Some of the country's leading universities are introducing systems to prevent students using the Internet to plagiarise course work
Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin have introduced the measures in an attempt to stamp out the growing use of the World Wide Web to download and copy information.
The computer-based system operates by comparing students' work against a database of over 10 million papers and identifying any plagiarised material.
Trinity College Dublin introduced the system, www.turnitin.com, following a successful trial run in the last academic year.
A UCD spokesman said the college was testing the same system and hoped to introduce it from the beginning of the next academic year.
However, student leaders have criticised universities for not supplying students with enough information on how to use the Internet without being accused of plagiarism.
Mr Ben Archibald, president of the USI, stated that "the software is being used to try and catch students out, yet there is very little support telling them how they should go about taking information off the Internet".
He added: "Students would be mad not to grab information off the net as it has a great ability to pull up huge amounts of information. However, we would warn students to make sure they cite their work very carefully."
But a UCD spokesman denied the system was being introduced because of any increase in plagiarism. "We want a high quality student experience here, and plagiarism can damage the experience for other students," he said.
Dr Michael Lassan, head of the school of history at UCD, said plagiarism was still easy to detect without the use of modern technology. "Some students use American and European spelling or have dramatically different changes in style or in the quality of their spelling in the same piece of work."
The news that colleges here are introducing procedures to combat plagiarism comes after a recent survey in Britain found that one in four UK university graduates admitted to cheating during their degrees. They did this by using material from the Internet or other sources.
A spokesperson from the Conference of Heads of Irish Universities (CHIU) was last night unavailable to comment on the situation in other universities.