[1] Last year a physics professor at the University of Virginia ran 1850 of his students' papers through a service called Turnitin.com. He came up with 122 cases of plagiarism. Christine Pelton used the same service to catch the 28 plagiarists in her class. Over the past few years, dozens of colleges have begun using similar software. But some haven't. Why? Because policing plagiarism might hurt a cheater's self-esteem

[2] When Columbia considered buying antiplagiarism software, some opposed the idea. Catching cheaters shouldn't be "a 'hang 'em out to dry' process, but rather an educational one," said Kathleen McDermott, the associate dean of academic affairs, in an interview with the Columbia Daily Spectator. Her colleague Sandra Johnson, the associate dean of student affairs, agreed. Columbia should deal with cheaters in a more sensitive, enlightened way, Johnson explained. "When students plagiarize, that usually means there's something else wrong in their lives that needs dealing with."

[3] What sinister force is driving America's college students to cheat? You guessed it: professors. When professors fight plagiarism, warned Rebecca Moore Howard in an op-ed she wrote last year for the Chronicle of Higher Education, "we risk becoming the enemies rather than the mentors of our students; we are replacing the student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police relationship. Worst of all, we risk not recognizing that our own pedagogy needs reform. Big reform."

[4] As the director of the writing program at Syracuse University, Howard would, you'd think, abhor plagiarism above all academic sins. Sure, she feels obliged to say it's wrong to download some else's work in toto. But in the end, she sounds more like a skillful apologist. In her telling, students plagiarize not because they're tired ("many of them are working long hours at outside jobs") and hen-pecked by perfectionist teachers. "We deprive them," Howard writes, "of a respectful audience if we tear apart the style, grammar and mechanics of their papers, marking every error without discussing with them why it matters."

[5] Plagiarists as victims. Teachers as oppressors. It's not your conventional take on cheating. Not surprisingly, it has been a hit with many college students, just as it was with the plagiarists at Piper High. The student newspaper at Stanford ran an editorial attacking the use of antiplagiarism software as a potential violation of the school's honor code, which "prohibits professors from taking 'unusual and unreasonable precautions' in their academic procedures." Moreover, the paper said, checking for cheating "might even harm the relationship between students and faculty."

[6] Darcy Jones, a "human performance major" at San Jose State, summed up her opposition to antiplagiarism programs in this way: "The software is probably here for the right purpose," she told the student daily, "but it totally hurts a person's right to choose whether or not they want" to plagiarize.

[7] A person's right to choose plagiarism. Laugh if you want, but cheating just may be the next civil right.