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University Wire Syracuse adopts site to curb cheating

University Wire Syracuse adopts site to curb cheating By Brian Hayden, Daily Orange; SOURCE: Syracuse 495 words DATELINE: SYRACUSE, N.Y.

It's 11:30, the night before a paper is due.

Only 100 words of a 1,500-word essay are on the page, and the temptation of plagiarism is there with every Google search.

But now the chance of getting caught is even greater.

Syracuse University's Academic Integrity Office has officially adopted Turnitin.com as an option for professors to use when validating the content of students' papers.

The Web site processes papers and checks for originality.

Turnitin's digital assessment system matches any plagiarized work with other documents in the site's database, as well as millions of articles and abstracts from more than 10,000 journals and periodicals.

The announcement follows an on-campus pilot study of the site last spring.

Professors access the program through Blackboard.com.

They also have the option of extending it to their students, who can check for cases of plagiarism before turning a paper in, said Elet Callahan, the former chair of the Vice Chancellor and Provost's Committee on Academic Integrity, which completed its resolutions and is no longer active.

Faculty at SU will also have the option to submit students' papers to the site anonymously, which many students found fault with last year, Callahan said.

The system's process begins when a paper is submitted.

It is electronically compared to tens of millions of previously submitted student papers, according to the company's Web site.

In addition to Internet pages, "papers are compared to a database of academic and professional content not available on the public Internet, including millions of articles and abstracts from over 10,000 journals and periodicals." "It's important for everyone to understand how this works," Callahan said.

Turnitin.com, used by 6,000 institutions in 90 different countries, began in 1996.

Nationally, there has been some resistance to Turnitin.com, as some professors have questioned the academic freedom of having papers stored on the site's database.

Other institutions, such as Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., continue to rely on honor-systems to prevent cheating.

A 2005 survey on academic integrity revealed shocking details about cheating at SU.

According to the survey, 74 percent of Syracuse students admitted to cheating.

Of those that did, 84 percent admitted to cheating more than once.

What's more, between 40 and 45 percent of SU students admitted specifically to plagiarism, Callahan said.

The university-wide attention to issues of academic integrity began in 2004, when then Vice Chancellor Deborah Freund formed a committee to look into SU's policies on the subject.

The result was the July 2006 opening of the Academic Integrity Office.

Ruth Stein, AIO's interim director, could not be reached for comment.

Last year there was a university-wide means for tracking instances of plagiarism.

Before then, each college dealt with the problem on its own.

Professors will be able to access the site in the near future.

(C) 2007 Daily Orange via U-WIRE September 14, 2007 ENGLISH Newspaper Copyright 2007 Daily Orange via U-Wire