Is America a Country of Copycats?

Matthew Warshauer was sure he had caught a plagiarist.

Warshauer, a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Conn., had assigned a paper to a class on 19th-century American history, requiring the students to do original research using primary-source documents. But when he started looking at one student's work, he immediately sensed something was amiss.

"I read the first paragraph, and I said, 'This kid used William Freehling's Prelude to the Civil War,'" says Warshauer, citing a well-known text. Perusing the paper further, he noticed the student had lifted passages from two other history books.

So Warshauer summoned the student and accused him of plagiarism — only to be met with a hostile response.

"The student denied, denied and denied," says Warshauer. "Then his father called me and yelled at me on the phone." The case went to a formal disciplinary hearing — at which, Warshauer claims, the father threatened to punch him.

Finally, after a drawn-out inquiry into the case, the student got off lightly — much to the surprise of Warshauer, who had helped draft the academic misconduct policy at the university and thought he was looking at an open-and-shut case.

"I was angry about it," says Warshauer.

And he's hardly alone. Across the United States this month, as professors read their students' term papers, countless examples will surface in which students try to pass off the work of others as their own, further frustrating professors and leading educators to wonder if the country is witnessing a plague of plagiarism.

Profiting From Plagiarism: The Business of Cheating

Perception of an Increase — But the Numbers Hint Otherwise

Indeed, with popular historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose having been shown in recent months to have plagiarized from other historians, and with plagiarism cases in secondary schools gaining national publicity, it feels to some professors as if the practice has never been more prevalent.