It's Time to Crack Down on Plagiarists and Eliminate Plagiarism

It's Time to Crack Down on Plagiarists and Eliminate Plagiarism

Plagiarize v. 1. To appropriate and pass off as one’s own (the writings, ideas, etc., of another). 2. To appropriate and use passages, ideas, etc. from. 3. To commit plagiarism. [1]

Plagiarism is an age-old habit of many people, with a large portion of these people being students who write essays or passages to earn a grade in a class. However, these students are unaware of the act they are doing which meets the criteria of the definition explained above. The consequences are very clear: Using another person’s thoughts or ideas without being authorized or noting that it was from another source constitutes plagiarism and will be grounds for failure or to the extreme, dismissal from a program or from a university entirely. The fight is now against those who desire to crack down on plagiarists and the sources of the material being plagiarized. There are many ways to inhibit copywritten material being used again. The obtainment of works cited, bibliography, footnotes and notation of quotes are just the beginning. However, with the widespread use of the Internet as a cesspool of information, how is a person to discover whether the person is cheating or not? The ball is now in the professor’s court to now use the Internet to their own advantage to catch the thieves in their tracks.

When a student decides to write a paper, the first thing in the mindset of that student, as well as many other students is relatively a common thing: the Internet. Although there is so much information to be found, this information is also at the disposal of the professor who administers the assignment. In many cases, the student is simply lazy and becomes sloppy in copying. This leaves noticeable mistakes because of the failure to proofread, ultimately leading to their fate resting in the hands of the professor. The person grading the paper must know what to look for and most of the time it is detected very quickly and precisely. In one case, a professor found the probable source of a particular piece of a student within five minutes and an additional ten minutes to confirm that indeed the paper was a case of word-for-word plagiarism.