Teachers can fight plagiarism: A simple Google search can catch wannabe cheaters. What's harder to combat, educators say, is the attitude that the quickest route is the best — even if it subverts learning.

When students use the Internet for research or homework aid, who decides which shortcuts are too short? Homework Web sites, for example, offer quick, comprehensive information, translating foreign languages, figuring out math problems and providing chapter-by-chapter plot summaries.

In a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey released this month, nearly four out of 10 teens say they believe "too many" of their peers use the Internet to cheat. Just one out of four parents say the same thing.

"Even if students are not plagiarizing, there is so much information available now," said Chip Kimball, assistant superintendent and chief information officer for the Lake Washington School District. "The question is, How do students synthesize a large body of information and make something meaningful out of it? Do students really understand how all the parts connect to each other? That's one of our challenges [as educators]."

Some experts see the growing use of Internet shortcuts as a symptom of larger societal pressures emphasizing grades over actual learning.

Others say the Internet is not only changing the face of cheating, it's altering the very nature of learning and teaching — in some ways for the better.

Nationally, half of high-school students report they cut and pasted information off the Internet without attribution, according to compiled surveys of 18,000 students over the past five years by Don McCabe, a professor at Rutgers Business School in New Jersey.

Even as more teachers — down to the middle- and junior-high school level — use such high-tech weapons as Google and the professional anti-plagiarism site Turnitin to catch plagiarism, McCabe says the amount of cheating continues to increase.

That's because it's not just the Internet to blame, some experts say.

"What's changed so dramatically over the last 15 or 20 years is the scope and volume of cheating," said Timothy Dodd, executive director of The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University in North Carolina. "But ascribing that increase solely to new means of cheating misses one of the critical reasons — an 'achieve at any cost' mentality."

In McCabe's high-school surveys, nearly half of students (45 percent) weren't sure or didn't consider copying a sentence without citation as cheating. "Students say, 'I got it off the Internet so it's public information,' " said McCabe, a national expert on cheating and plagiarism. "They don't consider it to be a big deal."

While the ease does encourage a few more students to cross the line, "the primary thing technology has done is lead to more cheating by those who are already cheating," McCabe said. "It's another weapon in their arsenal that is so fast and so easy."

More than three-quarters of public-school students admitted cheating on an exam in the past year, either by copying, using crib notes or helping another student, he said.

Some students justify dishonesty as a fairness issue, he said. "Everyone wants to go to the Ivy League school, so when they find out others are cheating and getting away with it, they feel like they have no choice," he said.

That's especially true when kids feel pressured to excel by parents. "Students respond by any means available," he said.

Dodd blames schools and parents for emphasizing quantity — both in the amount of homework and number of after-school activities — over quality. "There are students who are scrambling from assignment to assignment just trying to keep their heads above water," he said.

"When schools are giving planners to sixth-graders and parents are signing up eighth-graders for extracurriculars six days a week until 9 p.m., should we be surprised that these students are resorting to shortcuts to 'manage' their time?" Dodd asked. "For too many students and their families, getting into the best schools seems to be valued more than the education received."

Teachers now watch for Internet shortcuts as well as in-class text messaging (cellphones and personal digital assistants), answers downloaded on MP3 players and cheat-sheets printed on water-bottle labels. Students often ignore school rules prohibiting phones and gadgets in class.

McCabe sees cheating most by very good students worried about maintaining their grades at any cost and by poor students who don't care and just want their diploma. Average students content with a B or C1 are less likely to feel the need to take the risk, he said.

Washington Middle School math teacher Taigen Riggs says for him, the most important thing is for kids to "get it."

Even if students flunk a test, they can go back and improve their score once they really understand the concept. "I don't like to penalize kids for the process," he said. "The cheating part falls by the wayside if kids know they're not going to be beat up for trying."

Are kids learning?

Seven out of 10 online teens said they used the Internet as the major source for their most recent major school project or report, according to a 2001 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. A more recent Pew survey, conducted last fall, found the number of teens using the Internet at school grew 45 percent since 2000.

"Students literally go on a scavenger hunt for information on the Internet, which they throw against a Word document file," Dodd said. "Suddenly they think they have a paper. But what has the student internalized of the subject matter?

"Kids are skimming over their work and forgetting it as soon as they're done because they have seven other things they have to do."

Kimball argues that, done right, figuring out which sources are legit and combining diverse resources are actually more difficult — and relevant — skills than the simple regurgitation of facts required of previous generations.

"It is a different kind of learning," he contends, "but they're not learning less. If you look at the kind of work kids do, the learning may be more challenging."

At Redmond Junior High School, Dave Sudmeier's history classes often do research on the Internet. What he wants to see is how students then evaluate and synthesize the data. "That's where the teaching begins," he said. "Does the information help them generate new questions or new ideas?"

He might, for example, ask students to gather climate averages for a particular area, then plan a crop rotation, or look up occupations for U.S. presidents and suggest political strategies based on trends in leaders' backgrounds.

Good teachers will adapt but others won't, McCabe said. At the college level, his surveys of professors suggest the threat of cheating can encourage educators' creativity or lead them to rely primarily on in-class tests in place of research papers.

"Colleges are already concerned about students coming in with poor writing skills," he said. If high-school teachers figure it's not worth assigning papers because kids just cheat, "it will exacerbate the problem even more."

In her English classes at Lake Washington High School, Lis Christiansen requires regular working drafts and annotated bibliographies in which students analyze and summarize each source. She also comes up with creative writing topics. That can be challenging when students read classics — How many different angles are there for "Huckleberry Finn"? — but she tries to relate questions to specific classroom discussions so that no generic paper will work.

"It is more time-consuming and more work, but it's worth it in the end when you don't have so many kids cheating," she says, "because they can't."

Stephanie Dunnewind: sdunnewind@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2091.