Plagiarism in the Age of the Internet

College professor’s have long struggled with the issue of plagiarism in student writing. Some students have always been tempted to cut corners when papers are due. Plagiarism has become easier with the rise of the Internet, which concerns many academics. Detecting plagiarism is now a major concern in many colleges and universities, and some schools have turned to technological solutions to help professors identify plagiarized writing. Savvy instructors spend time on creative assignments to prevent the problem so that they can spend less time trying to catch plagiarists. Ultimately, however, students, who are not children anymore are responsible for making the decision to do their own work and resisting the temptation to take shortcuts when it comes to learning.

As most students are aware plagiarism occurs when writers present someone else’s words or ideas as their own. Plagiarism is not a new problem, which the famous people accused of it including Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., George Harrison, and Joe Biden. There are different types of plagiarism; some are more serious than others. Professor Andrea A. Lunsford of Stanford University notes that one of the most disturbing forms of deliberate plagiarism involves a student’s “handing in an essay written by a friend or purchased (or simply downloaded) from an essay-writing company (246).” The student, who downloads an essay from an online paper mill, is obviously cheating. Students who want to get a degree that they haven’t earned act dishonestly and show no respect for their instructors or for their fellow students who are trying to get an education. Not surprisingly, colleges tend to view deliberate plagiarism as deserving of the harshest punishment.

More subtle cases occur when students copied ideas or passages from Internet sources without proper documentation. Researchers at the Center for Academic Integrity claim that there have been an increasing number of instances of such “illegitimate ‘collaboration’” in the past decade. Although such cutting and pasting appears less blatantly dishonest than downloading an entire paper, many schools defiantly consider uncredited use of others’ words and ideas to be plagiarism. Even when students make an honest mistake or simply do not know that they need to cite the material they borrow, schools may charge them with cheating.

Before Internet use was widespread, a student who intended to plagiarize their paper had fewer options. Material taken from a book in the college library would probably be familiar to the professor. Plagiarism also required a greater investment of time. Because students had to type up the material from the source. These days, however, vast amounts of information on a wide variety of topics can be found online college students can find dozens of sources or even entire papers with a few simple searches. As journalist Mark Clayton has noted, students can easily find “Web sites sporting names like ‘Cheater.com’ and ‘School Sucks’ offer tools for rampant plagiarism at the click of a mouse” (200). The only thing that students who are determined to cheat have to do is copy and paste material from an online source into their own document or simply add their name to a paper written by someone else.

Some instructors are beginning to turn to the Internet for help solving the problem. New plagiarism-detection systems like “Turnitin” promise to help professors identify students who plagiarize passages wholesale from the Internet. Many other instructors simply type passages from student writing into google to see if the same language appears elsewhere online.

Although technology can help catch plagiarism, a professor’s own knowledge of student writing is often the best tool. Students who plagiarize all or part of their written work may be surprised at how quickly their professors spot a problem for the tone and style of downloaded term papers can differ markedly from earlier work handed in by the same student. Most instructors have seen enough of their students’ work to notice differences between a student’s writing and a piece written by someone else. In addition, many professors require their students to turn-in work at various stages in the writing process, beginning with brainstorming and outlines and moving on to rough drafts and revisions. The soul benefit to the current rise in Internet plagiarism is that professors have had to become increasingly creative about the types of writing assignments they give.

Even though professors are working hard to catch or prevent plagiarism, students need to take responsibility their own education, and taking responsibility means not cheating. As Clayton points out, “Ultimately, though, it is students who will have to uphold academic integrity themselves” (201). In life, as in school, shortcuts can be tempting, students must decide that the purpose of getting an education is to learn something, not just to get a diploma that will help them land a higher salary.

Works Cited

Clayton, Mark. “A Whole Lot of Cheatin’ Going On.” The Presence of Others, edited by Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008, pp. 198-202.

Lunsford, Andrea A. The St. Martin’s Handbook. 8th ed., Bedford/St. Martin's, 2015.