Students use the Internet, bribery, drugs and sex in last ditch efforts to improve their grades and save their skins

It's after 2 a.m. Your class is at 9 in the morning and, so far, you have typed nothing but a heading on your term paper. A pot of coffee later, you are frantically assessing the situation at hand. You just won't go to class, you tell yourself, and will finish the assignment during that hour. [Read article]

Plagiarists beware: For those of you who rely on your instructor's perceived ignorance to pass off a plagiarized paper as your own, get ready to pay. Instructors have new resources for exposing your shameless cheating. And, surprise; one of those resources is the very same service that provides you with the lifted work. That's right, the Internet is coming back to bite you where it hurts.

Sites like http://www.turnitin.com and http://www.plagiarism.org provide easy and quick resources for instructors to check all their students' papers for plagiarism. The way it works is the instructor, or a student per request of the instructor, turns in a paper to the Web site. The submitted paper is then checked against millions of other papers, journals, and online sources for similarities. Based upon the percentage of text that overlaps other text found on the web, the paper is given a color code. [Read article]