Brief synopsis: In Kansas, we are currently dealing with an interesting case of plagiarism at the high school level. In brief: a teacher busted a large number of her students cheating off the Internet on a paper assignment. As stated in her class syllabus or policy she failed the students. Administration stepped in, revoked her judgment and let the students pass. She quit her job. Questions: I'm wondering, how are you guarding yourselves against plagiarism? I know there are online services one (individual or university) can subscribe to in order to scan for generic phrases and thus, find plagiarism. But, are many of you using these services for entire papers? For short presentations? For oral reports? And, a related question: How do we teach our students about plagiarism and cheating off the Internet? How do we explain the difference between publicly available and well known information (which, by rule of thumb, does not need to be quoted), and a violation of intellectual property rights? I'm not talking about online databases or the CNN website, those cases are pretty obvious, but what about other Internet information venues, and when does a piece of information become "generally known" in the online environment? We had several inquiries on the list for the original sources of Internet myths. Do we need sources for those? Is it plagiarism if a student downloads such a myth? It wouldn't be if the story was passed on orally, right, or am I wrong there? I would love to hear advice, opinions, strategies, etc. on this! ulla ********************* Ulla Bunz University of Kansas Starting summer 2002: Rutgers University *********************