How to Combat Internet Plagiarism

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How to Combat Internet Plagiarism

In the past, plagiarism was practiced as a means of desperation or necessity, instead of out of pure laziness as it tends to be today. Now, with the development of the Internet, there are many websites that offer tips, sources for papers, along with papers that have already been written and submitted to the website. All of these can be free for download, or if you need a special kind of paper, it can be made specifically for a price ranging between $8.95 and $20.00 per page. All these illegitimate recourses are available to a person who is able to navigate around the Web.[i] Along with this, there are also ways for teachers and professors to track down the sources of suspected Internet plagiarism. This paper will include information on both of these subjects.

A student looking for legitimate topics for a research paper could type any relevant word into a search engine and find hundreds of websites containing written documents that have information, which the student could include in his or her paper. But, with the technology available today, the same student has the option to “cut and paste” the written text into his or her own paper until he or she has enough information to fill the entire paper, without doing any research for themselves. Using anyone else’s words or ideas without attribution is plagiarism, and if these students do not give reference to the people who wrote the information, they fall grounds to it. ii

There are many websites that are dedicated solely to helping students plagiarize. According to Laurie J. Flynn, in her article in The New York Times, more than 10,000 people a month visit the website “schoolsucks.com,” which is a website that offers essay...

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...most anyone to get online, plagiarism has become easier than ever. But along with this, tracking down the original sources the student plagiarized has become easy also, and professors and teachers alike can become Cyber Pirates.

1. Flynn, Laurie J. “Technology; The Wonder Years’ Homework Is Free Online.” The New York Times 10 September, 2001

[i] Flynn, Laurie J. “Technology; The Wonder Years’ Homework Is Free Online.” The New York Times 10 September, 2001

[ii] Ryan, Julie J.C. H. “Student Plagiarism In An Online World.” http://www.asee.org/prism/december/html/student_plagiarism_in_an_online.htm

iii Hinchliffe, Lisa. “Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism.”

http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm. May 1998

[iii] Applebome, Peter. “On the Internet, Term Papers Are Hot Items.” The New York Times

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