Could it be that seventy percent of undergraduate college students admit to cheating and 50 percent have cheated on a written assignment, as reported by a 2005 study by Rutgers University Prof. Don McCabe and the Center For Academic Integrity?

Could it be that at the University of Michigan, with its storied history of progressivism, endless accolades and claim to admit only the leaders and best, that out of an undergraduate population of 25,555, 12,778 students have committed an act of serious plagiarism?

According to a number of administrators, professors, lecturers and students, 50 percent is probably not representative of the number of students who commit serious acts of plagiarism. At the University, they say, the number is much lower.

"Most students act honorably and I think it's a small number that want to do things that are not appropriate," said Esrold Nurse, LSA's assistant dean for student academic affairs.

History Prof. Victor Lieberman had similar sentiments.

"It's not an issue that really has a lot of currency, it's not a very common problem and it has not taken a great deal of my attention," he said.

They may be wrong.

It's impossible to know the actual number of students who have plagiarized, but it's likely more than University professors would like to believe.

Left Behind At The Fishbowl

In an attempt to determine the extent to which University students are plagiarizing in their written assignments, we consulted the creator of the blog called www.ahfb.blogspot.com. The blog's founder, takes papers left behind on the printers in the Angell Hall Computing Site, also known as the Fishbowl, comments on them and posts them to his site.

When a regular reader of the Fishbowl blog found that some information in a paper posted on the site was taken from wikipedia.org, it sparked our curiosity. We contacted the blog's founder and asked him to look for more examples of plagiarism in the piles of papers he collects.

Of the first five papers he examined, two contained sections taken from websites that were not cited.

In one case, the student's paper reads, "Missouri is a state with a rich history, strong traditions and a bright future. From small communities to large metropolitan areas, Missouri offers a breadth of opportunities for new emerging companies." The state of Missouri's tourism website reads, "Missouri is a state with a rich history, strong traditions and a bright future. From small communities to large metropolitan areas, Missouri welcomes millions of visitors each year to discover all of the features that make our state extraordinary."

The second example he found was less overt. For an English 225 class, a student took information from a Wikipedia article on the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, rearranged and reworded it, but failed to cite the source.

Two out of five is far from proof, so we submitted 14 papers from the Fishbowl to the website TurnItIn.com, which scanned them for plagiarism. At least two contained some elements of plagiarism. Students took information from a document, either by copying it directly or paraphrasing it, and failed to properly cite the material.

This sampling isn't a representative or scientific survey, but it could be indicative of a more significant problem professors aren't noticing.

Documenting the problem

Part of the problem in determining how often plagiarism occurs is that the University has no uniform policy on how suspected incidents are handled. Such matters are left to each school or college to decide. Some schools and colleges also do not require faculty members to report cases of plagiarism.

Nurse explained that in LSA, faculty members who suspect students of plagiarism have two options: Choose to deal with the situations on their own or bring the incidents to the attention of the dean, who then meets with the student and may conduct an investigation.

Nurse said faculty members are encouraged to report all incidents of plagiarism so a record can be kept, even if the dean's office is not directly involved. But he suggested many cases are probably not brought to the attention of his office.

In terms of reported cases of cheating in LSA, the majority of which Nurse said are probably cases of plagiarism, the numbers are increasing. In academic year 2005-2006, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 148 reported cases, the year before there were 131, the year before that 122 and the year before that 107. 18,482 students were enrolled in LSA for the Fall 2005 semester, consisting of about 72 percent of the University's undergraduate population.