'Generation plagiarism'? Copying and pasting from the Web is just like copying from a book. But too many students either don't know that it's cheating--or don't care.

• Author: Gabriel, Trip
• Position: NATIONAL

A freshman at Rhode Island College copied and pasted from a website about homelessness--and didn't think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the site didn't list an author.

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, he was not defensive--he just wanted to know how to change the purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student said he thought Wikipedia's entries on the Great Depression--unsigned and collectively written--did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as "common knowledge."

The problem with those examples, and countless others at high schools and colleges across the country, is that using someone else's words without attribution--even when it's as easy as clicking "copy and paste"--is plagiarism. But many students, so used to the free flow of information online, simply don't grasp that it's a serious misdeed--one that can lead to suspension, expulsion, and a permanent blemish on their academic record.

"In a sense, they don't see what the big deal is," says Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "The information is available" he says, so their feeling is "why should I have to recreate it when I can just get it?"

In surveys conducted by McCabe that tracked thousands of college students, 40 percent admitted to plagiarizing a few sentences in written assignments, and 61 percent admitted to cheating on assignments and exams. In a separate survey, 47 percent of high school students admitted to copying and pasting from the Web, with nearly one third saying they didn't consider it cheating.

Alarmed at the rise of digital cheating, many educators, have responded by using sophisticated anti-plagiarism services that, for example, have students submit their work online to be checked against a database of millions of other term papers.

Free for the Taking?

Digital technology makes cheating easier--whether it's texting exam answers to friends, sharing homework online, or downloading ready-made term papers from the Internet. But it may also be redefining how students, who are used to music file-sharing and Wikipedia, understand the concepts of authorship and plagiarism.

Bryson Cwick, an 18-year-old senior at Ripon High School in Ripon, California, says such confusion is common among his classmates. "I think they view the...