After listening to an online radio program last night by Donald McCabe, many ideas arose about why students plagarize. According to McCave, the internet provides such a vast resource that is so easily accessible. He further stated that students feel less guilty about plagarizing because the internet justifies why they do it. There are sources available to them to limit their research. So when would plagarizing be a victimless crime? Citing a sentence is one thing, but cuting and pasting an entire paragraph without citation is another thing.
John Barrie, the creator and CEO of "Turn It In.com" (a plagarism detection software program), noted three ways they identify whether or not a student has been plagarizing. He stated that "there is an entire copy of the internet, more than 6 million pages, connect to his site. Commerical content, news journal and every single student who turns in a paper are also connected to the site. When a student turns in a paper to the website, the computer then goes through those sources to see where the student recieve the information from. The computer highlights the source, which would then tell whether or not the student plagarized. He will definitely be a reliable source that will be used to help me explain my points in my paper and I will cite him...
Michael Williams, who is the director and associate professor of visual communications at Ohio University, stated that the internet make papers simplier for students to research information better. However, he stated that "he issues assignments where students do not necessarily need to use the internet as a reliable source, but rather perform their own work. Relating back the McCabe, who stated that the number one reason why students plagarize is because they did not know what they were doing was wrong.
Honestly, students know what they are doing when they plagarize. I mean come on, how hard is it to cite a source that does not belong to you. McCabe did mention, however, that foreign students may not understand because their teachers do not enforce plagarism, which places them in a great deal of danger when they come to school here in the US. I do not know how writing is operated over there, so with that issue, tutoring would be the best option for them. Plagarism is highly enforced here at USCA. It plays a big part in academic integrity. A student is given three times at the most to plagarize and on the final attempt is dismissed from the university. With this in mind, do you think plagarism is victimless crime, do you think students are becoming more lazy with the internet as a reliable source for information, or do you think students just need to work hard and do it the right way?
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What about the person who is actually being plagarized? DO they ever have any say or recourse if they discover that their paper was used unethically? What type of recourse? I'm also curious about what we were talking about in class the other day: what happens to those papers that are turned in to turnitin.com? Do students have rights?
I'm not surprised that plagiarism isn't understood as much by foreign students. Frankly, the idea that someone can "own" an idea is pretty much a western concept. IN fact, much of what we understand as "plagiarism" today didn't really exist until the nineteenth century, not coincidentally corresponding with the Industrial Revolution. Most scholars agree that, before then, many of our most popular writers, including Shakespeare, "plagiarized" much of their work, at least according to the definition of "plagiarism" that we apply today.
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