At least, that's what an online plagiarism-testing service report says. After analyzing my senior thesis, it said flatly that my 30-page paper was "plagiarized," and said that it had found a source on the Internet that matched my document. At first, I panicked. I hadn't copied anyone else's work, so what was going on? Was it unconscious, a phrase I'd once read and kept hidden in my memory? Had I been careless in paraphrasing or quoting? I didn't know; all I did know what that the report said I was guilty of ripping off my senior thesis from some source on the Web.

Baffled, I went back to the report, and there, I found less-than-intuitive links to a more detailed analysis. Clicking through, I found the section that listed the URL of the source I was accused of plagiarizing from. I clicked to find ...

To find that Plagiarism.org had just discovered a copy of my own thesis online. Instead of realizing that it was my work and ignoring it, the service had accused me of plagiarism. It seemed an odd thing to overlook, and an odd way of doing business to announce the crime, and let the recipient of the report figure out whether it was justified or not. I took the time to investigate the report's charges; what if a professor hadn't?

These are key issues, it turns out, in the brave new world of plagiarism detection online. Like other things on the Web, it's a prospect alluring in its simplicity, but devilishly difficult to accomplish in reality. It remains to be seen how many people might be unjustly accused before the kinks are worked out.

The purveyors of the new service, however, say that Plagiarism.org actually allows people to "harness the Internet to solve the problem the Internet is creating," according to founder John Barrie. With the availability of online sources, including electronic "term-paper mills" like SchoolSucks and The Paper Store, students can easily "borrow" -- or even buy -- papers online. The Plagiarism.org site refers to studies that suggest as many as 66 percent of university students have cheated and 36 percent have plagiarized written material.

And while cheating in school is nothing new, some professors think the Web is making things worse. Harold J. Noah, an emeritus professor at the City University of New York, co-authored a study on plagiarism that found technology to be partly responsible for "ubiquitous" cheating. The trouble, he told the Chronicle of Higher Education, is that "it's often difficult to detect plagiarism from Internet sources."

Not surprisingly, enterprising programmers have spotted this market and are offering universities weapons to combat the practice. There are now programs that search for "borrowed" code in computer science projects, and services like Plagiarism.org, the Essay Verification Engine and IntegriGuard that comb through essays and student reports in search of copied passages.

Plagiarism.org, for example, analyzes the structure and content of a paper by comparing it to the contents of a centralized database, which includes papers posted online, material from academic Web sites, documents indexed by major search engines and other student papers that have been submitted to Plagiarism.org for analysis. It then prepares a report pointing out possible instances of plagiarism.

To test the service, I took advantage of a free five-paper trial run and uploaded my senior thesis. (I should note that the paper uses Salon's Table Talk as a case study for an examination of online community). A day or so after I submitted my work, I received an e-mail message pointing me to an online report.

It was this that I had to click through before I discovered that an error had been made. Plagiarism.org, in fact, had found only one matching phrase in my essay -- but it was 8,367 words long. It was my own paper: within the archives searched by Plagiarism.org was the copy of my thesis that I had posted on the Web.

While obviously an anomaly, such a false reading or a misinterpretation of the results could have some pretty ugly consequences. I wouldn't want to be thrown out of school for cheating -- and expulsion is the penalty at some schools, like the University of Virginia.

Next page | A hanging judge