. "I have to accept he realized he made a mistake."
Feldberg said he and the student talked at length about the incident, but if the student were to ask Feldberg for a recommendation, which Feldberg expected he might, there would need to be another long discussion.
As a result of the Dean of Student Affairs Offices' efforts to assist professors in making decisions about students caught plagiarizing, and to ensure that all students are treated equally, it has drafted a set of grading guidelines for student plagiarists.
These guidelines are now publicly available on the Student Affairs Office Web site and in Faculty handbooks for Arts, Sciences and Engineering. Suggested penalties range from a grade reduction on the plagiarized work to an F in the course.
The addition of these guidelines accompanied a faculty vote last spring to make it mandatory for professors to disclose all instances of academic dishonesty to the Dean of Student Affairs office.
Tufts is under contract with
Turnitin.com through 2011, during which time any faculty member can sign up for a free account to access the search engine. It is paying just under $18,000 for the service, according to Reitman.
Some schools, like Georgetown University and Tulane University, have already been subscribing to the program for several years.
"We waited I think until enough schools of similar calibers became clients," Reitman said. "I did not hear anyone talking with enthusiasm about any other products."
All professors who choose to use Turnitin.com are required to inform their students on the syllabus, Reitman said.
Some students consider the new procedure to be an annoyance, including sophomore Matthew Christie. In Biology 14 this past spring, he had to submit electronic copies of his lab reports to Turnitin.com, in addition to handing in hard copies. He was annoyed at the fact that he would lose points if he forgot to hand in an electronic copy.
"It's a pain in the [neck]," he said. "It's just another thing for me to forget to do."
Sophomore Vikram Kumar does not see the program as much of an inconvenience, but thinks "it was a little odd that it was instituted in Biology instead of...other classes where I was actually writing essays."
Psychology professor Heather Urry, who began using Turnitin.com this semester, said that while she thinks the site is a great tool, some students may respond by seeking out "how does it let me get away with it," she said.
Junior Courtney Houston-Carter also attended a high school that used Turnitin.com. He thinks that the program is a useful deterrent against plagiarism, and that even though he did not plagiarize, when his English teacher first talked about the program his heart "kinda jumped a little."
"If you have nothing to hide...it wouldn't hurt," he said.
