AU faculty members currently combine manpower and computer power to detect violations of academic integrity amongst their students, but online paper mills may put a wrinkle in that system.
Essay Writers is an online paper mill that is unique because its custom papers are "invisible" to search engines designed to catch plagiarism in student papers, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
One such search engine is Turnitin.com, a Web site some AU professors use.
Students submit their papers electronically through Turnitin and the Web site compares them with articles in its databases for plagiarized or improperly cited material.
John Hyman, a College of Arts and Sciences literature professor, said he handles CAS academic integrity violations before they go to the dean.
Incidents of students buying essays for class are infrequent, though they have made appearances in recent years, he said.
Plagiarism has also increased in recent weeks, according to Hyman.
"In the spring, there is a little uptick ... [because of] the desperation that can set in as things start becoming due," he said.
Academic integrity infringements are occurring earlier than usual this spring, according to Cynthia Bair Van Dam, a CAS literature professor who has been on several panels that addressed academic integrity violations.
"[The CAS dean's office] has been getting two [academic integrity cases] a day for the past few weeks," she said. "This is really early for that."
Violations are usually not premeditated, according to Rachel Rosenthal, a senior and peer adviser in CAS. However, she said she would not abandon the possibility that students may be buying papers online.
"I don't know of anybody who has," she said. "I wouldn't be surprised to find out that students had."
Very few AU students have been found to buy or copy entire papers for class, according to Bair Van Dam.
"I've heard of people finding essays online in high school ... but not at the university level," said Billie Toyra, a junior in the School of Public Affairs.
Most online papers are unreliable, Hyman said.
"You get custom-written stuff, but you have to count on the site's good faith that it's a one-time production," he said.
Students have sometimes gotten someone they know to do their work for them, which is hard to catch unless the teacher is already familiar with a student's writing style, Bair Van Dam said.
"[A student's voice] sticks out on a page like their thumbprint," Hyman said.
David Lublin, a government professor in the School of Public Affairs, said he values Turnitin.
"I use it in all of my classes, for the most part," he said.
Turnitin can catch plagiarism that might have been unintentional, which allows students to fix it before the due date, Lublin said.
When students know that their paper is going through software like that, they are less likely to try to plagiarize intentionally, Rosenthal said.
"The idea that [professors] are going to use [Turnitin] is probably a pretty effective deterrent for people," she said.
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