PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism

Plagiarism and Unfair Practice can Damage Students' Academic Careers

With the increase in modern technology in the year 2007 the integrity of academic writing has become more and more compromised. Rather it is a student intentionally copying and pasting information from the internet into their report for class or another student unknowingly copying some information from the internet and using it in a research paper. Academic plagiarism has become more and more of an epidemic as the online world continues to grow the end to its limits does not seem to be near.

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is defined as; to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own: use (a created production) without crediting the source; to commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source. To put it simple it is stealing.

When you are a young college student or you most likely define stealing as taking someone else stuff, i.e. car, shoes, hat. While writing a paper it might seem harmless to many students to just copy and paste an entire paragraph from an article and use it in your research paper, but the truth is it is just like stealing someone's shoes. Many students just don't seem to want to accept this fact because it is so easy to do. That is why Colleges and Universities are starting to step up their effort to curb plagiarism (Carrell, Sidebottom 2007).

Internet Plagiarism

According to a recent study on college plagiarism Internet plagiarism is defiantly rising among students. Thirty-eight percent of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in one or more instances of ''cut-and-paste'' plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source. Almost half the students said they considered such behavior trivial or not cheating at all (RIMER 2003). That is almost half of all students. One of the main points from this study is almost half of the students polled do not view the behavior cheating at all. That raises the question: Why not? The main reason students plagiarize comes down to excuses and last ditch efforts by a student to meet a deadline. Students are humans and we as humans tend to procrastinate. According to a study in 2001, Seventy-nine percent of students claim they will most likely procrastinate when doing their next assignment (PR News Wire, 2001). When forced to make a deadline for something as important as a grade it is real easy to take the easy way out and copy from someone else. No one is watching them as long as they change a couple words here and there they feel it is okay. The truth is it in not. The high level of pressure to earn a certain grade and make a deadline is big reason why people plagiarize. At the same time students not knowing exactly what plagiarism is and the consequences of ...