I have recently been thinking of what would teachers do if they found out that what students are writing is not original but have been culled from some website. Worse still, what if the student is not copying just the idea from the website but also all the details - down to the sentence structure level. Imagine a modern world essay competition where the evaluators live in myopic dream world believing that what the essayist has written is original and he/she has not copied it from the Internet.

And coincidently - such coincidences are becoming common occurrence these days, I came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald which talks about a few universities in Australia trying to use automated robotic crawlers to compare students essays with online material.

Internet 'robots' to catch university cheats

I did find some other resources which deal with the issue of plagiarism and its detection in the Educational system. I think this area seems to have huge potential for software makers and information management professionals.

Other sources:

Turnitin.com - A solution for a new era of education

iParadigms - a pioneer in the rapidly expanding field of digital information tracking

I am sure there will be other sources. Let us see, what I find next!