preview

Plagiarism - An Ever-increasing Problem Essays

Good Essays

Plagiarism - An Ever-increasing Problem

Plagiarism has been a problem to academic institutions for centuries. Plagiarism basically means taking credit for somebody else’s work. The technical definition of plagiarism, as used by State University, is presenting work done (in whole or in part) by someone else as if it were one's own. Dishonest practices that go hand in hand with plagiarism include faking or falsification of data, cheating, or the uttering of false statements by a student in order to obtain unjustified concessions. In the past, plagiarism had been limited by the availability of information that is worth plagiarizing, either in area libraries, in newspapers and magazines, or even in academic files maintained by …show more content…

But, along with these pro-plagiarists, there are also the anti-plagiarists. On the Internet, there are more web sites telling how to prevent plagiarism as there are promoting it. Sites include how to detect plagiarism, how to prevent plagiarism and what to do about plagiarism.

There are numerous ways to plagiarize. These include copying somebody’s work and saying it is yours, faking an area where information was obtained, falsifying data, as well as cheating. These are only a few of the many ways that information can be plagiarized. There are many statistics that can show that there is an increase in the number and severity of plagiarism cases. Shockingly, almost 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once, 36% of undergraduates have admitted to plagiarizing written material, and, to emphasize the effect of the internet, 30% of a large sampling of Berkley students were caught plagiarizing directly from the Internet. This is surprising considering the consequences of plagiarism. Along with these college statistics, another interesting statistic from “Plagiarism.Org” is that 58.3% of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5% did so in 1989. This is a huge increase. It is up to personal opinions to determine whether the Internet has caused this increase, and if it has, what is the percentage at today? College students should know better than to use somebody else’s work, and in

Get Access