The World Wide Web and Plagiarism

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The World Wide Web and Plagiarism

In the recent past when computers were available to the public, users could easily type a document without having to retype a whole page to correct or add a part to a document. Shortly after that came the Internet where countless pages of documents and information became accessible to nearly everybody. The problem with plagiarism was much smaller and easier to detect before the Internet. Preceding the Internet, plagiarized materials used to originate from fraternity houses’ efforts to recycle earlier information, copied directly from books at a library, or purchased from local ghostwriters. Professors who were familiar with their materials easily detected plagiarism in these forms. The World Wide Web and electronic resources made it much more difficult for educators to cipher the difference between original and plagiarized material.

There are generally three factors for the drastic increase in cheating and plagiarizing today. The first of those is the unpredictable amount of information that is available online to students everywhere. Which in turn makes it more difficult for the guilty plagiarizers to be caught, making it easier for them to get away with cheating and willing to do it again. The third apparent reason for todays prevalent cheating and plagiarism is the fact that the environment for students alike has become very competitive.

In recent studies on plagiarism conducted on college students around the United States, the results came out quite shocking.[1]

90% of students believe that cheaters are never caught or just aren’t punished in an appropriate manner. (US News and World Report poll.)

Almost 80% ...

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...n, stated, ”There are times that you cheat because there aren’t enough hours in a day. I understand how to do it, I just don’t have the time.”

Plagiarism is a major problem in academics and is hard to detect now that so much information is available on the internet. With all of the software and search engines there still is a large amount of copying. Depending on students to be honest and professors and teachers to be watchful for plagiarism is about all that can be done to stop it.

[1] http://www.plagiarism.org/problem4.html

[2] http://www.plagiarism.org/problem.html

[3] McMurtry, Kim. “e-cheating: Combating a 21st Century Challenge”. T.H.E. Journal: Technical Horizons in Education magazine: Nov. 2001.
[4] http://www.asee.org/prism/december/html/student_plagiarism_in_an_onlin.htm

[5] http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/%7ejanicke/plagiary.htm

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