8-14 教师狙击网络剽窃

Teachers Fight Against Internet Plagiarism 11

For students who wait till the last minute to start their term papers, plagiarism today doesn't even require cracking2 open an encyclopedia 23.

Need a paper on the Cuban Missile Crisis? Done, for ＄ 10 a page. Want it custom made? Add another ＄ 5 per page. Just go to sleep and it'll be in your inbox by morning.

Since the Internet became readily accessible to students in the 1990s, it has become in some ways the educator's worst enemy. In secondary schools and universities alike, students are taking advantage of the fact that ready-made papers are only a few clicks away. An entire industry has sprung up to provide free homework -- or at a price4 -- papers purported5 to be custom-made.

But now teachers are fighting back. Across the country, educators have become savvier6 about using a combination of in-class writing samples, Internet search engines, and anti-plagiarism technology to beat the cheating scourge 47.

For schools that choose the low-tech way to fight plagiarism, taking in-class writing samples is one of the easiest solutions. Teachers simply ask students to write a few paragraphs, which they hand in immediately.

But many schools are turning to technological 5 solutions like Turnitin. The on-line tool, created by iParadigms of Oakland, Calif., in 1998, searches the Internet as well as millions of publications for copied passages as short as eight words. It scans papers against material it has collected from professors to check papers against one another and see if any two students have plagiarized 7 from the same site. The service costs about 60 cents per student each school year.

At schools that haven't invested in technology like Turnitin, teachers are developing their own strategies for detecting plagiarism. In three and a half years of teaching English at Brooklyn College, Damian Da Costa caught two to three students each year by searching for phrases from their papers with Google.com.

Elisabeth Tully, the director of a school library, focuses more on plagiarism prevention than punishment, pointing out that schools must be vigilant 88 about ensuring that students understand what plagiarism is and how they can avoid it.

“It's not even so much that they're cutting and pasting electronic stuff,” she says. “They may have hand written something out of a book, but if they didn't at the time assign a source code and put the right quotations9 around it, they might make a mistake and inadvertently10 plagiarize 6.”

注释：

1. plagiarism [5pleidViErizEm] n.  剽窃，抄袭

2. crack [krAk] vt.  打开

3. encyclopedia [en7saiklEu5pi:diE] n. =encyclopaedia 百科全书

4. at a price  以高价，以较高的价格

5. purport 3 [5p:pEt] vt.  声称，自称

6. savvy 10 [5sAvi] a.  机智的，有经验的

7. scourge [skE:dV] n.  灾难，祸害

8. vigilant [5vidVilEnt] a.  警戒的，警觉的，警惕的

9. quotation 9 [kwEu5teiFEn] n.  引文，引语

10. inadvertently [7inEd5v:tEntli] ad.  非故意地，因疏忽造成地

教师狙击网络剽窃

对于那些总是等到最后关头才开始准备学期论文的学生而言，如今的剽窃甚至可以使人不用去查阅百科全书。

需要一篇关于“古巴导弹危机”的论文？没问题，10美元一页。需要定制服务吗？每页再加5美元。尽管去睡觉，明早论文就会出现在你的收件箱里。

自从20世纪90年代以来，学生可以便捷地上网之后，互联网便在某些方面成了教育者最大的敌人。一篇论文不过就是点几下鼠标的事儿，在中学和大学里，学生们正享用着这一便利。一个完备的行业已经兴起，向学生提供免费的家庭作业，或者是高价量身定做的论文。

但如今教师们已开始反击。全国各地的教育者都变得更精明了，为了打击剽窃，他们三管齐下：课堂内短篇作文、互联网搜索引擎以及反剽窃技术。

对于那些采用低技术方式打击剽窃行为的学校而言，最简单的办法莫过于让学生在课堂内写短篇作文。老师仅仅要求学生写几个段落，并且马上交卷。

但许多学校正选择用技术手段来解决问题，比如“图尼丁”软件。这个软件是加州奥克兰市的艾柏拉当公司在1998年开发的一个在线工具，对互联网和数以百万计的出版物进行搜索，以判别文章是否属抄袭，哪怕抄袭内容短到只有8个词，它也能查出来。该软件将论文与从教授们那里收集来的资料进行审核，并对论文进行相互核对，看两个学生的文章是否抄袭自同一个网站。这一服务每学年的费用是每个学生约60美分。

对于那些没有投资购买“图尼丁”这样的技术服务的学校，教师们便自己想法儿去抓剽窃者。达米安·达科斯塔在布鲁克林学院教英语3年半了，他通过在Google.com网站上搜索学生论文中的措辞，每年都能逮到两到三个进行剽窃的学生。

伊丽莎白·塔利是一所学校图书馆的馆长，她将更多的注意力放在预防剽窃而不是惩罚上。她指出，学校必须保持警觉，确保学生们明白什么是剽窃以及如何避免剽窃。

“其实他们剪切、粘贴电子素材并不是一件大不了的事情，”她说。“他们也许是从某本书中摘抄的，但如果他们没有同时注明引文的出处并确保引文正确，那么他们就可能无心地犯了一个剽窃错误。”