The internet: invented in 2007, for plagiarism

Revealing language in Trip Gabriel’s story August 2 on plagiarism and the internet:

In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, … [the proportion of undergraduates] who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” [declined] to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.

(My apologies to those who don’t like the brackets; some of the style in that passage is just… well, a percentage is not “the number.”)

Was there anyone else who thought, “Okay, over four years, the proportion who did not think copying is serious went from the pretty-awful 66% to the even-worse 71%”? I had this clue that students were using the internet to plagiarize in … oh, the late 1990s, when the internet existed. The primary difference now is that colleges and universities are commonly purchasing licenses for plagiarism-detection services, and Google exists, so faculty can spot the plagiarism more easily.