
We’re right in the thick of finals season. A few of you lucky ones are already done with them and may even be back at home already, while most of you are probably studying up a storm. It’s certainly a stressful time, and it often leads to bad decisions of the cheating/plagiarism variety. It definitely seems that plagiarism is a bigger problem now than it was in the past, but I think that it has more to do with advances in technology than an overall decline in student morals. When you had to hand write a paper or type it on a typewriter, copying someone was almost as annoying as writing your own paper. Now copy and paste makes it way too easy. Luckily, technology is catching up. iParadigms is an Oakland, CA (I swear I’m not trying to make this Oakland only, it’s just what I’ve been finding lately) based company that has been developing software to fight plagiarism since 1996. It started with some UC Berkeley researchers who had built internal tools “to monitor the recycling of research papers in their large, undergraduate classes.” From there a company was born.
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