Plagiarism & the Internet

Plagiarism and the Internet

Is plagiarism stealing? In a word-Yes! Intellectual dishonesty of any type compromises the individual who engages in it and cheats the party subjected to it. An article by Trip Gabriel in this week’s “Education” section of The New York Times illustrates the plagiarism problem and a few characteristic student attitudes.
Plagiarism may take several forms. The most blatant case I encountered occurred when I was teaching freshman writing at a local university. At the end of the spring semester, a student submitted a research paper identical to one I had received the previous semester. Unfortunately for that student, not only did I remember the original submission, but I also had a copy of the first paper. The result: a failing grade on the paper and in the course.
Most students aren’t quite that bold, however. More copy sections from a source without providing a citation that would credit the author. The author of the Times article maintains “ . . . many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.”
He characterizes plagiarism as a “disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information.” Because such open-source sites, such as Wikipedia, do not credit specific authors, students believe that they can take the information verbatim without citing the source. Some maintain that the information is free and need not be credited. But that would be akin to copying from an encyclopedia without providing a citation. He includes some troubling statistics:
In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for
Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of
14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments. . . .
Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes
“serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34
percent earlier in the decade.”

A few academic researchers point to the Internet culture as responsible for the proliferation of plagiarism. The disregard for intellectual property such as music takes the form of “lifting” someone else’s authentic idea and presenting it as one’s own. Not only is that laziness; it is dishonesty.