"The Plagiarism Problem" by Sean Price
"To be or not to be -
that is the question." That sentence could make a really snappy opening
for any article. But there's one small problem: It's already a famous line from William
Shakespeare's Hamlet
To borrow these exact words in a school paper without using quotation marks or giving
Shakespeare credit would be pretty foolish -- and not just because it's so famous. Passing off
another person's work as your own is called plagiarism. And it's a serious offense in any type of
writing.
Plagiarism [PLAY-jeh-riz-ehm) is the act of using or passing off as one's own the
ideas or writings of another. Here are some common forms of plagiarism:
• CUT-AND-PASTE — The simplest form of copying is using someone else's writing word-
for-word without providing quote marks or giving credit.
• PARAPHRASING - The plagiarizer puts another person's ideas into different words
but gives no credit.
• UNCONSCIOUS - All writers borrow from others without realizing it. That's why it's
important to check notes and sources. Unconscious plagiarism is often used as an excuse by
anyone who gets caught.
Choices & Consequences
At one point or another, everyone who writes has to decide whether to be or not to be" a
plagiarist. Unfortunately, one study shows that many teens choose to be. More than half of 4,500
high school students surveyed by Rutgers University in 2000 and 2001 admitted to some kind of
plagiarizing from the Internet.
"I don't think there's a teacher in America who hasn't confronted an instance of
plagiarism," says Timothy Dodd, executive director of Duke University's Center for Academic
Integrity.
But plagiarism can lead to humiliation, failing grades, and even expulsion. So why
do people do it?
Part of the problem is that plagiarism is not always clear-cut. Writers learn by
studying and imitating other writers, so it's easy for some people to go a step further. Instead
of just imitating style, they steal key thoughts, phrases, or even whole pages.
Many younger writers make this mistake because they don't understand plagiarism's
ground rules. And learning these rules can be confusing. For example, sometimes it's OK to
borrow a well-known phrase - like "To be or not to be" --- and not cite its source. Someone
could start a story with, "To be or not to be on the swim team." That's simply putting a twist on a
famous line, not pretending it's yours.
Also, it's easy to borrow too heavily from one source without meaning to. Erin
Horowitz, 16, of Lake Forest, California, says she has caught herself committing something
called "unconscious plagiarism." Fortunately, she knows how to look for this in rough drafts: she
compares what she's written with her sources. "I usually go back over my paper just in case
something sounds a little off," Erin says.
Too Good to Be True
Debra McCarrell, Erin's teacher at El Toro High School, says she's caught several
students plagiarizing on purpose. All of them stole their information from the Internet, she says.
And all of them got busted for the same reason: The writing was too good to be theirs. "It's so
obvious" McCarrell says. "You can just tell."
Many teachers feel that the Internet encourages plagiarizing. There are roughly 8 billion
pages available online - an almost-bottomless supply of free documents. But McCarrell says
teachers can usually catch Internet plagiarism easily. She herself simply checks certain phrases in
student papers on the search engine Google.
A growing number of high schools and universities now routinely run more in-depth
checks. John Barrie of Turnitin.com says his anti-plagiarism service scans about 40,000 papers a
day. It compares them with Internet pages as well as with books, journals, and other student
papers. About one third of the papers scanned contain unoriginal material - and just one
plagiarized sentence can be the tip-off. "The probability of somebody writing the same 16 words
in the same order as somebody else is less than one in one trillion," Barrie says.
The high cost of Cheating
Students caught plagiarizing in middle or high school usually get a second chance. But
plagiarism in the adult world gets much more serious. College students can fail classes or get
kicked out of school. Last May, South Florida's Sun-Sentinel found that a high school intern had
plagiarized several articles. The newspaper ran an embarrassed correction, and the girl lost her
internship and a journalism award.
The Sun-Sentinel incident is not unique. In recent years, plagiarism scandals have
rocked The New York Times, USA Today, and dozens of other publications. Most writers
involved lost their jobs. Even famous authors have been tainted Alex Haley, the author of the
blockbuster novel Roots, saw his reputation damaged by evidence that he had plagiarized. The
same happened to best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose.
The plagiarism problem can be dealt with in many ways: teachers should be vigilant;
students must be aware; and penalties for those who are caught must be clearer. But the best
advice for students tempted to plagiarize might be to just relax. Teachers say that many of the
worst plagiarists are highly intelligent go-getters. They take on too many classes and activities
and then cannot keep up their grades without cheating.
Erin Horowitz says most people she knows at El Toro High School would never
plagiarize, but those who do tend to be set on succeeding at all costs. "I think that's a big
problem," she says. "Most kids have a lot of work to do, and if they can cut corners on anything
they will."
Source Citation:
Price, Sean. "The Plagiarism Problem." Scholastic Scope 54.2 (2005): 16-18. Academic Search
Premier. Web. 26 Feb. 2013.
"Internet Creates Opportunities to Cheat” by Brittany McCandless
Some students from Asian countries, who come from a tradition of not using footnotes or
quotation marks in their research reports, know to list sources in the bibliography but learn
other ways to attribute information when they get here, according to Toni Carbo, a professor in
the School of Information Sciences and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs
at the University of Pittsburgh. Some African students have different concepts of privacy than
Americans, she said. A story yesterday did not clearly paraphrase her remarks.
When he assigned a paper on 20th century theater, Carnegie Mellon University assistant
professor Michael Chemers was surprised at what a student submitted.
A sophomore turned in a paper on Antonin Artaud, a complex playwright and director the class
had never discussed, written completely outside the skill level the student had shown in class. C
So Dr. Chemers confronted the student. When the student stood by his paper, Dr. Chemers
asked him to explain how he arrived at the thesis he wrote.
E
The student instead explained that he bought the paper online. C
While the Internet hasn't created plagiarism, it has contributed new opportunities for
violating professors' trust. E
C "It's so much easier to just take things off the Web," said Deborah Rubin, director of the
social work program at Chatham University.
In national surveys of more than 80,000 college students conducted from 2002 until this spring,
nearly half admitted they cheated via the Internet, according to researcher Donald McCabe,
founder of the Center for Academic Integrity, a consortium based at Clemson University.
It's unclear how many of them would have cheated anyway. Dr. McCabe, who is also a professor
of management and global business at Rutgers University, said other survey questions showed as
many as 42 percent said they plagiarized from written sources, not necessarily the Internet. E
The ways included fabricating research citations; submitting work that someone else, such as
a peer, has written; cutting and pasting from written sources; and submitting a paper taken all
or most from another written source.
But Dr. McCabe, who has researched cheating since 1990, believes the volume of cheating
has increased
E
"It's just made it easier so the people who are doing it are doing it more often," Dr. McCabe said.
Plagiarism hits at the heart of education.
"The entire relationship between the professor and the student is built on trust, that you're
honestly submitting your work, and I'm honestly grading it," Dr. Chemers said. "When
you violate that, there's nothing left."
Dr. Chemers has other war stories to tell about blatant plagiarism.
While teaching at Shoreline Community College in Seattle in 2002, he confronted a student who
copied and pasted information from a Web site word-for-word into a new document and turned iu
in as her own research paper.
That student begged for forgiveness and asked for a second chance. This time, she vowed, she
would write a paper on plagiarism.
She plagiarized that one, too, copying whole portions from another online source.
Dr. Chemers' father, a professor at University of California-Santa Cruz, once encountered one
student who bought a paper from a paper mill and submitted it as his own. That plagiarism
was easy to catch: It was an article the professor himself had written in an academic journal.
With students now conditioned to performing their research online, Dr. Chemers said they copy
phrases, sentences and sometimes paragraphs word-for-word from Internet sources. Even when
they attempt to paraphrase, students often neglect to cite the source, and sometimes purchase
entire papers from online term-paper mills. E
Dr. McCabe believes his cheating survey may understate the problem. The more serious the
coffense, he said, the less likely students are willing to admit they've done it. Likewise, those who
did voluntarily respond -- only 15 percent of all possible students polled -- tend to minimize what
they've done, he said.
And he said some students may not consider it cheating.
"When you read the comments students provide, their cheating is everyone else's fault but
theirs," Dr. McCabe said. "Their parents put too much pressure on them, or the faculty does
ca lousy job teaching their courses or the assignments are too hard. For a lot of students,
they've figured out a way to justify it." E
In their experience, Dr. Rubin and Robert Alexander, a professor of English and the director of
the university writing program at Point Park University, have both found that many students
don't consider copying and pasting sentences to be plagiarism. Nor do they find a problem
with omitting citations for the sources of their primary intellectual arguments.
Dr. Chemers has found that, for some students, the monetary transaction of purchasing a
paper online makes it seem legitimate.
In his 35 years of teaching, Dr. Alexander has seen a slight rise in issues of academic integrity
with the onset of the Internet. While professors tell him about several cases of plagiarism
every semester, often in freshman composition classes, he's not especially concerned.
"It's not an extensive problem," he said.
E
Some students may be deterred by the threat of punishment. At most local schools, online
plagiarism warrants failing the assignment, failing the course and sometimes expulsion.
Dr. Chemers' Artaud scholar was expelled.
"But for every one that comes to official status, you have to figure there are 10 that don't," Dr.
Chemers said.
Many cases, he said, are handled between the professor and the student because the process
of addressing discipline on an institutional level can be a hassle.
Plagiarism is an international problem, according to a report released this summer by UNESCO, the
United Nations' education-and-science agency. The report -- "Corrupt Schools, Corrupt
Universities: What Can Be Done?" -- cites a case at an Australian-run university in Malaysia in
which 15 cases of plagiarism were overlooked because the university was "concerned with losing
revenue from off-shore students."
But how do professors know when students have turned in work that's not altogether theirs in
the first place?
Just as students are becoming more comfortable in using the Internet, so are professors. Faculty
at universities throughout Pittsburgh reported using the Internet to catch academic dishonesty
in two ways: using Google to search for suspicious lines or phrases in assignments and
submitting students' papers to online companies such as www.turnitin.com.
At www.turnitin.com, the company puts each document through a search that includes current
-S
and archived Web sites, a database of student papers previously submitted to the company,
and commercial databases of periodicals and journal articles.
s
The report then tracks each passage of the paper, showing the possible source and
clearly identifying unoriginal material.
But many times, professors don't even need an originality report.
"Sometimes it's easy to spot because you're used to students' writing style," Dr. Rubin said.
Like many professors, she gives in-class assignments first to gauge students' writing abilities.
Dr. Chemers said he is not only familiar with all of the published material in his field, but he also
knows many of the authors personally. c
While some American students have a hard time understanding what plagiarism is, it's even more
difficult for international students. C
Toni Carbo, a professor in the School of Information Sciences and the Graduate School of Public
and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, has found that norms about information
sharing are very different among cultures.
Dr. Carbo, who teaches information ethics, said in some Asian and African cultures, for
example, academics are part of an intellectual community in which sharing information
without attribution is accepted. C
The Internet also raises more issues for academic integrity in higher education. Some
students have difficulty telling an accurate site from an inaccurate one.
In a theater history class, Dr. Chemers had a student who submitted a paper on ancient
Roman theater citing the proletariat as the cause of the Roman Empire's fall.
There's just one problem, Dr. Chemers said. There was no proletariat in ancient Rome. The
student admitted he found the historically inaccurate information from someone's personal Web
site.
Local faculty agree education is the key to stopping students from using the Internet dishonestly
Faculty point to the importance of using course syllabi to explain both what plagiarism is
and what repercussions are for students who plagiarize.
They also teach classes on how to use Internet sources responsibly, both finding and citing
sources.
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Dr. Rubin gives her students a topic relevant to social work -- such as abortion and poverty --
and assigns them to look up sites on the topic and evaluate the quality of those sites in
comparison with scholarly journals.
Dr. Chemers, meanwhile, devotes a class each semester to teaching his students how to find
which sites are credible, such as the institution that hosts the site and the academic sources
the site uses in footnotes.
At Pitt, faculty are also taught how to evaluate sites through a series of workshops and training
sessions offered through the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education.
Additionally, Dr. Rubin and Dr. Chemers both give specific assignments that are too nuanced
or personal to be plagiarized, while Dr. Carbo requires her students to submit multiple drafts of
papers, making it easier to filter out cut-and-paste phrases.
"[Cheating) is like a chronic disease that you can't cure," Dr. Alexander said. "But you can learn
how to manage it and make it as least harmful as possible." S
Source Citation:
McCandless, Brittany. “Internet Creates Opportunities to Cheat." Oct 16, 2007, (n.d.): ProQuest:
ProQuest Central (SRU). EBSCO. Web. 29 Apr. 2011.
Cause/Effect Essay on Plagiarism/Cheating
What causes students to cheat or plagiarize? In recent years, US colleges and universities
have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of violations of students caught cheating.
Numerous articles have offered a variety of explanations for why this is happening.
Choose what you think are the most likely causes, and write an essay that supports your
point of view.
It should have:
1. An introduction that summarizes the topic and, possibly, some of the effects of the
rise in cheating and plagiarism. This summary may include reference to readings,
but it is not required in the introduction. Finally, there must be a clear thesis
statement with subtopics that argue which causes seem most valid to you.
2. Three body paragraphs that explain the subtopics (causes) and evaluate their
validity. You must use two of the sources we have examined in class (Price,
McCandless, or Marsan), and you must use at least one of your own sources. (Note:
we'd like you to not use the same source as any of your classmates). Also, each body
must have one reference (no more, no less).
3. Your conclusion should restate the thesis and main points and leave the reader with
an interesting final thought (ex. prediction, opinion, suggestion).
4. A Works Cited page using MLA format. Note: not for the first draft.
Due dates:
Body Paragraph 1 (emailed)
Intro (emailed)
Body Paragraph 2 (emailed)
Essay Due (emailed + hard copy)
Thursday, 2/21
Sunday, 2/24
Thursday, 2/28
Tuesday, 3/4
Requirements:
750 + words, typewritten on 8 12" x 11" paper, double-spaced (print
only on one side). Follow MLA formatting requirements.
Your essay will be graded on:
1. Citation - correct use of in-text citations, as well as a correctly formatted
Works Cited page.
2. Clarity/Content - your ideas and opinions should be clearly expressed with an
academic audience in mind.
3. Organization - introduction, conclusion and body paragraphs with clear topics.
4. Grammar/vocabulary - use and control of basic, intermediate, and
advanced grammar. Accurately uses academic words from class.
The Causes and Effects of Plagiarism
Following the fast growing technology and internet, the significance of plagiarism
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has greatly increased among high schools and colleges. According to the statistics on
p.org, the survey that Donald McCabe conducted from Fall 2002 to Spring 2011
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presents the final result of 17% of the population performing plagiarism on test, 40% on
what
written assignments, and 43% as total on both. Plagiarism is encountered frequently, is playiring
with students cutting-and-pasting, paraphrasing, and unconsciously borrowing heavy
load of information from others; resulting a series of detrimental consequences such as
receiving an F on the assignment/course and expulsion, etc. Many authors have written
based on the topic of this serious problem, going more in depth with the causes and the
effects.
Thesis stalent?
Not MLA
In the article, "The Plagiarism Problem," Sean Price reflects the seriousness of
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plagiarism problem. Nowadays, with easier access to the internet and more documents
provided online, students are more likely to take a short-cut and cheat. Teachers often
catch students submitting assignments that are too good to be their own work, and take
ب)
out specific phrases to check on search engines for originality. Luckily, John Barrie of
turnitin.com has introduced his anti-plagiarism service to the teachers and students.
"...scans about 40,000 papers a day...compares them with Internet pages as we; as with
books, journals, and other student papers" (qtd. in Price). The Turnitin website allows
individuals to turn in their assignments and scan for originality, greatly reducing the rate
of plagiarism.
Besides the major problems of plagiarism led by the internet, there are other
TS:-
problems, and cultural difference can be one of the factors. In the article "Internet
credat: I?
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Creates Opportunities to Cheat," Brittany McCandless mentions that in other cultures
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such as Asian and African, sharing information would not be considered as cheating. In
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fact, Individuals under different cultural influences have different views regarding
ownership of the texts. Students often take information from someone else's document
and put it in theirs without giving any credits. Because of that, international students
may face some difficulties and confusion when they start attending school in the U.S.
For solutions, teachers often go over the topic of academic honesty and the disciplines
with the class to keep awareness.
who is
the causer
Due to research, many plagiarism cases have shown that students have
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unconsciously plagiarized and most of them have ended up with serious consequences.
credalt
In the article "Two Students Kicked off Semester at Sea for Plagiarism," by Alison Go,
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two students were reported to have plagiarized on their essays unconsciously and
ended up with expulsion. One of the students have informed that she took only three
sentence off of Wikipedia and did not do so on purpose. The author mentions, "She
says the three phrases she had taken were "when the Germans attacked the Soviet
Union during Operation Barbarossa"; "German-speaking minority outside of Germany":
and "who had just been released from a concentration camp." Unfortunately, the honor
code enforced by the University of Virginia which was sponsoring the Sea Program,
kicked her out regardless of the severity of the problem.
In conclusion, the action of plagiarism is caused by many factors and committed
in different ways. It has affected and is still affecting numerous individuals all over the
world. With this ongoing problem, many solutions were introduced, helping many people
and the overall society.
Works Cited ?
Bibliography:
Go, Alison. "Two Students Kicked off Semester at Sea for Plagiarism." U.S. News &
World Report, U.S. News & World Report, 14 Aug. 2008, 4.19pm,
www.usnews.com/education/blogs/paper-trail/2008/08/14/two-students-kicked-off-seme
ster-at-sea-for-plagiarism.
Other
sources ?
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TS. Clear Transition? Use cause/effect language?
. CS: Missing? Transition? Uses different words? Specific enough?
. Explanation: Missing? Connected to the reference? Off topic? Unclear?
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Body Paraganization: Clear? Significant? Connected to the thesis statement? Wrong order? Off-topic?
RCS: Missing
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