DENVER -- It is an epidemic of dishonesty that some ethics scholars believe underlies the nation's corporate scandals, including those in the media, from the New York Times to USA Today. The epidemic is plagiarism -- stealing someone else's work and calling it your own.

Statistics show, like at other schools, plagiarism at the University of Colorado is a significant issue, but professors are fighting back. In an era when students can buy term papers online, these instructors have enlisted a powerful weapon to combat plagiarism -- a tool that has now caught many unsuspecting students who just a few years ago, would have never had to worry about losing a grade or even getting booted out of school.

Among students, it is not a question of how many of their colleagues cheat, the only question is whether they get caught.

"People don't really expect to get caught on something like this because a lot of teachers are pretty lax on the idea of checking for the proper citations," said one CU student.

But for Steve Ouellette, who teaches at CU's Leeds School of Business, it has become a lot easier to catch students who decide to steal the words and ideas of others and call it their own. He sends all his papers to Turnitin.com. It's a California-based service with a database of tens of millions of pages of information.

"If a student has taken information from the Internet, from one of the millions of pages of books or journals that we have in our index, or from another student paper, odds are they are very, very likely to get caught," said John Barrie, of TurnItIn.com.

The teacher simply submits students' papers online to a secure portal through the Web site. The company matches the paper against its massive database and finds phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even pages that have been copied directly from another source.

It then highlights those duplications and shows where the material originated.

"So at that point, the instructor has an unambiguous way to tell where every student paper originated from," Barrie said.

"I can go through the original source and see, for example, that this entire paragraph was cut and pasted in there," said Ouellette.

Ouellette said the student may cite an imaginary source to throw professors off track.

"That goes beyond plagarizing," Oulette said.

"We found a student who took the first 10 pages and the last 10 pages of a masters thesis from another university, put it together as a 20-page paper and turned it in as his own," said Dr. Jeffrey Luftig, the faculty advisor for the CU honor code council.

He said stopping plagiarism is only one element of changing the culture, making students more aware of the importance of ethical conduct.

"While you are developing the culture you still need tools that allow us to identify where, perhaps, students are not understanding what is expected of them and where consequences may be involved," Luftig said.

Luftig said the strategy is working. Fewer students are testing the system and with good reason.

"I was a lot more willing to cut and paste from papers on the Web at that time two years ago, because I knew these turn-in sites were not available yet. But now that I know they are available, I didn't even think about it for this paper," one CU student said.

Even so, cultural change doesn't come easily.

"You can get papers from past students, your friends that are not on the web, it's just as easy if not easier," he said.

So cheating may never go away.

Of nearly 5,000 papers submitted to the online detection company in the past two years, 10 percent of CU papers have been flagged for plagiarism. But according to TurnItIn.com, that's a low number.

Of the millions the company has received worldwide, more than 30 percent have material taken from other sources that have not been attributed.