Blog#7 Plagiarism Issues

Blog#7 Plagiarism Issues

  Nowadays, universities and colleges have spent major concerns dealing with an increasing plagiarism phenomenon occurred among students. Since “plagiarism” has became a heated key word of university search engine, even exceed “tuition” and “majors”, people started to reconsider the rationality of the temporary method dealing with plagiarism. However, academic world used to supervise plagiarism by enforcement of certain criterion, by which alert and punish students who violated academic integrity. With the emerge of latest technologies, website as Turnitin received its reputation by efficient supervision and simple manipulation; which means academia kneeled to technology and surrender to monster plagiarism. Is enforcement of plagiarism reasonable for both professors and students, or in other word, is it fair to students who intend to committing plagiarism and students who really want to study? In the article “Is Policing Plagiarism At A University As Counterproductive As Trying To Stop Copyright Infringement?” by Mike Masnick, the author suggests that the side effect of strangling plagiarism has overlapped its contribution to the academic world.  Mike states that the success in supervising plagiarism by Turnitin absolutely destroyed classroom morale in NYU, innocent students are not satisfied with the overall learning experience because they think professor Panagiotis Ipeirotis should have spend more energy on preparing for lecture rather than being a plagiarism detective. He also points out that the wonder drug for avoiding plagiarism is mutual promotion and peer supervision among students.

  International students inclined to have different reasons for plagiarism due to various cultural and academic background. With the globalization, not only to the aspect of economics, but also to the education, there is a climbing number of international students study abroad. Because most of their destination are USA, UK, Australia and Canada, in which country English language are widely used and spread, international students should adjust and adapt to the diverse environment as soon as possible. In the article “Cheating Across Cultures” by Elizabeth Redden, it is reported that 34 first-year international business school students in Duke University were accused of collaborating on a take-home test in April, 2007, and it arouse a widely concern of motivation and reason behind the scene. As cited by Elizabeth in his article, Greenblatt points out that many Asian students come from education system in which the students show respect to the professors by verbatim copying. Timothy Dodd, as cited by Elizabeth Redden is her article, holds that language barrier has blocked the path of international students in fully understanding codes of conduct, he also explained that being “Exotic” in learning and living styles have alienated international students from mainstream social groups, from which cultivate desperation and thus, lead to cheating. Michael Elliott, director of international student and scholar services, as cited by Elizabeth Redden in her article, launched a program several years ago, in order to help international students adapt to drastically different academic environment through a brochure. Michael Elliott claimed that the brochure gave a helping hand to international students by introducing the tip as well as sanction related to academic issue. As cited in the article “Why Many International Students Get a Failing Grade in Academic Integrity” by James Bradshaw and Tamara Baluja, Karan Bellinger states that international students do not plan on cheating, but failed to keep up with intensive academic pace and receiving pressure from parents and job seeking lead to an unexpected results.