Plagiarism: A Growing Problem
Plagiarism is more widespread than people think. According to the Gallup Organization, the top two problems facing the country today are Education and a Decline in Ethics (both were ranked over crime, poverty, drugs, taxes, guns, environment, and racism). At least 80% of college students reported to cheating at least once in their lives, says The Center for Academic Integrity. The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next states that 58.
3% of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5% did so in 1989. All over the world students and even adults are losing jobs, scholarships, and getting sued because they can’t think of something to say or they like how someone else said it and don’t give them credit. The more you think about it there is only one other source that the cheating could come from or be influenced by. The teachers. If kids don’t think that the teacher is going to do anything to catch them, then they are more likely to cheat.
Over 40% of the students, polled in a national survey published in Education Week Magazine, said that their teachers sometimes choose to ignore the cheating. Some of you may think that “What do the teachers have to do with cheating?” Well everything. It is one of the main reasons that people cheat, because they know that they won’t get caught. This is only teaching them bad habits that will most likely be use later on in life as adults. And the number of people cheating will keep rising if nothing is done, and that is why it is the number one problem in America today and can affect anyone if they are no careful and don’t cite their sources.
For example, most recently J.K. Rowling’s Publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, is being sued by the estate of Adrian Jacobs for lifting different events, from her book The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: No. 1 Livid Land, and using them in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. These events include wizard contests, wizard prisons, wizard hospitals, and wizard colleges.
In this case it is more about the story plot than the actual words, but the same principle applies. The publishers are estimating that it will be close to a million dollar case. What many people don’t think about when they are cheating is what will happen when they get caught. Some common penalties that can happen if found cheating in a college; Lowering a student’s grade on the assignment, giving the student a failing grade on the assignment, lowering the student’s overall course grade, and giving the student a failing grade in the course. Depending on the severity of the crime, some people may be suspended or even expelled and can lose their scholarship.
There are a lot of new websites that are starting to help identify the cheating. This allows teachers to get a broader view of where they are looking because most of the programs check across the whole internet for that same sentence. An example of one would be PlagarismDetect.com. They offer a free account that can check the paper against the whole web. These are becoming very common now days among teachers because of the reliability of them.
Plagiarism can be found in may forms such as sever as downloading an entire paper from the Internet, having someone else write the paper, copying the whole paper from some other source or sources to just little as improperly documenting a quote. All over the world students and even adults are losing jobs, scholarships, and getting sued because they can’t think of something to say or they like how someone else said it and don’t give them credit. And no matter how you cheat or even if you did not mean to it is still wrong.
