WHITE PAPER Plagiarism and the Web: Myths and Realities
An Analytical Study on Where Students Find Unoriginal Content on the Internet
Prevent Plagiarism. Engage Students.
www.turnitin.com
Table of Contents
1.0 Summary ...................................................................................................................... 3 2.0 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 4 3.0 Popular Content Resources on the Web ...................................................................... 5 4.0 The Most Popular Student Sources ............................................................................. 6 5.0 The Top Eight Most Popular
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Contrary to general perceptions, the vast majority of students who have matched content in their work do not rely on cheat sites or paper mills. Instead, many more are using legitimate homework, academic and educational sites as research sources. The study also shows that student research and writing practices are following similar trends of the Internet as a whole. Increasingly, students rely on social networks and user-generated content sites such as content sharing and question-and-answer sites to find materials that they include in their papers. The report outlines some broad trends based on the findings of the study and offers instructors, administrators and parents steps to take to help students use and document sources from the Web.
WHITE PAPER | Plagiarism and the Web
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3.0 Popular Content Resources on the Web
Turnitin classified the top 100 most popular web sites that matched existing content in the Turnitin databases over a period of ten months (June 2010 to March 2011). The categories are as follows: Social Networking and Content Sharing This category encompasses sites that rely on user-generated content rather than professionally published content. The sites include social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, content sharing sites such as Scribd and SlideShare and Question & Answer sites such as Yahoo Answers and Answers.com. Homework and Academic The
Plagiarism is an increasing large issue on college campuses, a habit to most of the student. According to the article ‘’The Plagiarism Plague’’, the findings on the survey made to 50,000 students on more than 60 campuses was that 70 percent of the students admitted that they cheated. Half of the students surveyed admitted that one or more times made serious cheating on writing assignments, with 77 percent of the students surveyed said that cheating was not a serious issue.
Almost every student has been there: staring at his/her computer trying to get an assignment done when they have twenty other obligations swinging over his/her head. Students are trying to find the fastest and easiest way to get the assignment completed. Many students will plagiarize intentionally or unintentionally at some point of their educational career. Plagiarism is the act of taking someone else’s work or ideas then calling that work their own. There is no acknowledgement being given to the original author. In Trip Gabriel’s “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age,” the internet has created new challenges for students being able to give credit to ideas and information. Often, Students do not understand that information on
Plagiarism in today's “copy and paste generation” is an unremitting, complex issue that is not yet fully understood.
The Internet provides learners and trainers with the ability to access large amounts of information quickly and easily. Turning this information into a valuable learning resource requires organisation, planning, and careful selection of material. Trainers/Tutors should select websites that are appropriate to the needs of their learners and that support the objectives of the curriculum. Learners should be encouraged to develop a variety of analytical, searching and critical thinking skills and strategies to become confident and competent users of the Internet. Selected websites will need to be revisited regularly, however, to ensure that the content and/or the URL have not changed.
In the digital age, which allows the use of the Internet in research, the lines of plagiarism are clearer and more identifiable for students than is the case with traditional research, which relies on works in hard-copy form.
Plagiarism is “the presentation of work for credit that is not [a writer’s] own” (Johanson, 2010, p. 267). Any information obtained by a writer from another source requires a citation in the text; therefore, a writer must provide a reference when paraphrasing or quoting another author’s material (APA, 2010). The use electronic resources or software to prevent unintentional plagiarism, educating students on how to cite and reference material in academic writing appropriately, and providing information to students about the consequences of plagiarizing.
Students are assigned a variety of writing tasks throughout college. Whether it is an assignment in an orientation class or a term paper, students will need to include information from scholarly peers to help prove their point and make a credible stance. Thankfully students can include data from scholarly articles as long as they give proper credit to the author(s) from whom they received the information. Among the many issues that a student could potentially face is overusing resources. By not including enough of their thought on a subject, the work could become a collage of other writer’s work that a student merely puts his name on. To help avoid such an issue, one must remember that no more than 15% percent of a paper should include quotes
Not making a good use of the internet and deciding to plagiarize can result in a failing grade. Students have been cheating all the way from High School without getting caught, and consequently they haven’t been lectured on plagiarism. Usually, teachers do not take the time to talk to their students about plagiarism. “many students claim not to have been confronted with the issue by parents or previous teachers except when personally caught plagiarizing” ( Petress). This lack of knowledge about plagiarism incites students to keep cheating. The only difference is that in college teachers have more advanced ways to grade papers. Technology has advanced. “...the same technology that makes it so easy for students to cheat is now aiding teachers in catching them” ( Hastings). College teachers are more strict regarding plagiarism than high school teachers; they can turn a plagiarized work into a zero. Students need to understand how useless it is to cheat. Everything is better than a zero, so students will get more benefit if they turn in a paper that
The article I chose was high-tech cheating: with the proliferation of mobile devices and instant access to the internet. Most students that plagiaris dont understand the concept of it, so they dont think theyre doing anything wrong. According to the article "More students than ever are using information technology in ways that break the rules of academic integrity.
Writing research papers is a crucial requirement for any course in all universities and colleges. Students are forced to do a thorough research on various topics and support their papers with peer-reviewed scholarly sources. The question has been where do most of them find these sources to support the information on their research papers? While doing their academic research papers, most students depend on the Ashford University Library for their sources. Through the Ashford University Library, students can search through different avenues and find the resources needed for their research papers and theses. Ashford University Library is the best place any student can ever find suitable peer-reviewed and scholarly sources to be used in academic
Students may have poor time-management skills or they may plan poorly for the time and effort required for research-based writing, and believe they have no choice but to plagia¬rize. Students may view the course, the assignment, the conventions of academic documenta¬tion, or the consequences of cheating as unimportant. Teachers may present students with assignments so generic or unparticularized that stu¬dents may believe they are justified in looking for canned responses. Instructors and institutions may fail to report cheating when it does occur, or may not enforce appropriate penalties. (http://www.wpacouncil.org). In The New Century Handbook, there are a few helpful ways described to avoid plagiarism. Step one is to take accurate, usable notes. Step two to record complete citation (bibliographic) information along with your notes. Step three is to determine when acknowledgment is needed. Step four; avoid copying and pasting information (text or graphics) from the Internet into your paper. Step
but in present times, the emergence of Internet paved the way for a vast number of academic writing, which makes
A common argument is that no one knows what facts found on the internet are true, and which facts are made up or a hyperbole (Levine 1). Students will pick and choose from a variety of colorful if not trustworthy sources. Students, Levine notes, will not read the mores scholarly articles due to the footnotes and complicated looking bits, and they dismiss books entirely in spite of the fact that books have better built arguments (1). One student might rely on personal blogs with no true verification, filled with more opinions than authentic fact (Levine 2). Others may only gather sources from one point of view rather than a variety, building up their own argument rather than analyzing all of
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that provides collaborative modification of its content and structure directly from the web browser who is known as Wikipedians. Everyone can create an essay or article for publication after registration on the site. However, It is no need to register before editing essays or articles. Thousands of changes can be made every day due to constantly changing edited by many people. A new set of challenges have been raised for educators and students when they involved in writing and critical thinking, due to the movement in culture from analog to digital culture. The improvement in Internet changed the channels of how students to use research source content for academic writing. With wealth
In Wikis as Learning Environments, Forte and Buckman report their findings of using a wiki to represent traditional research. The students in the study reported enjoying using the wiki and publishing their work even though they struggled with the translation of the traditional research paper to that of creating a public website. They seemed to realize that they were involved in something bigger than "just writing a paper for the teacher", knowing the site could be a resource that lives on after the class. Forte and Buckman stress "when the research paper went online it became something different." The "genre" changed and the students initially struggled to understand what that meant. Throughout the process of creating the wiki the students were able to learn from each other. The nature of the wiki 's collaborative editing and revision history allowed the students to look at each other 's work all throughout the process. In doing so, they began to create a shared vision of what this public space should be. This ability to apply our