Abstract
Plagiarism is the act of taking one’s words or ideas and presenting them as your own. Although the main idea is borrowing or copying another’s work, plagiarism can be defined in the following scopes; using someone’s original works without giving due credit to the original source, heavily deriving your work from an existing source such that they make a large percentage of your work and laying them forward as your own original works even if you credit the source, subjecting your works to multiple proof reading and editing by friends in such a way that their ideas define much of the outcome of your final works and then omitting their names in the acknowledgment section of your paper/media.
Internet Plagiarism among College Students
The cases of plagiarism have been on the rise among the college and high school students. This academic fraud is widely credited to the widespread access to the internet (Neumann, 2002). Many students admit having copied internet sources to their schoolwork without proper citation. The use of online sources is not only limited to students. It is evident from the analysis that even some faculty members turn to the internet to access this readily available information (Neumann, 2002). The academic fraudulence has led to the development of anti-plagiarism software such as Turnitin.com that many instructors use to detect plagiarized assignments. Although the situation is feared to have escalated to greater levels, more research is needed to support this keeping in focus the contextual factors that necessitate cheating such as the student’s knowledge on the consequences of plagiarism, peer-related practices and the ethical perception of students in the matter.
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Much of the research on plagiarism has been focused on the students, neglecting the institutional input on the cases of plagiarism they have encountered. Nevertheless, research involving 425 students had 14.6% admit to having turned to an external writer to do their assignments and 5.6% agreed to have used external research services. Over 25% supported an argument suggesting plagiarism is acceptable (Neumann, 2002). Further research produced data that revealed that most students are less concerned with plagiarism as long as their peers are doing it, and this peer perception leaning to the support of the behavior has led to the widespread of the act (Neumann, 2002). However, students were found to be worried about the consequences of being caught. The students also showed that the students are aware that cheating is wrong, but they still do it anyway.
The reluctance of many academic instructions to combat the vice has been criticized as one of the leading factors that encourage plagiarism. The institutions do very little to caution against plagiarism; neither do they provide stress on academic integrity by discussing it in class (Neumann, 2002). There was little data available on how schools monitor the extent of the cheating, showing very little concern by these institutions on the extent of cheating by the students. This information shows that much is known about internet plagiarism as a vice and many acknowledge that it is wrong, but no action is being taken to counter it. this makes it easy.
A research conducted by Patrick Scanlon and David Neumann on the extent of plagiarism sought to answer the following questions: What is the incident of Plagiarism? What is the student’s peer perception of plagiarism? What is the extent of knowledge of ethics on plagiarism? Do institutional sanctions affect the students’ perception of plagiarism? Questions were posed to students regarding the purchase of term papers from internet sources, copy-pasting incidences and using papers from other students (Neumann, 2002). The research involved 698 students between 17-23 years from 9 different universities over the years 1999- 2000.
The results were that: 19.0% and 9.6% agreed to sometimes or frequently copy text from the internet to their assignment without citation respectively. 5.4% and 3.4% reported having plagiarized an entire paper sometimes or frequently respectively. 8.3% and 2.1% reported having handed someone else’s paper sometimes or frequently respectively. 6.3% and 2.8% sometimes or frequently purchased papers from online paper mills (Neumann, 2002). Many students reported knowledge of widespread plagiarism among their friends as opposed to themselves. Over 90% of the responded agreed that they and their professors deem plagiarism wrong. Overall, only 24.5% of the population reported having cheated by plagiarism (Neumann, 2002). This indicated that although plagiarism is present among students, it is not rampant enough to cause panic.
In summary, the report on plagiarism demands action, but it is not as alarming as perceived. It is true that the computers and widespread access to the internet have changed the way students write or approach their assignments, but there is no data to support a decline in the quality of education due to plagiarism. Upon further investigation, maybe these doubts may be confirmed.
References
Neumann, P. M. (2002, May). Internet Plagiarism Among College Students. Journal of College Student Development, 43 (03), 374-385.
