A freshman at Rhode Island College copied and pasted from a website about homelessness—and didn't think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the site didn't list an author.
At DePaul University in Chicago, the tip-off to one student's copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web: When confronted by a writing tutor, he was not defensive—he just wanted to know how to change the purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student said he thought Wikipedia's entries on the Great Depression—unsigned and collectively written—did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as "common knowledge."

The problem with those examples, and countless others at high schools and colleges across the country, is that using someone else's words without …show more content…
Dudley, who oversees the discipline office at the University of California, Davis, would agree. Of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to his office last year, most involved students who intentionally copied—knowing it was wrong.

To address the problem, some colleges are requiring students to complete online tutorials about plagiarism, which at one school cut down plagiarism rates by two thirds. (Click here for an online plagiarism tutorial.) And a majority of U.S. colleges now subscribe to anti-plagiarism services like Turnitin.com, which can instantly search a database of billions of online sources to ferret out plagiarism and cheating.

Andrew Siewert, an English teacher at Chaminade College Preparatory School in St. Louis, Missouri, says the service is useful but won't solve the problem by