Chapter I
The Problem and Its Scope
There was a time when cheating was rare in schools, but today the whole “importance of learning” aspect has been eliminated. Instead, everyone is focused on making the top ten percent of their class or being valedictorian and we seem to have forgotten school’s purpose. School exists so that we will be educated, not so everyone can cheat their way into being successful.
Education, which has become vital for the survival for any civilization must be dealt with care and dexterity as his education later mould the personality of a person who dwells among millions of people and can influence their lives. The 21st century has highlighted the need of the reforms so that a normal human
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And generations of research has shown that a major factor in unethical behaviour is simply how easy or hard it is.
A recent study by Jeffrey A. Roberts and David M. Wasieleski at Duquesne University found that the more online tools college students were allowed to use to complete an assignment, the more likely they were to copy the work of others.
The Internet has changed attitudes, as a world of instant downloading, searching, cutting and pasting has loosened some ideas of ownership and authorship. An increased emphasis on having students work in teams may also have played a role.
“Students are surprisingly unclear about what constitutes plagiarism or cheating,” said Mr. Wasieleski, an associate professor of management.
Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said that over the 20 years he has studied professional and academic integrity, “the ethical muscles have atrophied,” in part because of a culture that exalts success, however it is attained.
He said the attitude he has found among students at elite colleges is: “We want to be famous and successful, we think our colleagues are cutting corners, we’ll be damned if we’ll lose out to them, and some day, when we’ve made it, we’ll be role models. But until then, give us a pass.”
Numerous projects and research studies have shown that frequently reinforcing standards, to both students and teachers, can lessen
Trying to prevent students from cheating Dorff created slightly different tests for the same course he taught twice. Even with Dorff’s efforts to prevent cheating, the students passed the tests answers from the earlier course on to the latter course failing to realize the test was different. By passing false answers it shows the students desperation and willingness to cheat. Dorff also believes that student don’t know what “constitutes cheating”. In Dorff’s article, he accused a student of plagiarizing. The student’s denied plagiarizing replying that “he would never cut and paste” because he retyped the document. This shows how many students do not know how to credit other peoples work and students are not instructed on how to properly use other people’s material. Dorff shows examples of the lengths or shortcuts students are willing to take in order to
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.
While Tim Gabriel claims that it is the easiness of Internet use that is at faulty, where as David Callahan is disagreeing and saying it is the administrations and staff’s fault for not helping and explain why plagiarism is wrong. Many believe people that cheat or plagiarize are lazy and that they want the easy way out. People that plagiarize might think it is faster and easier to get things done. Gabriel explains, “Ms. Brookover, who works at the campus library, has pondered the differences between researching in the stacks and online. “Because you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to ‘this doesn’t belong to me,’ ” she said. Online, “everything can belong to you really easily” (Gabriel 14). Ms. Brookover explains how the students today are in a different era, before one would have to take time and search for answers in books and journals, where as now all the answers are one click away on the Internet. It is very easy to take someone else’s ideas and make them your because of the Internet according to Gabriel. Callahan said “ America wasn't a fair place for kids like him, so it made sense to try to level the playing field by bending a few rules” (Callahan 3). Students start bending the rules the minutes they copy a phrase or a paragraph that isn’t theirs. Many colleges out their expect college students
What do you think of technology nowadays? Can you imagine a day when technology and internet disappears? I would answer no because I grew up using technology and it has provided many sorts of entertainment and educational help. Now, I can’t imagine how things will turn out if they disappear, especially for education because I’ve grown up relying on technology for school work and I believe this applies to almost everybody living in this generation. In Trip Gabriel’s article “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age”, he claims that digital technology makes plagiarism and cheating much easy. The internet contains much information that is free and easy to access for many students. In his article, Trip Gabriel interviewed professionals or educators as well as students of various Universities in U.S. to prove his claims. By comparing examples from Trip Gabriel’s article and David A. Tomar’s writing on ghostwriting business to my own ethnographic study on younger generations perceptions of technology on
In “Academic Integrity and Student Plagiarism: a Question of Education, Not Ethics,” Susan Blum confronts the challenges associated with plagiarism, citation, and the education system. Initially, the author establishes plagiarism as a major problem on college campuses. Because previous approaches for dealing with plagiarism have been unsuccessful, many professors have turned to electronic software like Turnitin to identify student plagiarism (Blum 1). This means colleges and professors are desperate to find a solution to the increasing problem of plagiarism. Additionally, we see students are in need of a deeper understanding and education on the concept of plagiarism. Blum states, “Students must be persuaded of the value of citation - which
With the ever-increasing wealth of information provided by a simple Internet search, students are finding their resource options growing. From hundreds of topic specific sources to completely written essays, students are challenged to use their own words. Michelle Cleary addresses the issues of plagiarism faced by students today while giving real-life solutions from an instructor’s view in her article, "Top 10 Reasons Students Plagiarize & What Teachers Can Do about It (With Apologies to David Letterman)". From research methods to writing instructions, the author uses a cause and effect scenario to illustrate the plagiarism problems and suggests methods that encourage academic success. Students struggle not only with the temptation to plagiarize, but also worry about inadvertently plagiarizing, and the ramifications of their actions.
Teachers in both middle and high school grew up learning information with books. The number of students who believe plagiarism is “serious cheating,” has declined five percent in about a decade. This might be the fact due to learning information from a book, it is a lot harder to copy word for word. It also was more time consuming since everything was written by hand. On the internet, all a student has to do is click and drag what they want to copy, hit ctrl + c to copy and ctrl + v to paste. These commands are the same for copying and pasting a Youtube link and for copying and pasting homework. This is similar to the statement made by a Rutgers senior, Sarah Brookover, “...it’s the same machine you’ve downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last
Due to the Internet academic plagiarism has become the most common and serious problem in school of all levels. “In Roget’s Thesaurus plagiarism comes under theft, and there’s little sympathy for those accused of stealing other people’s work and presenting it as their own” (Revell, 2006). Plagiarism is on the rise in academia due to two main reasons. One of the reasons is because students do not know how to cite sources and references properly, or students do not fully understand what constitutes plagiarism. In addition, many students do not know they can also plagiarize against themselves. Self-plagiarism or double dipping occurs when students use the same paper that he or she had submitted for another class without the proper citation of the original work (University of Phoenix, 2009). Therefore, when a student plagiarizes his or her paper it is equivalent to committing theft.
Cheating has been an ongoing procedure that has been occurring since before I was born. This has been a problem for years and continues being so as cheating is becoming more and more common. In the article by LA Times, ¨Cheating in School Reflects Basic Confusion in Society¨ (August 22, 1999) written by Mari Pearlman, she explains how adults want teachers to punish students for cheating although they are doing the same thing, only in different ways. I agree with Mari Pearlman´s analysis on what she has to say about cheating because still to this day, it is all true.
The students are not going to willingly make their lives more difficult than they already are. The amount of homework a student has can be overwhelming. To cheaters, it’s not about integrity or “doing the right thing”. To them, doing the right thing, is doing what needs to be done no matter how you do it . Research shows that 40% of students who have violated the honor code and have not been caught. Cheaters will always find newer and better ways to cheat ,whether it’s at school or at home, and still get away with it. There is no way to get rid of cheating.
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.
In Isaac Gilman’s article, one of the topics he discussed was the importance of academic integrity. While the internet provides a useful tool for learning new things, it can also be used to steal ideas and work. Plagiarism has been around for a long time, but the access to online information makes it effortless. Paper mills which gain a profit from selling
In the article, Rethinking Plagiarism in the Digital Age, written by Lea Calvert Evering and Gary Moorman they discuss the idea of plagiarism, why do students plagiarize and what is the best method besides punishment to teach students not to plagiarize. In the beginning of the article Lea Calvert Evering and Gary Moorman claims that the concept of plagiarism to be “based on a capitalist view of property and ownership” (Evering & Moorman 35). The authors believe that we should reconsider and modify what we consider plagiarism because this idea is being challenged by this generation involving technology. According to this article, plagiarism is practiced among students in American secondary school and higher education. It states, “In a survey of 2,294 high school juniors...McCabe...found that 34% submitted their own work that was copied word
The digital revolution has given us the ability to easily copy and replicate things in which universities look for when uploading work. Another example of how digital age has changed is that in today’s education individuals have to hand their work in threw email or online forums; this has changed massively within the short space of five years.
Morality has taken a backseat to success. Today’s parents preach the same line of virtues to their children as did their parents and many parents before them; be honest and work hard and good things will come to you. But today’s children are pressured to obtain their success, by their parents and society, by often violating that very moral code, skirting the shores and sometimes diving into the troubled waters of unethical behavior. Historically, most ethical traditions culminate with the thought that just living is the way to