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Why do Students Plagiarize? There certainly are countless reasons students plagiarize. Deadlines, seemingly overwhelming assignments and of course laziness, are all compelling reasons for students to consider plagiarism. Learning to recognize the various factors that make plagiarism an attractive alternative is often the ideal method to prevent it before it starts. Today students learn quickly, that finding and manipulating information on the Internet is a useful skill.
For countless students it becomes a mere question of ingenuity: “can I sneak a plagiarized paper past my professor? ” (Educational tips on plagiarism prevention) Often intimidated by the level of work they find online, and thinking their personal work cannot compare they will usually succumb to plagiarizing. However, by teaching students the skills how to process the data they obtain by analysis and interpretation is a quite real and effective way to stop plagiarism.
Many students are often under considerable pressure from family, peers, and instructors to vie for academic scholarships and/or places in the business market. In order to stay current some students justify their plagiarism with the notion if others are doing it so can they. Others have problems expressing their thoughts well enough to write them down. So pulling words and information from other people’s written work is often simply too tempting to pass up. Every day, millions of students face similar ethical quandaries–and unfortunately, research indicates that most choose to plagiarize.
In a nationwide poll, 80 percent of America’s best students admitted to having cheated at least once; More than half said they did not believe cheating was a big deal–and 95 percent of the cheaters said they have simply never been caught. In addition, a U. S. News poll found 90 percent of college kids believe cheaters never pay the price. * (Kleiner and Lord) Cheating among college students has shown the principal reason for cheating to be, it is the common thing to do, there is no honor code, and faculty support of academic integrity policies is low. Academic Cheating Fact Sheet) According to an earlier article in the San Francisco Chronicle, there are numerous ways to cheat and numerous ways to curb cheating. The following is just the top five ways that students cheat: Copying from answers from another student, Plagiarizing by downloading from the Internet, Using Cell phones to share answers, Getting test questions and/or answers or from a student in a previous period, by saving the test answers into the memory of a graphing calculator, then brings it to the test.
And the following are the top five ways to curb cheating: Get students to help formulate a Code of Honor, Uphold your schools academic integrity policy by severely punishing cheaters, Make stolen answer keys useless by creating multiple test versions, Do not permit electronic devices into the testing areas, Do not depend primarily on testing for determining grades by developing different ways of assessing student knowledge. (McMahon) In spite of all this seemingly overwhelming research, it seems that very few students admitted to copying and pasting content from the Internet without properly citing it. Scanlon and Neumann) * U. S. News poll of 1,000 adults (including an oversample of 200 college students) conducted by Celinda Lake of Lake Snell Perry & Associates and Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group, Oct. 18-23, 1999. Margin of error: plus or minus 3. 5 percent. Works Cited “Academic Cheating Background. ” 1999. 1 Feburary 2009 . “Academic Cheating Fact Sheet. ” 1999. Educational Testing Service/The Advertising Council campaign to discourage academic cheating. . “Educational tips on plagiarism prevention. ” Copyright © 2008 iParadigms, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Why Students Plagiarize. 01 February 2009 .
Kleiner, Carolyn and Mary Lord. “The Cheating Game. ” U. S. News & World Report 22 November 1999, November 22, 1999 ed. McMahon, Regan. “Everybody Does It Academic cheating is at an all-time high. Can anything be done to stop it? ” San Francisco Chronicle 9 September 2007: 18. Nagy, Christopher. “Dealing with High School Plagiarism. ” 9 January 2009. NewFoundations: Publishing and Consultancy. 1 Feburary 2009 . Scanlon, Patrick M and David R Neumann. “Internet plagiarism among college students. ” May/June 2002. FindArticles. com. Journal of College Student Development. 01 Feburary 2009 .