NEW BRUNSWICK — The blunt e-mail arrived in Amanda Serpico's mailbox two days before Christmas and left the Rutgers University senior stunned.

"You have plagiarized your final paper for the course," it read.

The three paragraph note from Serpico’s communications professor said Turnitin — a computer program designed to spot plagiarism in written papers — had concluded parts of her paper on gay marriage laws were lifted from other sources. The professor said he was reporting her to the dean.

"I was really confused," said Serpico, 22. "I was honestly shocked that he came out and flat out accused me of plagiarism."

The e-mail began a long and complex disciplinary process where the Rutgers senior was asked to prove her innocence through a series of meetings and written appeals. As colleges and universities adopt new methods of cracking down on alleged cheaters, her experience is becoming more common.

At Rutgers, the number of academic dishonesty cases has more than doubled in the past three years thanks to new academic integrity guidelines, increasing awareness among professors and the growing use of the popular Turnitin plagiarism-detection software, campus officials said. Last year, Serpico was one of 344 Rutgers students accused of cheating, according to university statistics.

Across the country, colleges and universities are reporting rising numbers of students accused of academic dishonesty, especially plagiarism. Studies show many students raised in an era of websites, blogs and Wikipedia do not know it is considered dishonest to copy and paste text from the internet into their papers without citing the source.

A survey released this year by the nonprofit Pew Research Center found 55 percent of college presidents said plagiarism on their campuses has increased over the past decade. Nearly 89 percent of the presidents believe the internet has played a major role in helping students cheat.



The process

At Rutgers, some of the 344 students accused of academic dishonesty last year were caught cheating on tests. Others were accused of making up information, sabotaging other students’ projects, violating research ethics rules or helping friends cheat. But the vast majority of accused Rutgers students, more than 70 percent, were charged with plagiarizing papers.

Most of the plagiarism cases, including Serpico’s, began when professors ran their students’ papers through Turnitin, the plagiarism-detection software Rutgers has been using for about five years. The program, used by colleges and high schools around the country, compares papers to internet sites and a database of other student papers to search for passages that may be plagiarized.

"We do get quite a bit of cases (through Turnitin)," said Anne Newman, director of Rutgers’ office of student conduct. "It’s used as a tool."

All students accused of cheating enter Rutgers’ seldom-seen and often-secretive academic integrity disciplinary process. In the most serious cases, students appear at hearings behind closed doors. Others, like Serpico, are not given a chance to argue their case in person. Instead, they file a written appeal outlining their innocence and are judged by a panel of university professors, administrators and students.

In Serpico’s case, her appeal was rejected and she was found guilty of plagiarism this past spring. She was given an "F" on her final paper. That meant she failed her course.

Though she was scheduled to graduate in May with a double major in exercise science/sports management and communications, the failed course meant she lost the communications degree. She received her bachelor’s degree in exercise science/sports management, but graduation was bittersweet.

"My senior year was essentially ruined," said Serpico, of New Milford.

Program defended

College officials across the country say the widespread use of Turnitin and similar plagiarism-detection software programs has made it easier for schools to flag potential plagiarists and accounts for some of the spike in the number of students accused of cheating.

The Turnitin software allows professors to upload a paper and instantly check the text against 14 billion web pages and an archive of 150 million student papers. The professors are sent a report detailing any sentences or paragraphs in the student paper that appear to be lifted from other sources.

But iParadigms, the California-based company that manufactures the program, said Turnitin is just a tool, and reports need to be reviewed before a student is accused of cheating.

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"Such determinations of plagiarism require human judgment, and instructors and students alike should understand their institution’s academic integrity policies before turning in written assignments," the company warns users.

An iParadigms study released this year found many students caught lifting text from the internet may not know — or care — they are cheating.

"Contrary to general perceptions, the vast majority of students who have matched content in their work do not rely on cheat sites or paper mills. Instead, many more are using legitimate homework, academic and educational sites as research sources," according to the study.

Wikipedia, the encyclopedia-like website, is the most popular source of plagiarized content, according to the report. That is followed by the question-and-answer sites answers.yahoo.com and answers.com.

The problem has grown so bad on some campuses, school officials have begun encouraging students to use Write-Check, newer software from the manufacturers of Turnitin, that allows students to screen their own papers before they turn them in.

Keeping it private

Rutgers officials said it is rare for students to publicly discuss accusations of plagiarism or other cheating. Though there are provisions in the rules to allow students to waive their confidentiality, opening up academic dishonesty hearings to the public or the press requires the consent of both the accused students and their professors. That means few students or parents know much about the process and it is difficult to know how cases are handled behind closed doors.

"Most students and faculty want it private," said Newman, director of Rutgers’ office of student conduct. "I’ve never had a case where all parties have agreed (to an open hearing)."

Serpico, the Rutgers senior accused of plagiarism, said she wanted to publicly tell her story and share all of the documents related to her case because she believes she was falsely accused and the system of judging alleged cheaters is flawed and lacks oversight.

"I’m extremely frustrated with the system," Serpico said. "I felt like I’m a very small fish in a big, big pond."

Since her guilty verdict, Serpico’s family has hired a lawyer to help her try to reverse the university’s plagiarism ruling, arguing Rutgers officials did not follow the proper procedures and unfairly punished her for something she did not do. The two sides have exchanged dozens of letters and e-mails. But Rutgers officials have refused to budge.

University administrators declined to speak specifically about Serpico’s case, citing federal student privacy laws. But in a series of letters to Serpico and her attorney, campus officials and their lawyer have said she has exhausted all of her appeals and her guilty verdict stands.

"The bottom line is that the university does not believe it appropriate to give your client partial credit for the plagiarized assignment and accordingly the grade will not be changed," Edward Sponzilli, a Bridgewater attorney hired by Rutgers, said in a September letter to Serpico's attorney.



The dispute



"Argumentation" was one of the final courses Serpico needed for the communications portion of her double degree. She said she was averaging a "B" in the course — which was designed to teach persuasion and debate techniques — when she submitted her final paper last December. It was titled "Lifting the ban on same-sex marriage in Texas."

About a week later, she received the e-mail from the instructor accusing her of plagiarism. She fired back an e-mail saying all of the sources she quoted in her paper were cited in the text or on the "works cited" page attached to the paper.

"I worked on this paper for weeks and would not try to plagiarize anybody else’s work for my own," Serpico wrote to her instructor.

She later learned Turnitin, the plagiarism-detection software her professor used, had concluded 53 percent of her nine-page paper may have been lifted from the internet, other publications or other student papers. The computer-generated Turnitin report cited passages in Serpico’s paper that were similar to sentences found on 35 websites, blogs and other sources, including the New York Times website, a tennis players’ message board, a site about Eskimos and a student paper submitted by a high school student in Arizona.

Serpico thought the accusations were ridiculous. She didn’t even mention the incident to her family over Christmas break, assuming it would be cleared up once her professor read her paper carefully.

On New Year’s Eve, her professor e-mailed her back saying much of her paper was cited correctly. But, using the Turnitin report, he said he found three passages that were lifted word-for-word from a gay rights website, a Yale University student’s blog and an online journal about gay politics.

"Since these cases together take up so much of the total text in your paper, and you did not attempt to attribute them to any external sources, I am left with no other choice than to formally treat this as a case of plagiarism," Leon Laureij, a Rutgers doctoral student serving as the "Argumentation" course instructor, wrote in his e-mail to Serpico. (Rutgers officials said neither Laureij nor anyone else at Rutgers connected to Serpico’s case could comment further under federal student privacy laws.)

More than a month after getting her professor’s last e-mail, Serpico had her first meeting with a staff investigator in Rutgers’ office of student conduct.

In her eight-page appeal, Serpico said all of the text her instructor accused her of plagiarizing was taken from the sources she listed on the "works cited" page she attached to her paper. "My paper was not plagiarized, and all of my sources are accounted for, even if they were not properly cited within text, they were clearly made visible on my reference page at the end of my paper," Serpico wrote in her appeal.

A few weeks later, Serpico learned her appeal had been rejected by a review committee made up of professors, students and administrators. She and her parents spent the next few months taking their case to various university officials, including several senior administrators and Rutgers President Richard McCormick. None agreed to intervene, and the case was eventually forwarded to an outside attorney by Rutgers. After nearly a year of fighting the charges, Serpico said her family’s only recourse appears to be to file a lawsuit against the university, though it is unclear if that will help.

After graduation, Serpico applied to several graduate schools to get her master’s degree in sports management. She was rejected by the University of South Carolina, her top choice, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Serpico said she will never know why the schools rejected her or if they checked with Rutgers to see why she had an "F" on her transcript for her "Argumentation" course and learned she had been found guilty of plagiarism.

She was admitted to Florida State University in Tallahassee, the only school she applied to that asked on the application if she had ever been accused of academic dishonesty. She said she had and sent the admissions office a stack of documents proclaiming her innocence. She was eventually accepted.

"I want to say that had something to do with it. But I don’t know," Serpico said.

Unusual case

At Rutgers, cases like Serpico’s that end up in the hands of lawyers appear to be rare. According to university statistics, the majority of Rutgers students accept responsibility when accused of cheating. Last year, 241 of the 278 students accused of cheating on Rutgers’ New Brunswick-Piscataway campus did not dispute the charges. The remaining cases were resolved in disciplinary conferences, university hearings or by other means. The vast majority of students were found guilty.

On the New Brunswick-Piscataway campus, nearly 92 percent of the accused students ended up with some form of punishment last year, including failed papers and classes.

The number of people involved in the academic dishonesty process at Rutgers is also growing. On the New Brunswick campus alone, there are four full-time staff members in the office of student conduct and another 50 volunteer faculty and staff members trained as advisers and investigators to review cases, said Rutgers spokesman E.J. Miranda.

With a growing number of college students facing cheating charges on their campuses, it is unclear how the accusations will affect graduates’ futures.

At Rutgers, expulsion cases are part of a student’s and the university’s permanent records, campus officials said. Other cases are kept on file 10 years and students can ask to have their records expunged. After a few years, future employers or college admissions offices may never know a student was punished for academic dishonesty.

After nearly a year of battling her plagiarism charges, Serpico said she has moved on and is concentrating on graduate school. But she’s not sure she’s ready to give up the fight to clear her name.

"I still don’t believe I did anything wrong," Serpico said.