David Willbern, director of the ETC, told members of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee on Sept. 27 that the center has obtained an anti-plagiarism software program, Essay Verification Engine (more commonly known as Eve), that can compare a written paper with all papers on the Internet.

The software won't find all sources of plagiarism, Willbern cautioned, noting it won't check sources in the library, or sources that do not have files online and send them to students either encrypted or by "snail mail."

"It can't consult those 'hidden' documents, but there is so much out there-there are literally dozens and dozens of paper-mill sites on the Internet-and it works," he said.

The software has been tested in the ETC on papers authored for a world civilization course, and found plagiarism "in a matter of a few minutes," Willbern said.

"So even though it doesn't find everything, it will find what you can't, and will save a lot of time," he said.

Willbern said the ETC has a site license on the software for the entire institution, so faculty members can come to the center, sit at a computer and scan an electronic file. The software, which can be used on text, Word and WordPerfect documents, will take about 5 minutes for a four-to-five-page paper or about 30 minutes for a 10-page paper.

Faculty members also can download the software to their office computers, he said. Download instructions are available on the ETC Web site at http://www.etc.buffalo.edu/eve/index.html.

"This is the dark side of the Internet," Willbern said, referring to the easy availability of downloadable information. "This is the dark side of the availability of information, which has a wonderfully bright side that all these resources are available. We want students to out there and read this material. We just don't want them to submit it to us as their own."

Emily Tall, associate professor of Russian, told FSEC members that she had used the Eve software to confirm that two papers had in fact been plagiarized. Once confronted, the students admitted cheating.

"The software was very good, and I recommend it," she said. "I think when all the students know of its existence, it will be a powerful deterrent."

Bruce Pitman, vice provost for educational technology, agreed, using as an analogy a situation where a lock on the door discourages a burglar.

"The awareness that this is being used may help discourage, at least in part, some of the plagiarism. That would be useful in and of itself," Pitman said.

Dennis Black, vice president for student affairs, noted that there is other anti-plagiarism software available that uses methods to detect cheating other than the search-and-match system used by Eve. One in particular will develop a writing-pattern history of a student and analyze future papers on the basis of previously submitted papers.

But once plagiarism has been detected, what is the best strategy to use when confronting the student, wondered Bernice Noble, professor of microbiology.

When asking colleagues for their advice, "I was advised to avoid a confrontation over it because, in gen-eral, students go to the student judiciary, they make a big fuss and the faculty member never comes out OK," she said, adding that she has redesigned her course "so I didn't run the risk of having plagiarized material offered to me."

Black said that the majority of plagiarism cases are handled directly by instructors in their classrooms, and the outcomes are not questioned, challenged or appealed. But this method of handling these situations results in a "lack of central reporting," so there is little sense of the extent of the problem and individual instructors' responses to it, he added.

Black stressed that several years ago, UB adopted a statement on academic integrity, and there are "very definitive" academic dishonesty policies, procedures and committees at the undergraduate, graduate and professional-school levels.

When there is a challenge to an instructor's decision regarding a case of cheating, and on those rare instances when there is a recommendation that the sanction extend beyond the classroom-such as the marking of a transcript (grade of "F" due to academic dishonesty), suspension or expulsion from the university, "these matters move into another level of review-an academic review within undergraduate, graduate or professional education," he said.

Nina Kaars, assistant vice provost for undergraduate education, said that SUNY counsel has advised the university to be careful to follow procedures in these cases. In such cases where students decide to sue a university, the court for the most part will side with the university if it has followed its published policies, she added.

She suggested that the Faculty Senate encourage departments to have their faculty members include the university's statement on academic integrity in their course syllabi. "It's a very good idea to put students on alert," she said.

Charles Smith, associate professor of music, recommended that the senate encourage faculty members "to be more creative in their assignments. One of the reasons that this kind of Internet paper mill is possible is that a lot of faculty members give boilerplate assignments," such as asking students to discuss the role of nature in Wordsworth's poetry, or discuss the origins of World War I from a Marxist perspective.

"To give a paper topic like that, you're actually just inviting the students to go out and find lots of samples that have been written on much of the same topics. Give very specific assignments-if your assignments are specific, it's highly unlikely that you're going to find that many papers out there that you can borrow from. If faculty are more creative and more involved in the process of giving assignments, (we) can alleviate this (cheating) to some extent."

Willbern noted that Rick Feero, an instructor in the Composition Program in the Department of English, has developed a Web site devoted to plagiarism. Feero will give a workshop on his Web site and the issue of plagiarism, and conduct a demonstration of the Eve software at noon on Nov. 27 in the ETC.