Plagiarism and the Internet
In the days before computers research had to be done solely in books, articles, or on personal interviews. It was not so easy to attain an abundance of valuable information so quickly. Now children are taught from early ages to utilize the computer and the Internet. Searching school topics on web browsers is common knowledge for today¦Ðs youth.
But with this breakthrough technology also comes consequences and rising disputes. Is the information that Internet-users are finding valid sources? What legal restrictions does one have in using those sources? Are the sources themselves legal? Students ¡cutting¡ material from a variety of different sites and ¡pasting¡ them into a word document as if it were their own work has become a common practice among high school and college students. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, seventy-five percent of students admit to committing ¡academic dishonesty¡, however only twenty-five percent of students from the same populous consider ¡cutting and pasting¡ to be the only serious form of cheating (Southard 2).
A national survey conducted by Education Week estimated that fifty-four percent of students admitted to plagiarizing information from the Internet (Plagiarism.org 1). At the University of California-Berkley officials have stated that there was an averaged seven hundred and forty-four percent increase in cheating between the years of 1993 to 1997 (Plagiarism Statistics ¡ Did You Know??? 1). Perhaps one of the reasons for this drastic increase of cheating is the easiness in which one can find the documents that they plagiarize. Popular websites such as ¡www.schoolsucks.com¡ and ¡www.a1-termpapers.com¡ provide immoral and slacking students with hundreds of prefabricated essays (Plagiarism, Ethics & the WWW 2), equipped with word count and grade received.
Another possible reason for the increase in plagiarized schoolwork is the nation growing decline in ethics. The Callup Organization in 2000 published a list of the top problems facing the United States. The number one problem was education, followed by decreasing ethics. These two rankings perhaps aided in the creation of some of the other listed problems below, such as poverty, drugs, crime, and racism (Plagiarism.
In conclusion, I believe the writers of this article express that there are plenty of ways a student can cheat. I actually didn’t realize there are website that will write papers for you. But, whether it’s a copy paste action, or even paraphrasing someone else’s words, it’s still plagiarism and plagiarism is dishonest, immoral; it’s wrong! I could not agree more! While the Internet has made it easier for students to cheat, students have always found ways to cheat, regardless of World Wide Web. On the contrary, lets not forget that students still have a choice in the matter, a choice to be honest or
The article Cybercheats clearly shows the cause/use of plagiarism. Students of all ethnic backgrounds use plagiarism. However it also shows how most schools are trying to crack down. Two employees from National Institutes of Health actually have a program that can decode essays that may have some sort of plagiarism. It is clearly obvious that the students who do indeed use this from of cheating have no real values. As Michael Miller, a teacher at Georgetown University, says, "It's really up to the individual reader to do with the information what they will, good or evil. I belong to a school that says teach people to do the right thing and then turn'em loose." It seems that if you are adult enough to actually attend collage then you are adult enough to handle the pressures and responsibilities that come along with it. For most cases the use of plagiarism is clearly used by students who don't know the value/capabilities of there own. They also aren't usually aware of the consequences.
The book lists common excuses for use of plagiarism: “’I was in a hurry’, ‘I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to’, ‘There’s pressure to get good grades’, ‘Everybody else does it’, ‘I mixed up my notes by accident’, ‘Somebody else said it so much better’, ‘I’m not hurting anyon...
In this article Gabriel asserts that in this day and age a student can go to any website and just copy and paste what they need, but when they do not document the source they have committed plagiarism. Gabriel documents various sources throughout the article such as the different cases that occurred at the Rhode Island University, DePaul University, and University of Maryland. He also pointed that it occurs outside of school environments, too, when he mentioned the bestselling
The better educated you are, the better off you are socially, and economically. Having a degree is, in general, a good indicator of your level of education. To get it some students study very hard. Others, on the contrary, prefer to take some shortcuts that seem to be easier for them. Those, not so much interested in acquiring a solid education, simply want to plagiarize to pass their classes, to get that degree. Plagiarism spreads out through any level of our education system. It even extends beyond that limit to reach almost any aspect of our society. With the internet revolution, this problem becomes more acute. “The web has provided global access to an unfathomable cornucopia of term papers, essays, and other scholarly works, right there out in the open for purchase or outright theft” (Simonson, Smaldino, & Zvacek, 2015, p. 160). This paper will discuss the different types of plagiarism. Before getting deeper into that discussion, we will start by explaining the word plagiarism.
Plagiarism is a severe problem because it has since become an epidemic and is being practiced at an alarmingly increasing rate. It has become widely accepted among students at many colleges and universities across the United States. It has gotten to the point that many students don’t even consider it cheating. This fact alone makes it even more serious and harder to control. It is now common practice to obtain someone else’s writing and turn it in as an original work. It is not difficult to purchase a pre-written paper or hire another individual to write a paper. Students are willing to pay whatever the cost so that they don’t have to do the work themselves. In fact, paper-selling services such as this have become quite a lucrative business. With the age of technology quickly advancing it has become all the more easily to plagiarize.
Cheating by students in American schools has become a serious and growing problem. A 2005 poll of 12,000 college graduates in the contiguous United States with a 62% response rate showed the following: 45% of all students cheated on an examination that counted toward 10-20% of their grade and 51% cheated on an exam that counted toward 33-50% of their final grade. When asked why they cheated, 70% of cheaters stated that they did not fear failing the exams on which they cheated and that cheating for a "higher grade" was the primary motive. The most common method of cheating involved electronic technologies such as instant messaging via telephone, e-mail, internet searches, and other devices holding electronic versions of material covered on an exam. For outside classroom work, 71% of all poll responders admitted to copying homework from someone they considered "smarter". Of all the reponders, 43% of students stated that they had turned in an essay copied from the internet. Of the cheaters, 88% had turned in an essay copied from th...
One thing is certain; plagiarism is on the rise. With the rise of technology and the age of information upon us it is easier than ever to pull ideas from every corner of the world and every epoch of our species. Confucious is only a click away and Van Gogh is in reach of a Google search. No more time consuming trips to the local library, head scratching at the Dewie Decimal System. An iPad and a few minutes of time takes the place of a full time research team. Sometimes however, the temptation might become too much and an overloaded student may decide to save some time and use a segment here and there from the words of another. Access to material such as this is certainly easier to obtain than ever before and students claim to do it anonymously for a variety of reasons. Some feel overburdened and need a break while others feel they cannot compete with the quality of work they see online and feel the need to plagiarise. Many others however claim that most of the time the plagiarism is not intentional at all.
In conclusion, people today may not think that plagiarism is that big of a deal. Those people do not understand the consequences of their actions. They could get a failing mark in a class they have worked hard in, or even worse they could be expelled from the college or university. Why would anyone want to take the chances of being expelled? Nobody wants this, which is why it is so important to have knowledge about plagiarism. By discussing what plagiarism is, ways teachers can prevent plagiarism, ways teachers can detect plagiarism and how students can avoid plagiarism I hope people have a better understanding of what plagiarism is.
Academic dishonesty, specifically cheating and plagiarism, recently has increased in popularity. Students often justify unethical academic behavior. Technological innovations, like the cellular telephone, have provided students with new methods of cheating. Plagiarism has also been influenced through technologies, specifically internet companies have emerged that provide unethical solutions to academic assignments.
Many students are using technology to cheat because they are able to find answers quickly online by just searching for them. Cheating is increasing in the United States at higher rates because many of the students in high school or in college have to deal with different responsibilities, pressure, and loads of different types of work. Richard Perez Peña states in “Studies Find More Students Cheating,” “Internet access has made cheating easier, enabling students to connect instantly with answers, friends to consult and works to plagiarize.” Plagiarism, which means using a work of someone else as if it were yours, is the most common form of cheating in high school and in college. Plagiarism occurs by not citing a source correctly or by not putting the proper quotation marks on a quote that you borrow to state your point. Some students don’t even know what plagiarism is, and they do it using the technology that we have today. Therefore, Julie Rasicot states, “High schools and teachers should make clear what constitutes plagiarism, how to avoid it and what the consequences will be if students are caught.” If students are not informed about plagiarism, then they tend to use technology as an easy way to do an assignment, which prevents them from learning. On the other hand, many professors have argued that the technology is developing
This is not just an issue in colleges, high schools are facing this problem as well. In 2010, 59% of high school students admitted to cheating on a test in the past year, while 34% admitted to committing this crime more that twice. While 95% of students admitted to some form of cheating, whether it was cheating on a test, or just copying homework from another student. (Plagiarism.org, 2010)
Plagiarism, or the unaccredited use of another's work or ideas, has become more and more of a problem in recent times than it was in the past. According to statistics found in a survey conducted by the Free Press, 58% of high school students let someone copy their work in 1969, but by 1989 this number had risen to 97%. The expansion of the World Wide Web and the number of people accessing the Web on a regular basis has caused an epidemic of plagiarism in this country, especially among students. This is a serious problem that must be addressed because many students feel that if they are not getting in trouble for cheating, than it is okay.
Cheating in the classroom has been happening since the first schoolhouse was built; however, it has more than doubled in the last decade due to the emergence of new technologies that give students high tech alternatives to looking at their classmate's paper. "A 2002 survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics of 12,000 high-school students found that 74 % of students had cheated on an exam at least once in the previous year. According to Donald McCabe, who conducted the Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, study, the Internet is partly to blame. The Internet makes plagiarism very simple. In-class cheating has also gone high technology. Experts say students who cheat are not just scribbling tiny crib sheets anymore. They are using their cell phones to instant message questions and answers or storing notes on their graphing calculators." ("Eye on Cheaters," 2004)
Plagiarism is a serious offense and a growing trend in our society today. Some may associate plagiarism with the idea of taking someone else’s writing and making it their own. In fact plagiarism involves anything that is copied or taken and said to be of your own work. Dictionary.com defines plagiarism as “the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work, as by not crediting the author”. In fact this definition covers all types of cheating and misrepresentation of ones own work. There are many numbers and statistics that can be found on the amount of individuals that have admitted to cheating. Perhaps the most astounding number is one that was reported by Moeck in 2002 aloft of 40% of higher education students commit academic dishonesty. This number I’m sure has grown since this report and will continue to grow with the development of the Internet. There are a number of ideas and strategies that can be employed in order to stop this ever-growing phenomenon. As teachers and adults, we are responsible for stopping this trend and educating students about the consequences and dangers of plagiarism. I believe there are a variety of reasons individuals plagiarize. First, students are insecure with their own ability; they don’t believe they can do the work therefore they take others. Second, students believe they can get away with the act because they know others who have plagiarized, and there were not any consequences. Lastly, students are uneducated on what plagiarism is and do not know the consequences of their actions if they commit an act. These ideas will be the focus of the position taken on plagiarism in today’s academic society.