Face it kid - You're going to get caught Teachers out to bust high-tech cheaterss

In six years of teaching high school English, West High School instructor Alana Escalante has seen many types of cheating: two students turning in the same exact essay, paragraphs lifted from a published article or book, a character analysis of a novel's heroin copied verbatim from "Cliff's Notes."

But with today's technology, specifically the Internet, Escalante and her colleagues are forced to take stronger measures to prevent plagiarism and cheating than ever before.

The availability of ready-made essays on the Web has teachers veering away from assigning take-home reports or essays, and giving their students more in-class writing assignments and oral tests. When they do assign an essay to be completed at home, they usually require students to provide a tedious outline of their research and where they got it from.

Escalante said she assigns an in-class essay at the beginning of the year. The paper not only helps her gauge where her students are at in their writing abilities, but she uses it as a baseline to compare with their future work.

"Whenever I see a student's writing that stands out, I 'Google' it," Escalante said. "Usually, that search will take you to a link where that phrase shows up in a paper or publication on the Internet."

There also are Internet-based services such as www.turnitin.com, where teachers can look up key words and phrases to find out where their students are finding their sources.

"Sometimes a student will turn in an assignment that's surprisingly brilliant, and I'll say to myself, 'Did I just do a great job teaching, or is this student cheating?' " Escalante added.

Students know teachers are scrutinizing their work, but some believe it doesn't keep a few from visiting Web sites that host hundreds of essays available for download or trying to slip plagiarized work past their teachers.

"All I know is, if we cheat or plagiarize, they won't let us walk (at graduation)," said senior David Corona 18, who attends north Stockton's Bear Creek High School.

Bear Creek junior Brenda Quintanilla, 16, said her teachers have outlined to her class what plagiarism is and warned them not to do it.

Tracy High teacher Laura Hawkins said she teaches English learners, and plagiarism is a problem among her students, as well. She speculated in an e-mail to The Record that many teachers have allowed English learners to copy and paste from the Internet.

"Last year one assignment was to write a letter to the editor in response to the previous letters on the topic of immigration reform that ran in The Record last May," Hawkins said. "One of my students turned in her letter, and it was obvious that it was not written in her voice. The vocabulary and syntax were very advanced for her skill level. When I told her that it just didn't sound like her work she became very upset. ... I told her I would reconsider because she's a hard worker. ... It turned out that every paragraph had been lifted from the Internet."

Besides using Google or other Internet sites to catch a cheater, teachers also can simply ask the suspected cheating student about their work.

Tracy High English teacher Terri Sorgent has caught students using plagiarized ideas in the past by asking them to define a word, a phrase or a concept they wrote in a paper.

"They weren't able to explain," she said.

Sorgent also assigns essays in a sequence. For example, she will assign students to turn in a thesis, followed later by rough drafts and research outlines before they turn in a final product.

"The teacher can see the development of the idea through the process," she said, making it harder for the student to lift their work directly from an outside source.

"There's just so many ways for students to cheat," Escalante said. "We have to stay on top of it."