Yesterday the Times reported on cheating practices, prevalence, and technology in the Internet age. On its second page, the article reviewed a recent NBER working paper on cheating, in which the authors conducted an experiment using a Blackboard-based tutorial on plagiarism as the intervention.
Their results revealed that plagiarism, as detected by the ubiquitous TurnItIn database, was more prevalent among students with lower SAT scores. The authors also found that the intervention worked to reduce plagiarism, implying that students may lack knowledge regarding academic integrity.
Update: a Times Room-for-Debate forum on this topic.
Update 2, another Times article.
Update 3, a post by Stanley Fish on (the lack of?) a cogent moral argument against plagiarism.
Update 4, Stanley Fish again on metaphysics.
