Blog 7: My Two Issues About Plagiarism

The Internet now has made the access to the digital information much easier and unsafe than before. Many students may become cheaters because of the Internet, even though they may not know that they are plagiarizing the work of others. This essay will describe some of the problems involved with using Internet daily in our life, and how it could affects the student’s behavior. Also it discuss the benefit of using it itself to fight the plagiarism in the academic integrity.

Today thousands of resources like research papers, articles, and essays can be downloaded for free from the Internet, make battling plagiarism more complicated, compared to the time before the arrival of the Internet. Search engines, such a Google, Yahoo, or MSN make the information unsafe and easy to share .For one single search, students could found many different sources, which make the detecting of plagiarism more difficult for educators. The piece by Kayla Webley at Time (with the headline “Survey: College Plagiarism Is at an All-Time High”), “a new survey from the Pew Research Center shows plagiarism in college is on the rise.” As cited by Daniel Luzer, in her article “Plagiarism on the Rise,” hypothesizes that 89% of the college presidents surveyed said that computers and the Internet have increased cheating and copying someone’s other work over the past 10 years. However, we cannot simply stop using Internet because it has many benefits other than just increasing plagiarism. First, it has made us in a small world.  Students now can communicate between them and get relationships, experiences, and learn about the others' diverse cultures. Secondly it gives you a variety of opinions and authors, instead of just one perspective. Students can write essays in their laptops and send it by emails to their professors, and save a lot of time for both. Another point is that many of the websites like Turnitin.com and search engines are being used for catching the Plagiarism in the students’ papers. And become an effective way to prevent it. David E Harrington in his article “(Moral) Hazards of Scanning for Plagiarists: Evidence from Shoplifting,” states that Turnitin helps teach students how to improve their citations and paraphrasing. And it’s better at identifying some types of plagiarism than others.

Many students when they used words or ideas from books as their own, they may know is plagiarism. But when they used them from a website, they may not consider it as plagiarism. Students may get confused while surfing the Internet. Some websites are using a lot of works without distributing the author’s name, the copyright date and contain only a few pages. Because of that many students may not consider these works as an intellectual property. Downloading music for free, sharing information between us every day in Facebook or Twitter, and accepting some violations as arbitrary in our life. Give the impression that the materials in the Internet are created by no one. Books, on the contrary, usually started by the writer’s name and the people who supported making it, those things made the citation easy and clear for students to use. But sometimes book are difficult to get through, because you have to read and find relative information page by page, which required more effort and time for copying the information down in the papers. Susan D. Blum in her book My World! Plagiarism and College Culture, states that technology like internet and new culture has made it harder for students to distinguish between originality of their own work and the others. She notes that students might feel guilty for shoplifting, but not for plagiarism or downloading music.