Student plagiarism has become a huge problem for teachers. “Teachers who still assign long papers — 10 pages or more with footnotes and bibliographies — often require students to attach companion essays that describe every step of their research and writing. Even then, teachers scour the Internet for suspicious turns of phrase. And some schools are paying thousands of dollars a year for software that scans work for plagiarism. Those programs reveal that about 30% of papers are plagiarized, either totally or in part.”