College professor’s have long struggled with the issue of plagiarism in student writing. Some students have always been tempted to cut corners when papers are due. Plagiarism has become easier with the rise of the Internet, which concerns many academics. Detecting plagiarism is now a major concern in many colleges and universities, and some schools have turned to technological solutions to help professors identify plagiarized writing. Savvy instructors spend time on creative assignments to prevent the problem so that they can spend less time trying to catch plagiarists. Ultimately, however, students, who are not children anymore are responsible for making the decision to do their own work and resisting the temptation to take shortcuts when
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Plagiarism is not a new problem, which the famous people accused of it including Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., George Harrison, and Joe Biden. There are different types of plagiarism; some are more serious than others. Professor Andrea A. Lunsford of Stanford University notes that one of the most disturbing forms of deliberate plagiarism involves a student’s “handing in an essay written by a friend or purchased (or simply downloaded) from an essay-writing company (246).” The student, who downloads an essay from an online paper mill, is obviously cheating. Students who want to get a degree that they haven’t earned act dishonestly and show no respect for their instructors or for their fellow students who are trying to get an education. Not surprisingly, colleges tend to view deliberate plagiarism as deserving of the harshest …show more content…
Material taken from a book in the college library would probably be familiar to the professor. Plagiarism also required a greater investment of time. Because students had to type up the material from the source. These days, however, vast amounts of information on a wide variety of topics can be found online college students can find dozens of sources or even entire papers with a few simple searches. As journalist Mark Clayton has noted, students can easily find “Web sites sporting names like ‘Cheater.com’ and ‘School Sucks’ offer tools for rampant plagiarism at the click of a mouse” (200). The only thing that students who are determined to cheat have to do is copy and paste material from an online source into their own document or simply add their name to a paper written by someone
Plagiarism is not a new problem, which the famous people accused of it including Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., George Harrison, and Joe Biden. There are different types of plagiarism; some are more serious than others. Professor Andrea A. Lunsford of Stanford University notes that one of the most disturbing forms of deliberate plagiarism involves a student’s “handing in an essay written by a friend or purchased (or simply downloaded) from an essay-writing company (246).” The student, who downloads an essay from an online paper mill, is obviously cheating. Students who want to get a degree that they haven’t earned act dishonestly and show no respect for their instructors or for their fellow students who are trying to get an education. Not surprisingly, colleges tend to view deliberate plagiarism as deserving of the harshest …show more content…
Material taken from a book in the college library would probably be familiar to the professor. Plagiarism also required a greater investment of time. Because students had to type up the material from the source. These days, however, vast amounts of information on a wide variety of topics can be found online college students can find dozens of sources or even entire papers with a few simple searches. As journalist Mark Clayton has noted, students can easily find “Web sites sporting names like ‘Cheater.com’ and ‘School Sucks’ offer tools for rampant plagiarism at the click of a mouse” (200). The only thing that students who are determined to cheat have to do is copy and paste material from an online source into their own document or simply add their name to a paper written by someone