This is a bit long. In answer to the last question first -- if a student downloads *anything* and turns it in for an assignment, I expect them to tell me where they got it. In most cases, I would only allow them to use material from online if they were also analyzing that material and writing something additional about that material. Purchase College has recently rewritten their plagiarism policy in response to a perceived increase in the amount of plagiarism in classes. In my Classical Social Theory class last semester, 4 out of 40 students turned in papers that included some plagiarized material. (In one case, half the paper was downloaded uncredited from a website; the others included less material, and one student credited some websites and not others.) The semester before that, in my Computers and Culture class, I also had four plagiarized submissions (2 from the same person) out of only 25 students. In that group, most were entire downloaded papers, some with slight alterations. One was a Salon.com article! To discourage this, and to make it easier for me to spot instances of plagiarism (as well as for other pedagogical reasons), I structure my classes so that students do several writing assignments over the course of the semester. I almost never assign "library research" topics or traditional "term papers." As part of each assignment, which they receive in writing, I require that they use (quote from or reference) a set number of readings from the course, usually at least three. A typical assignment has them gathering original data of some sort (doing an interview, looking at a website) and then analyzing their data using the readings and theories presented in class. I usually have them turn in their original materials as well. (For instance, in my popular culture class, they just did analyses of magazine advertisements and attached the ads they analyzed to the paper.) In the case of Classical Social Theory, I paired each classical work (by Durkheim, Weber, and Marx) with a modern work which used that theoretical perspective. These strategies generally prevent my students from finding entire papers which meet the criteria of the assignment. Any paper which fails to complete the requirements of the assignment, fails to cite class materials, or has very different writing styles in differen portions of the paper, sets off my plagiarism "alarm" and I start doing online searches for material from the paper. (If you would like tips on this, feel free to ask, but I don't do anything fancy -- I just use search engines.) Purchase College does not have fraternities. At UC Davis, where I taught previously, we had a problem with fraternity "paper banks." Those can be harder to catch unless you regularly vary your class assignments in some way. Individually-tailored papers, which can be purchased online, would also be harder to catch, but I don't believe most of my students have the financial resources to devote to that -- I guess if they do, I don't know it! I will be interested to hear what experiences other people are having with this. ___________________________________ Lori Kendall Assistant Professor of Sociology Purchase College-SUNY lori.kendall@purchase.edu