Academic dishonesty may be hard to catch and even harder to measure, but a hint to figuring out the trends of the perennial problem can come from following the money.
The University of Minnesota, which saw 188 reports of academic misconduct last year, subscribes to SafeAssign, a plagiarism detection software program.
Similar programs have seen sales increase in recent years.
“Sales growth has been strong,” said Chris Harrick, vice president of marking for iParadigms, an anti-plagiarism software firm.
Growth of its hallmark product, the detection software Turnitin, grew nearly 12 percent in 2010, which includes its use by 200,000 more teachers and 2 million more students. Universities that contract with Turnitin-style services often have students use the software as a preventative measure.
More than 2,500 higher education institutions use Turnitin, which checks a paper’s text with the content of websites, publications and archives of student papers stored on the company’s software.
Read the full story at the Minnesota Daily.
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