Trained by Internet use to cut and paste and impersonate.


By TRIP GABRIEL

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness - and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

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 his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive - he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations .

But these cases - typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the schools that described the plagiarism - suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be changing how students - who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking - understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University in South Carolina.

In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a founder of the Center for Academic Integrity , about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences .

Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining - to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.

“This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don’t have the same gravity,” said Sarah Brookover, a 31-yearold senior at the Rutgers campus in Camden, New Jersey. “When you’re sitting at your computer, it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free .”

At the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, Susan D. Blum, an anthropologist, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word .

“Today’s students stand at the crossroads of a new way of conceiving texts and the people who create them and who quote them,” she wrote last year in the book “My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture.”

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

“If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade,” Ms. Blum said .

In the view of Sarah Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University, plagiarism has nothing to do with trendy academic theories.

The main reason it occurs, she said, is because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing.

Relaxing plagiarism standards “does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness,” she said.

At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others. Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the office , the students who copied knew it was wrong but were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”

“Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice,” he said.