A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism

This NYTimes article says that 38% of American undergraduate students have cut & pasted content from the Web without citing the source. This is up from 10% three years ago.

One of the researchers gave the following explanation:

"There are a lot of students who are growing up with the Internet who are convinced that anything you find on the Internet is public knowledge and doesn't need to be cited."

"If professors cannot detect a paper from an Internet source, that is a flaw in the grader or professor"

Students plagiarize because they're lazy, or they "don't have time" to properly research. They don't see it as a big deal, even if they get caught red-handed. For the teacher, however, it's an entirely different matter.

Let me tell you a little about K's experience as an educator. K has 40 students. As an English 101 instructor, she assigns them 4 essays throughout the year. Last year, she was also doing 12 short writing assignments. That's 640 pieces of writing throughout the year. Essays range from 4-12 pages (depending on the length of assignment).

Last year, K experienced Internet plagiarism first-hand with some of her students. Each time, as an educator, it was demoralizing to find that one of her students had plagiarized. She spent a lot of time deciding whether or not to turn the student in, then was forced to recommend sanctions (usually failing the course with the academic equivalent of a felony on their record) on the student once she did.

The experiences left her drained and sad - and increased her workload by forcing her to run random pieces of her other 40 students' papers through the search engines. The time increase involved in that is incredible. As a primary instructor, K is paid for roughly 10 hours of work per week, including 3 hours of instructional time. She pours her soul into her kids and puts in many extra hours to ensure they have a good education. The majority of people who have plagiarized in her class never took 5 minutes to walk up to her office and ask for help in the class.

Aside from the increase in her own workload, what seemed to perplex her the most about plagiarism was the fact that these kids (or their parents) are paying a princely sum for their education; and they waste every cent of it, because they take nothing away from the class, since they're not actually creating their own ideas about the text.

And I suppose she can elaborate from here, if she wishes. :)