Problem As American education enters a time when the ability to use technology becomes imperative, a time when students will become expected to communicate and work via the Internet, and a time when students will need to be able to find and interpret information efficiently and correctly, secondary school teachers are searching for ways to provide their students with assessments that mirror the expectations those students will face in the workforce. One way to do this is to have students research topics and create position papers, presentations, and various other forms of written expression that require students to synthesize and analyze information. However, in the midst of researching topics and sharing ideas, these same students are faced with the temptation to simply copy and paste information as they find it. Instances of plagiarism are on the rise, yet teachers are in a position where they cannot discontinue this type of assessment. Therefore, teachers face the question: How can we stop the rise of plagiarism among students? Input Since teachers have given assessments of any kind, students have attempted to find ways to cheat. Whether they were looking at another student’s paper, attempting to gain answers prior to the test, or directly copying another student’s work, these students were trying to gain a favorable grade without performing to the required standard. Today’s digital age has not only added more opportunity for students to copy the work of another, but it has also added an air of ambiguity to what is and is not cheating, or plagiarism. Some of this stems from, as Taylor (2003) states, “different mores and values than in the past [that] all contribute to cheating;” therefore, “working to understand underlyin... ... middle of paper ... ...arch 11). New honor codes for a new generation. Inside higerhed. Retrieved June 25, 2009, from http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/03/11/pavela1. McKeever, L. (2006, April 1). Online plagiarism detection services – saviour or scourge?. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(2), 155-165. Retrieved June 25, 2009, from ERIC database. Slobogin, K. (2002, April 5). Survey: Many students say cheating’s ok. Retrieved June 12, 2009, from http://archives.cnn.com/2002/fyi/teachers.ednews/04/05/highschool.cheating/. Taylor, K.R. (2003, November). Bracing for cheating and plagiarism. The Education Digest, 69(3), 54-59. Retrieved June 25, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals database. Villano, M. (2006, October). Taking the work out of homework. T.H.E. Journal, 33(15), 24- 26,28,30. Retrieved June 25, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals database.
The book, Other People’s Words: What Plagiarism Is and How to Avoid it, has taught me many things about plagiarism. Some of the things this book taught me are the definition and some ways to avoid plagiarism.
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.
It is absolutely clear that you feel sad when somebody cheated and duplicate your own things. This causes many people to feel frustration and getting upset when they are facing this difficult situation. We know it is not a good attitude for students, authors, and anyone else to use something misappropriate that they didn’t belong it. I read an article that called “When the Story Stolen is Your Own”. When the author Sherman Alexie was writing this article, he was feeling nervous because somebody has stolen his article and use it in his own. Nobody didn’t believe him when he told the publisher that his story was stolen by someone and imitate that he belong it. Same as the students when they cheated each other and submit the same paper, it was one of the biggest challenge that happens some of the students when they are in the college.
If anything is held to the highest value in any array of schools, it is a policy against plagiarism. Academics understand the severity that plagiarism can hold, especially since many of them tend to do it to each other. In 2005, Melissa Elias, who was at the time the President of the Madison School Board, gave a commencement speech that had several sections that were plagiarized from a speech Anna Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prize winner author, had given to Mount Holyoke in 1999. Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard University Sophomore, had published a book with several portions of copied from works of four different authors. Individuals held at high academic expectations committed both of these incidents, one being the president of a school and the other being a student of an Ivy League University. However, despite their valor in academia they both plagiarized, the only difference being that Viswanathan was getting royalties for her act of plagiarism. One has to question whether there really is a difference between these two cases, because both individuals clearly intentionally plagiarized. When handling cases of plagiarism one has to be extremely cautious due to the various degrees of plagiarism that depend on the individual’s intentionality and regards to profit.
It is a random Thursday night on the first floor of Brewster Hall and the Campus of State University when a frazzled young girl wanders into the room of a fellow student inquiring about The Stranger by Albert Camus. She needs to have a three page paper completed by tomorrow and cannot find a kick start on the essay writing process. Since her peers are on the level of the common doormat concerning Camus, she was left without any further help. However, had she just typed “the stranger, camus” into Google, three of the first ten sites listed would have directed her to either free or paid essay sites.
...kay and when cheating was acceptable. One person said, “Excuse me, but there are worse things to do than cheat on homework.” (Nathan, 125) She noticed that over half of the students who responded thought that cheating depends on the situation or circumstance.
Take out your sticky notes, electronic devices, or the magic markers to write with on the palms of your hands. Look over at your classmate’s paper and copy the “correct” answers for the quiz questions one through ten. Hand in your quiz into your teacher early, and then lay your head on your desk and go to sleep. Does that ring a bell? The topic being focused on is cheating. Not the type of cheating where you break your boyfriend, or girlfriend’s heart. This discussion is based on the cheating a lot of students practice in class, “academic cheating” to be precise. Academic cheating is defined as representing someone else's work as your own. It can take many forms, including sharing another student’s work, purchasing a term paper or test questions in advance, or paying another student to do the work for you.(ETS/AD Council) 70% of public high school students admit to serious test cheating. 60% say they have plagiarized papers. Only 50% of private school students, however, admit to this. (McCabe)
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
Davis, Stephen F., Patrick F. Drinan, and Tricia Bertram Gallant. Cheating in School: What We Know and What We Can Do. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print.
One aspect of the creative industry that has remained the same throughout generations is the difficulty for artists to inject their work into popular culture. Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production by Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) written in 1991 argues that “The Video revolution failed for two reasons – a lack of access and an absence of desire” (99) while artists from the documentary Press. Pause. Play. point out how easy access is to creative technology. The artists from PPP point out that it is much more difficult for good work to breakthrough into popular culture because there is so much of it. Comparing the arguments by CAE with the ideas in PPP reveals that artists breaking through into popular culture has always been difficult, but it is difficult today for different reasons than it used to be. For this reason, quality plagiarism is essential in the creative industry.
Modern students face many pressures for academic success. They are often unwilling to disappoint their parents or spouses. Some fear that not cheating will weaken a student’s ability to compete with their peers. They rationalize their unethical behavior, unwilling to accept a poor grade, consequently justifying cheating as the only means to that end.
But now, teachers who may have previously cross-examined suspicious students by asking them to orally dissect their term paper's argument are now funneling college and university funds toward Internet-based antiplagiarism services and software. This means instructors and students are wielding the same weapon, the World Wide Web, in this cyber brouhaha. For teachers, a grudging reliance on technology coexists with the reality that some students are genuinely unaware that information must be attributed when it is culled from a clearinghouse like the Internet— just as when it is taken from a newspaper or an encyclopedia. The boundaries between research and cheating are becoming increasingly ambiguous.
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)
Keywords: cheating, research, surveys, culture, consequences, results Cheating: A Tendency for Students As of today, the constant practice of cheating
Cheating can be defined as academic dishonesty to achieve a better grade; it includes copying one’s homework, plagiarizing, or viewing another’s test. The discussion of whether cheating can be justified or is always wrong has been debated and become extremely relevant in recent years. There are arguments to both sides, but in the end, cheating cannot be justified nor is it ever okay. Nothing can counter the fact that cheating in school is morally wrong, can create a hostile learning environment, and more. Cheating is morally wrong in its definition.