Ipeirotis’ efforts definitely produced results. Over the semester, he found that some 20 percent of his class had plagiarized to one degree or another and began taking action against them. His reward, however, wasn’t a promotion or praise, but rather, him having his raise reduced to the lowest amount he’d seen.

The reason, according to both Ipeirotis and the justification he received for the small raise, was that his students, many of which he had caught and reported for plagiarism, had rated him poorly.

What made Ipeirotis’ case unique was not that he fought plagiarism and was punished, but that he spoke out about it on a now-removed blog post. Behind the scenes, teachers have long been boiling over with concerns that their schools are not taking plagiarism issues with weight and, sometimes, are actively discouraging addressing the problem.

For that to change. schools need to take plagiarism seriously and begin rewarding teachers, the ones on the front lines, for addressing this issue. This means both taking the detection and discipline side of fighting plagiarism seriously as well as looking to alternative solutions that could render the problem moot.

Why Schools Turn a Blind Eye

To be blunt, it’s a difficult time for schools, especially in the U.S. At all levels and both public and private, money is tight and resources are very limited. Dollars for plagiarism fighting are a low priority in the big scheme of things, especially as issues that could impact the safety of students and faculty are growing in number and priority.

The truth is that fighting plagiarism doesn’t help test scores, improve graduation rates, bring in new students or improve the school’s reputation. As important as it is, a school can turn a blind eye to plagiarism and still function.

To make matters worse, fighting plagiarism often times hurts the schools in meeting benchmarks. Disciplined students often drop out, lowering graduation rates, and students that fail classes due to plagiarism lower the overall GPA.

Image-conscious schools have also become wary of the reputation issues that come from actively pursuing plagiarists. Dealing with a large amount of it earn a school a reputation for being a plagiarism haven, even though the amount found actually proves the opposite.

This is then compounded by plagiarists who use social media to bash schools online. Smaller, lesser-known schools are especially vulnerable to these kinds of attacks.

These challenges have led to an atmosphere where many instructors feel that students are treated more like customers, to be pleased and cared for, rather than students who need to be educated and graded.

That problem doesn’t just impact plagiarism, but all areas of academic unpleasantness. From homework, to grade curves and more, the relationship between teacher and student is changing, likely not for the better.

Getting Serious About Plagiarism

If schools want to provide the best education they can to their students, this attitude must change and soon.

For one, if there to be any merit to the idea that college is meant to prepare students for later occupations, plagiarism must be dealt with and strongly.

While it’s true that those who plagiarize an assignment successfully located the needed information, which is a part of any assignment (both in and out of school), it’s a part that is almost trivial with the birth of the Internet and the student still skipped on many of the most important elements.

Academic assignments, at least good ones, do far more than teach students how to find and spit back information. They teach critical thinking, including how to challenge ideas. They teach students how to spot connections and trends among bits of data they have and they even help improve writing skills, a necessary tool just about anywhere one goes.

Students who plagiarize an assignment miss most of the education that could have come from it. That, in the long run, means a lower quality education, which means a lower-quality graduate if they go that far.

But before one walks away thinking plagiarists only cheat themselves. consider the following issues:

1. Good students, sensing or knowing that their peers are cheating to get good grades, often better than theirs, will either start cheating as well, reduce their efforts or simply leave.
2. Good instructors, detecting plagiarism but unable to effectively respond to it, will often reduce their efforts or leave, once again reducing the quality of education for all students, cheaters or not.
3. Students who cheat are, generally, less dedicated to their education. They make poorer graduates that not only are less likely to become active alumni, but also will reflect badly on the school in other ways after graduation.

This isn’t to say that every plagiarist is a doomed failure that will sink your school, but plagiarism as an epidemic will, over time, erode the quality of education for everyone there and hurt the school’s reputation.

However, since most of the dire impacts take years to show up, many schools are happy to kick the can down the road and hope for a better solution to the plagiarism problem later.

Today is the Day

The problem with kicking the can down the road is that now is, most likely, the ideal time to address these issues.

First off, the technology to detect plagiarism is the best it has ever been and the cheapest it has ever been. It’s less expensive, easier to use and more powerful than ever. Unfortunately, new plagiarism techniques may soon shift the balance, making it critical to address these issues now, while instructors have the upper hand.

Second, the Internet generation is just now truly coming of age. Students who have never known research without the Internet are just now reaching the higher levels of education. Sadly, these are the ones perceived to be the greatest risk of plagiarizing, rightly or wrongly, but if they are reached now, then those behind them will see the shift in culture.

Finally, we have ways of dealing with plagiarism other than punishment. If we’re going to shift the academic culture away from the trend toward plagiarism, we can’t simply punish our way out of it. Education is critical and the tools above make it easier to do just that. However, in a few years, education might not be possible, or at least not as easy, as the plagiarists will be the ones who have done nearly all the teaching.

In short, now is the time to strike and waiting until tomorrow just makes the batter harder and even less-winnable.

Bottom Line

It’s time for schools to reward teachers like Professor Ipeirotis for their hard work fighting plagiarism and, more importantly, to start opening addressing the issue. Though it’s tempting to sweep that matter under the rug, doing so misses a valuable opportunity to deal with the issue and risks lowering the quality of education for everyone.

Plagiarism is certainly not a pleasant business, I know that well because it’s my 9-to-5, but it’s an important one.

Schools need to address it. Not just so that they can make better students, but better creatives and better workers. After all, when cheating becomes a way of life, its impact is felt well beyond the classroom.

According to the press release, linked above, the service will search the Web for copies of the content, provide the creator with various means of redress and then monitor the site for compliance.

The service is not currently available with the iCopyright for Creators service, previously reported on here, but will be shortly. If you are not currently a user of the site, it may be a good time to sign up.

I have sent an email to iCopyright and I hope to gain access to a demo version so that I can test the service and provide a more thorough write-up shortly. Expect a review in the next couple of days.

Some Personal Thoughts

My first thoughts are that I am very excited about this service. iCopyright is a well-known and well-respected name in content licensing. Though their Creators service lacks functionality that prevents me from taking advantage of it, I highly recommend it to those that do not use CC licenses.

The pairing of licensing and detection services is a natural one, especially for larger customers that need to streamline the entire content control process. Whether bloggers and smaller users will benefit from this remains to be seen.

Though the press release makes it seem as if iCopyright functions similarly to other services such as Attributor, Blogwerx and other copy detection/resolution tools, its pairing with a strong license structure may give it an edge.

However, the real test of this service is going to be how accurate its detection is, how easy it makes it to handle unlicensed copies and how much value it is able to provide users. Until I’ve used the service, I won’t know.

Conclusions

If you haven’t signed up for iCopyright for Creators yet, now might be a good time. The licensing functionality is strong out of the box, especially for those who don’t use Creative Commons, and the promise of licensing, detection and cessation in one platform is compelling.

However, there are a lot of unanswered questions right now about the service including effectiveness, cost and features so I am not ready to get too excited. Still, it is worth noting that this will be available soon and could be a great boon to content creators.

I’m looking forward to giving this a more thorough review and updating this site with more information later.

Disclosure: iCopyright has contributed to this site. I am a consultant for Attributor.

The show focused heavily on spam blogs and ways that bloggers can avoid having their works scraped. Though the 30 minute time slot did not give us adequate chance to go in too deep on the topics, a lot of interesting ideas were raised.

If you missed the show, you can listen to it here. Please ignore the typo in the episode title. I’ve already written the host about it.

There were some audio problems with the show later in but, according to my wife, everything can still be heard.

Regular listeners to the Copyright 2.0 Show won’t likely get much from this but new and casual readers might.

Let me know what you think if you get a chance!

According to the current schedule, I will be speaking shortly after lunch on the Saturday, the first day of the event. I will be giving an hour-long presentation entitled “How to Prevent, Detect and Stop Content Theft”. The presentation itself will probably last about 30 minutes with plenty of time for Q&A.

Looking at the lineup, I’ll be sharing the stage with many other blogging notables including Matt Mullenweg, Lorelle VanFossen, Liz Strauss, John Pozadzides and Cali Lewis, all on the same day.

This is going to be a huge event and I am greatly looking forward to it. If you are interested in attending the event, you can register for the event now. Registration is $20 and pays for both days as well as for the complimentary T-shirt.

If you do attend, I’d love to meet with you and hear what you have to say, so be sure to catch me during any of the breaks and introduce yourself.

The one thing that I’m not looking forward to is the drive there. It won’t be the longest drive I’ve ever made, Key West was 16 hours, but eight and a half hours is nothing to sneeze at either. Still it is going to be worth it to not only meet some long time friends for the first time, but also to be able to present to a group of dedicated bloggers about this issue.

I hope to see some of you there. Please let me know if you plan on attending so I can be looking for you!

The screencast goes over all of the basics including choosing a term to search for, creating the alert, what you receive in the alert emails and how to manage the alerts that you’ve created. It also gives something of a sneak peek behind my Google Alerts strategy showing you the number of alerts I’ve created and the amount of potential plagiarism that I receive regarding my work.

It also showcases some of my bad habits including not appropriately tagging my emails or filing them away. Something I need to be better about.

Still, the screencast makes a point about the effectiveness and usefulness of Google Alerts for tracking your work as it is copied across the Web. It has also been my most-requested screencast.

So, if you can forgive a few rough edges, you will find the video embedded below and it runs about eight minutes. I look forward to your thoughts and feedback on it. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful.

To do that, they are encouraging users to take advantage of a their free scan offer and submit feedback on the quality of the results they have received.

Anyone who is familiar with Copyscape should have little trouble using the service. You simply visit the site, paste in the URL you want to check and Bitscan does all of the work.

Bitscan also has the ability to check offline content by providing a box to paste in your content from any document on your computer. However, it does not have the ability to receive uploads of word processing files at this time.

Currently every user gets 20 free scans. Though that should be more than adequate, my tests would only require about 10 to 15 scans, if it is not you can write the operators of the site and see if they can help.

I am holding off on a more thorough analysis of the service for a few weeks at the request of the developers of the service. Right now they are still tuning the product and don’t expect the service to return the best results that it can.

With that in mind, if you do decide to test the service, take a moment and send them feedback on the product. Let them know how well it performed and what they can do to improve it. Also, I’m certain any feedback on the look, speed, and easy of use would also be appreciated.

I’ll come back in a few weeks with a more thorough analysis of the service, including the results of my own testing and information about future plans for the service.

In the meantime, pound away on the service and be sure to let them know what you think!