Blog#7 Two issues about Plagiarism

Why students prefer to plagiarizing online resources probably bases on two reasons. At first, compared to books, the characteristics of electric files make them easily accessible and convenient to be used in academic cheating. The resources on the internet are much more abundant than books deposited in a school and renewed every minute. In many universities, like OSU, a great amount of research papers and textbooks related to all kinds of subjects in electric form are supplied in OSU library websites for education purpose. Students can search online by entering a keyword and be allowed to download what they need without limitation of time and place, which can also be done in public websites, like pubmed.com. Moreover, plagiarizing sentences and even whole articles is very easy through simply copying and pasting. Laju Arnyeka, in his article “Nigeria: Copy, Paste and Plagiarize”, discusses the effect of the internet on plagiarism in Nigerian campuses. Ife Abidakunoluwa, an English Education student, as cited by Arnyeka in his article, admits that most students, like him, complete their assignments by copying and pasting. And these plagiarism behaviors usually are undetectable, because no one could read all materials in the internet. Another reason that students plagiarize the online resources is that they consider the information in the websites as a sharing thing, no matter what originality is. Growing up in the time of the internet, young people like to share everything online, such as in blog, in the Facebook and Twitter, and frequently are regardless of the originality, which results in copying resources without citation. The survey done by Susan Blum in her book My World! Plagiarism and College Culture, introduced by Scott Jaschik in his article “It’s Culture, Not Morality”, analyzes the student culture leading to violation of academic norms. Blum in her book states that students do not take account in the originality of online resources and regard sharing and collaboration to be acceptance. Therefore, students violate the norms both in daily life and in school, like sharing music online and plagiarism in their assignments. Generally, as the development of technology in the internet age, students are encouraged to search online for reference materials; on the other hand, the unique characteristics of online information and students’ concepts of sharing and originality result in the rising of plagiarism based on online resource in academics, which should be treated seriously.

More and more colleges have noticed this problem “internet plagiarism” than before; and they also take some actions against it, not only traditional educations on plagiarism, but also specific strategies targeting online information, like anti-plagiarism software. The most famous and popular service around the world is Turnitin, which is widely used for detection of potential plagiarism. Frankly, it does save teachers a lot of time and energy on anti-plagiarism, but completely depending on this software is insufficient. In the first place, students have many objective and subjective excuses to plagiarize, even though they are warned to be scanned by Turnitin. The article “Use of Turnitin software does not deter cheating, study finds”, written by Claire Shaw, introduces the study done by Dr Youmans at California State University about the efficacy of anti-plagiarism software. According to the study, there was no significant difference in the percentage of plagiarism between two groups in which students were warned to be scanned or not. Dr Youmans, as quoted by Shaw, concludes that “Even when combined with aggressive teaching methods, the Turnitin detection system failed to provide a sufficient deterrent”. Next, the articles in Turnitin are only part of resources on the internet, so the negative answer does not mean that there is no plagiarism happened. In addition, another system designed by the Turnitin platform is WriteCheck through which students can check whether their revised assignments are “cleansed of easily recognizable plagiarism”. David Harrington, in his article “(Moral) Hazards of Scanning for Plagiarists: Evidence from Shoplifting”, describe this anti-anti-plagiarism software which assists plagiarists against detection. Consequently, completely relying on anti-plagiarism software does not efficiently stop academic misconduct. Harrington suggests that other approaches are combined with anti-plagiarism software to avoid plagiarism, like plagiarism education. In the colleges, students are required to attend the orientation about plagiarism and even take writing courses to learn skills of paraphrasing. For instance, the OSU online plagiarism tutorial briefly assesses what kind of behaviors is defined as plagiarism and how to avoid them. The No.8 question about “internet plagiarism” explains that directly coping information from internet without paraphrasing and citing is considered as academic cheating. Clare Trayner, as cited by Brian Brady and Kunal Dutta in their article “45,000 caught cheating at Britain’s universities”, a student in geography at Royal Holloway, was accused of plagiarism because one paragraph in her essay was copied from an internet site, for example. Overall, multiple tools should be taken to stop academic misconduct based on online resources, including specific strategies and plagiarism education.