The War on Plagiarism

http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring2002/heberling51.html

I found this article by searching the TAMU Library database for ‘plagiarism in education’ under the articles tab. This article is by Michael Heberling, who is the president of Baker College Center for Graduate Studies. This article is about plagiarism, specifically about plagiarism in online education.

This article starts with a little history and background information on plagiarism. It talks about some contributing factors of why students choose to plagiarize, such as laziness. It shares different ways that students can cheat or plagiarize in the classroom such as cutting and pasting passages found online. Then the author writes about different ways of catching students who are suspected of plagiarism. He brings up reverse internet searches using google, as well as websites that detect plagiarism for you. A few of these are turnitin.com, plagiserve.com, IntegriGuard, and EduTie. Heberling comments on digital paper mills, which are companies that provide papers to students for a fee.

The articles main points are that there are tools to fight plagiarism, which should be used to maintain academic integrity. The author concludes that there are many ways to cheat in an online class, as well as a traditional one, and that although plagiarism cannot be gotten rid of completely, it can and should be fought.

The article does make a successful rhetorical message by bringing up several good points on how to combat plagiarism. It does take for granted that plagiarism is wrong in that it doesn’t really back this point up with any hard evidence. The intended audience for this seems to be educators such as faculty and administration in schools. Therefore the fact that plagiarism is wrong should be accepted by the audience. His message contains a subtle call-to-action sort of moral that is encouraging readers to put an end to plagiarism wherever they are able. Overall, the author uses good points and good evidence to back them up.

Originality Checking

Growing up with technology at our fingertips affects many parts of our lives. In recent years, technology and the availability has especially affected our education system. Technology has brought change through many good and bad avenues. Plagiarism is one of the biggest negative aspects of technology in schools. Today more than ever before, plagiarism is easy to do and the means to commit plagiarism are readily available. There are numerous websites that allow someone to buy essays or papers to turn in to your high school class for an assignment, simply by paying money. Two of these are www.customwritings.com and thepaperexperts.com. Other students may choose to just copy and paste things that they find off of Google. It is so easy in this world to do this because Everything is available online.

This makes it difficult to be a teacher and to have one more thing on your plate to combat against in the battle of educating students. Most students don’t really want to learn, and if there is an easy way out, you can be sure that most will take it. Why would they want to spend time putting in extra work writing a paper when they could just copy paste something and have a better end product? The only real reason most wouldn’t is because they might get caught and have consequences.

One website that teachers have been using to fight against plagiarism is turnitin.com. This website checks the papers against a large database of other papers to see how similar they are, which will reveal with surprising accuracy if a student has copied someone else’s work. Turnitin’s website says this: “Turnitin’s proprietary software then compares the paper’s text to a vast database of 12+ billion pages of digital content (including archived internet content that is no longer available on the live web) as well as over 110 million papers in the student paper archive, and 80,000+ professional, academic and commercial journals and publications.”