The Pros And Cons Of Plagiarism

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Today, millions of students will hand in work to a teacher; for some of them this is the assignment that will make or break their grade. If your entire academic future rested on a single grade, wouldn 't you do everything you could to make it your best work possible? Some people stay up for countless hours, working harder than they ever have in their entire lives, to produce high quality work. Other people decide to break one of the most enforced rules at every school in the country. In other words, they cheat. There are many different ways a student can cheat: they could have plagiarized work off of the internet, they could have snuck their phone into a test and used it to look up answers, etc. There are a million different ways students …show more content…

Cheating on an exam, though the most popular by far, is only one way to break an academic honesty code. Another way is through plagiarism. Starting as young as third grade, students are warned about the perils of plagiarism and how bad it can, a lesson that is refreshed at the beginning of every English course they take for the rest of their lives. As they get older and enter high school and college, many students chose to ignore these warnings and plagiarize their work anyways. Where does modern technology come into this? Well, the Internet, the most modern technological advancement yet, plays the biggest role in plagiarism. There are thousands of sites where students are able to purchase, some even offer them for free, an essay about any topic they choose. Those students then simply write their name at the top and turn in the essay as if it was their own work. Essay writing has never been easier. Some students are sneaky though; they take sections from multiple different sources then simply compile them together to create a single essay. According to a study done by McCabe, "41% of college students […] admitted to cutting and pasting material from the Internet without citation" (Dehn 190). Before the invention of the Internet, plagiarism to that extent would have been

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