Plagiarism is, and will continue to be, a major problem on college campuses all over the world. The main cause of this issue is the Internet. Students have access to almost anything on the internet these days and they tend to take full advantage of that. In an article by professors at the Rochester Institute of Technology, they claimed that "Four years ago a count of term paper mills on the Web—including A-Plus Termpapers, Paperz.com, School Sucks, and Research Assistance by Collegiate Care—set the number at 70." This number is pretty astonishing and shows how many options students have when it comes to finding term papers. I also feel that many students do not want to take the time to produce their own paper and they feel that if they use someone else's, it won't be a big deal. You are taking someone else's work and taking undeserved credit for it. It would be better to be honest with your teacher then take the F and possibly get an academic dishonesty mark on your transcript.
When it comes to efforts on the university side to fix this issue, I feel that there is only so much the school can do. I think the first solution would be to block those term paper websites from the on-campus network, but there are still the other 55% of students that live off-campus that you have to worry about. I know a lot of professors use Turnitin.com which is a really good way to monitor plagiarism. Turnitin is branched from Plagiarism.com which was basically the segway into many other plagiarism prevention sites. When you turn in a paper to this website, it scans the Internet and compares it to your document to see if there are statements that stand out or are similar to another paper that is already written.
I feel tools like Turnitin.com are the best a university can do at this moment to prevent plagiarism. It also comes down to the student's decision; they can be unethical and copy a paper, or they can make the ethical choice and write a paper that they deserve a grade for. All in all, it is up to the student to make the right choice.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~ladare/eac595/readings/scanlon-neumann.pdf
https://turnitin.com/static/index.php
I agree with you that one of the issues of plagiarism is simply just that students have become more lazy and just do not want to do their own work.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you--it would be better to be honest on the issue of plagiarism instead of messing up your transcript.
ReplyDeleteYou're right when you say it really does come down to the student to decide whether or not they want to plagiarize. If they're plagiarizing in the first place, then they probably don't care all that much about school.
ReplyDeleteI've never been asked to submit a paper onto a checking program however my poetry teacher tells us that he puts all our papers into his system so he can run all new papers through the program.
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