Introduction

The web has made plagiarism for students easier. With this new ease, a new definition of plagiarism becomes necessary. The honor code states that a student cannot give or receive unauthorized aid, but the definition of unauthorized aid changes almost from assignment to assignment and professor to professor. In this project we will address the ethical issue of students downloading assignments off the Internet. If these assignments are submitted for credit then it is plagiarism, but what if they are used for reference or for a general idea? Should the student's intention when downloading the assignment be taken into account? The intention of those who put their papers up on the Internet must also be taken into account. Selling a paper to Papers4Less.com is arguably different from posting a paper to a personal web site. If the author might simply be putting it up for the benefit of the public, is he responsible if another student submits it as her own work? Additionally, how has the view on plagiarism changed due to the Internet?

There are also many ethical issues involved in catching web-based plagiarism. It violates the spirit of the honor code to vigorously check every paper for plagiarism. If the paper is simply going to be fed into a program which compares it to all similar papers on the web, what's the point of having an honor code at all? And isn't this similar to proctoring an exam, which is forbidden in the honor code? It could be possible to block access to websites such as Papers4Less.com using an on-campus internet connection, but this would limit what could be legitimate academic research. Additionally, monitoring access to such sites would be an invasion of privacy.