Plagiarism and the Internet :: Cheating Education Essays

Plagiarism and the Internet The Internet has made plagiarism, taking someone else's ideas or words and using them as one's own without citing the original source, a very common offense. There is so much information on the Internet, available from so many sources, that it is difficult to determine where the information originally came from. The indifference of educators has not helped the problem; many educators feel the problem is too great for them to do anything about, so they choose to do nothing. This leads students to assume that their teachers are either unaware of or condone plagiarism, continuing the cycle. In a survey by the Psychological Record, 36% of undergraduates confessed that they had plagiarized written material. "A national survey published in Education Week found that 54% of students admitted to plagiarizing from the Internet..." (plagiarism.org). Dr. John M. Barrie, of Turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection site, believes that almost one-third of the work submitted to the site is at least partially copied from another source. "When it comes to cheating, at the top of the list is plagiarism, and at the top of that list are students cutting and pasting, mostly from the Internet," says Dr. Barrie (http://tms.physics.lsa.umich.edu/). Why should students attempt to write original papers when they can just as easily copy one from the Internet? It saves them time and energy and may even get them a better grade than they may have gotten on their own. Educators doing nothing about it has not helped the problem... Ronald M. Aaron and Robert T. Georgia performed a study that found that 257 chief student affairs officers across the United States believe that colleges and universities have not properly dealt with the cheating problem. Many educators feel it would take too much time and energy to find if a paper was plagiarized or not, so they choose to ignore the problem. Donald L. McCabe performed a study called Faculty Responses to Academic Dishonesty: The Influence of Honor Codes; it found that 55% of faculty would not report possible cheaters if it required any real effort (plagiarism.org). "'With respect to cheating, I'm just in denial. I just don't want to deal with it because I know it is a