Metro

Schools nailing cheats via Web

Unscrupulous students may have to work harder to plagiarize their papers.

More than 150 city public schools now use cheat-checking services like Turnitin and SafeAssign, which run student writing assignments through massive databases to look for material pilfered from the Internet or other pupils’ papers.

Stuyvesant HS in Manhattan is among at least 13 of the city’s most highly selective high schools that contract directly with Turnitin. Many others get plagiarism-detecting services through textbook publishers.

And 120 schools in the Department of Education’s iZone, a pilot online learning program launched last year, use Turnitin to sniff out cribbers, The Post has learned.

“It’s very easy to cut and paste,” said Teddi Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Last school year, 173 city students were suspended for “scholastic dishonesty,” including plagiarism, cheating on tests and “collusion” on papers, spokeswoman Marge Feinberg said. That was up from 146 suspensions in 2009-10 but less than the 204 in 2008-09.

Turnitin charges schools $2 per student a year.