Plagiarism cheats students
Jeff Gurney
Issue date: 11/23/05 Section: News
In the world of higher education, your growth as a student comes with a heavy price. Many hours are spent reading, researching and writing for required reports in most of your classes. This means staying up many nights until almost dawn and drinking a lot of coffee.
Or at least this is how it should be.
Unfortunately, an amazing amount of students are getting into buying ready-made reports. There are many places that you can go online and pick the type of paper you want. For a fee they will send you the paper and all you have to do is change a few sentences. Once that part is done all you need to do is turn it in.
This is the way some students have made it through college. Then the professors got smart and noticed that there were a lot of papers that sounded pretty much the same or had just about the same content.
Along comes services like "turnitin.com" where the professor tells the student to first send the report online, and for a fee, usually paid for by the school, your paper is compared to many different papers and text that are in a massive data base. The service can tell in percentages how much content in your paper was gleaned from other sources.
This service also provides the professor with the results of the scan and tells them what your scores are in each of several categories.
Over the past few years there have been several writers working for very prominent media services that have been caught plagiarizing, and surprisingly they were using quite a bit of other peoples stuff. The most amazing thing about this misuse is that they worked for trusted publications and broke that trust for money.
In a 2003 study conducted by Edmundson, 38 percent of American college students admitted to committing "Cut and Paste" plagiarism. This percentage is up 10 percent from 2000.
These numbers pose a question. What is the reason we go to college? Are you attending SLCC merely to get a better job, or to learn something in the process for that job?
An unknown author once said, "If it were easy then everybody would have done it."
This is the ideal that those that started higher education probably had in mind. It is much more valuable, that diploma in hand, when you earn it yourself.
Or at least this is how it should be.
Unfortunately, an amazing amount of students are getting into buying ready-made reports. There are many places that you can go online and pick the type of paper you want. For a fee they will send you the paper and all you have to do is change a few sentences. Once that part is done all you need to do is turn it in.
This is the way some students have made it through college. Then the professors got smart and noticed that there were a lot of papers that sounded pretty much the same or had just about the same content.
Along comes services like "turnitin.com" where the professor tells the student to first send the report online, and for a fee, usually paid for by the school, your paper is compared to many different papers and text that are in a massive data base. The service can tell in percentages how much content in your paper was gleaned from other sources.
This service also provides the professor with the results of the scan and tells them what your scores are in each of several categories.
Over the past few years there have been several writers working for very prominent media services that have been caught plagiarizing, and surprisingly they were using quite a bit of other peoples stuff. The most amazing thing about this misuse is that they worked for trusted publications and broke that trust for money.
In a 2003 study conducted by Edmundson, 38 percent of American college students admitted to committing "Cut and Paste" plagiarism. This percentage is up 10 percent from 2000.
These numbers pose a question. What is the reason we go to college? Are you attending SLCC merely to get a better job, or to learn something in the process for that job?
An unknown author once said, "If it were easy then everybody would have done it."
This is the ideal that those that started higher education probably had in mind. It is much more valuable, that diploma in hand, when you earn it yourself.
