The Problem of Plagiarism

David Presti, professor of University of California at Berkeley, had a hunch that his students were submitting plagiarized papers. "It's so easy to cheat now," Dr. Presti said. "But this increasing digitalization is also making it easier to find cheaters out” (Kopytoff 2000). Through a website called Plagiarism.org, he was able to find that, little over 14% of his students plagiarized at least some of their essays. Due to increased acts of plagiarism amongst students, a number of websites have been developed to detect those acts. This paper will discuss plagiarism and various ways plagiarism can be committed.

Plagiarism comes from the Latin "plagiarus" which means kidnapper (Waltman 1980). It was not until the 18the century, however, that the word began to designate an intellectual theft. According to In relation to this paper, plagiarism is one of many classifications that constitute academic dishonesty. In the educational atmosphere plagiarism is most common among students, but there are different acts of plagiarism.

With attention to plagiarism in academic misconduct, IUPUI lists four styles a person can plagiarize in its code of conduct. If a student does not give credit to the persons original words or material by not citing a source pertaining to these four styles then it is considered plagiarism (IUPUI 2011). 1) Quotes another person’s actual words; either oral or written. Some students tend to cut and paste words directly from the original source without citation. This may occur when students procrastinate by waiting to the last minute to write a paper or do an assignment.

2) Paraphrases another person’s words, either oral or written. However, some students are clever enough to re-word the quote by using a thesaurus to ruse the reader into thinking this is their original idea. Paraphrasing could also change the meaning of the quote if it is not done precisely. For example, the in the article Telling the Truth about Damned Lies and Statistics the author, while reading a student’s dissertation, discovered an illogical statistic. The student obtained the statistic from another author, which this author paraphrased from the original source and added words to make it more appealing to the readers.

3) Uses another person’s idea, opinion, or theory, or 4) Borrows facts, statistics, or other illustrative material, unless the information is common knowledge. Issues professors may come across could be determining whether an idea is common knowledge or not.