At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web
site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and
did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment
because the page did not include author information. At DePaul
University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple
shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when
confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he
was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple
text to black. And at the University of Maryland, a student
reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great
Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and
collectively written — did not need to be credited since they
counted, essentially, as common knowledge. Professors used to
deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to
others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty
much left it at that. But these cases — typical ones, according
to writing tutors and offic