Plagiarism, Cheating and the Internet
Cyber cheating is defined as “the use of technology tools in inappropriate ways for academic work.”(Conradson & Hernandez- Ramos, 2004, p1) Although technology has dramatically advanced our society in many positive ways, one negative aspect of technology is its effects on student cheating. Many believe that the internet is the “number one sociable force which leads students to plagiarize.” (Mayfield, 2001, p1) There is an increasing number of online cheating websites which students use. Along with these sites come programs which help teachers and professors detect student plagiarism. Besides the internet students have found ways to use watches, cell phones, calculators, and PDA’s to help them cheat on tests or other assignments. Of the students who do cheat the majority of them believe that what they are doing is not wrong and they feel that copying answers is not even considered cheating.
In many ways the internet is one of the easiest ways for children to cheat through school. With the click of a mouse students can access websites where they can easily purchase term papers and essays on hundreds of topics. “Search engines such as Google can find over a million resources for students trying to buy term papers, some of which sell for more than ten dollars a page.” (Toosi, 2004, p1) There are three main types of websites students use to cheat; lecture note sites, term paper and essay sites and editorial services sites. The first two types of websites offer some free services and others can charge anywhere from five to five hundred dollars. Websites such as Academictermpapers.com and Cheaters.com offer a variety of papers including book reports, file p...
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... Plagiarism in the Internet Era: a wake up call. Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited.
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When Professor John Doe assigned this reading assignment, I had really no idea what academic book would appeal to me. I definitely wanted to choose a book that would impact me in the long run and that I would benefit from. When I told my brother about the book, he said that he was just finishing a book called “The Cheating Culture, Why More Americans Are Doing More To Get Ahead” by, David Callahan. When he quickly explained what the book was about I knew that was the book I was going to read. I figured that this would be a good choice, because everywhere you look these days you see cheating. This book was published back in 2004 so even though it is a decade old, I do believe that many of the examples in the book are still problems, if not, even worse today than they were a decade ago. Weather it is kids in school, athletes, or the average business man. Everyone is cheating and trying to cut corners to get ahead. Nearly everyone has cheated in their life rather you would want to admit it or not. Reading this book, I was hoping to learn exactly why so many people try to cheat, and what alternatives people could take to prevent from cheating.
That stomach churning feeling of guilt for many seems to appear as a small price to pay when completing an act of academic dishonesty. Colleen Wenke wrote an essay on cheating eighteen years ago called “Too Much Pressure”. In the past fifty years, the number of students who admit to cheating has increased fifty to seventy percent(Gaffe). Many people wonder what leads the students to make this unjust decision. Today, the reason for a rise in cheaters is because of how easy it has become, leading many students to the false conclusion that they aren’t breaking any rules; It is simply viewed as a shortcut to success in the classroom and beyond.
So, to help students across the country cheat better, saving themselves both from easy detection and from incurring the wrath of insulted faculty, and leading to a much more harmonious school environment, I offer the following tips, based on recent experience:
Clayton, Mark. "A Whole Lot of Cheatin'Going On." The Presence of Others. 3rd ed. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000. 185 - 190.
New York Times journalist, Trip Gabriel, puts into perspective students ability to use their creativity throughout their academic career in “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age.” This article discusses issues of plagiarism in the digital age, especially through college students. There are different perspectives from various people either attending college or professors that argue why plagiarism occurs. Whether it’s because of laziness, unpreparedness going into college, originality, or authorship not taken into consideration. Overall, this article infers the different standpoints of plagiarism, demonstrating the ease the digital age gives students to plagiarize, and the importance
Pressures from society to obtain a successful career require achieving an education in most cases. In today's economy having a thriving career could depend on our educational background as part of the ingredient to fuel our lifestyles. Students attending high school or college can relate to the pressures of sustaining adequate grades. Students who are overwhelmed with trying to maintain higher GPA standards push the academic barriers using technology to cheat. Our society is more advanced with technology such as computers, cell phones, text message systems, as well as various other electronic devices that could provide the avenue for a desperate student seeking a way to cheat in order to receive a higher GPA score. According to Ad Council (1999),"Grades, rather than education, have become the major focus of many students" (Ad Council, 1999). For those students in high school maintaining high GPA's could equal college scholarship programs needed to attend college. Students with peer pressures as well as pressures from parents to achieve higher grades could thrust students who are not motivated to study, to resort to cheating as an easy solution to an unethical problem. This research paper will discuss ways in which students are using technology to cheat. Other aspects of this paper will include statistics on academic cheating as well as ways instructors are catching students cheating. The pros and cons after using cheating detection programs as well as statistics that show significant changes after using the detection programs will also be discussed.
Why do so many people use 123HelpMe.com simply to plagiarize other people's writing? Is it even possible that someone cannot write their own essay, or that someone cannot read a book of any length? If you plagiarize, aren't you sentencing yourself to failure? And if you cannot gather information, aren't you opening yourself to attacks from the System?
There is an ever broadening problem spreading throughout colleges all across America: cheating. Is it a serious offence or just a harmless crime? Cheating is on the rise, but schools and colleges are not far behind with ways of dealing with it. Mark Clayton deals with this issue in his essay entitled “A Whole Lot of Cheatin’ Going On.”
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
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.
Academic dishonesty has been a big issue that many faculties have to deal with all the time in classrooms in today’s academic environment. In a report founded by Thomas & O’Reilly (2002), “74 percent of American students admit to cheating on an exam. So imagine how many really are. Forty percent of adolescents say they have stolen from a store and a whopping 93 percent say they lie.” With such a huge percentage of students cheating with the use of technology, it has become an epidemic that is spreading like wild fire. Since technology was introduced in the class environment, it has become the number one concern to some instructors because many students are not using it too learn, but instead students are using technology to cheat in assignments and other work that may involve school work.
Children are taught to use computers at incredibly young ages, and according to Ann Lanthrop plagiarism has become a problem even in the lowest levels of elementary education. It has become so easy for students to access information for their homework and papers on the Internet that some students feel they should not have to work even a little to receive the grades that they desire. High school students get out of reading novels for their English classes by reading "book notes" online. While in the past students had access to these materials, websites such as Spark Notes, Monkey Notes, and a number of other websites have made access to these "study guides" free to students, causing the temptation to cheat to be even harder to ignore. The Web also offers many ways for students to obtain term papers or essays at a low cost. In many cases, these students do not even bother to change any piece of the paper! The simplicity of the Internet has made cheating on assignments much more effortless than in the past, even if students are not directly copying and pasting from Websites, they can also email homework problems and essay questions to every member of the class. Plagiarism is a severe issue that needs to be addressed by both teachers and parents with children while they are still young enough to fear the consequences of their actions.
Over the past decade or so, we have seen a huge increase in cheating in our schools. The introduction of the Internet into most homes and schools and other technological advances are some of the main causes. Students are misusing the new technologies to find new and more high tech ways to cheat. During testing students are receiving answers via text messaging devices, they are downloading notes to iPods and graphing calculators, they are picture messaging exams with their mobile phones, and they are even hiring look-alike experts to take the exams for them. They can use the internet to easily plagiarize a paper; they can pay a company to write the paper for them, they can even pay to use a prewritten paper from a database. The internet and technology are making it easier and easier for students to cheat, and as technology continues to advance, we will continue to see a rapid rise in cheating.
Cheating on academic work is a serious issue that most students admit to doing at some point in their academic career. Elite students are surprisingly the culprits of cheating, but hide it well. (Romm, para 5) Cheating is such a large issue that “70% of students from a sample of 1,800 from nine campuses said they had cheated at least once during their college careers.” (Schneider, para 9) Students cheat on academic work because of different, ongoing pressures in their lives. Understanding the student’s motives and pressures are essential to preventing cheating from occurring in the future. Students cheat for different reasons specific to them regarding their priorities, pressures and because of how easy it has become. Even though eliminating cheating will not happen, there are actions that educational professionals can and should take to prevent most of it from happening so often. Therefor cheating problems are minimized and have a positive impact on the student’s education and understanding of concepts.