Plagiarism and Cheating Today

     Plagiarism on college campuses are extremely common today. With more than 1.4 billion pages on the Internet and 25 pages being added every second, using the internet in class education and research is something normal. From this website I learned some interesting information on plagiarism that I never knew before such as:

• A national survey published in Education Week found that 54% of students admitted to plagiarizing from the internet; 74% of the students admitted that at least once during the past school year they had engaged in serious cheating; and 47% of students believe their teachers sometimes choose to ignore students who are cheating.
• A study by The Center for Academic Integrity found that almost 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once.
• According to the Gallup Organization in 2000, the top two problems facing the country today are: 1) Education and 2) Decline in Ethics. Both of these were ranked over crime, poverty, drugs, taxes, guns, environment, and racism.
• A study showed that 55% of faculty would not want to devote any effort on documenting suspected incidents of cheating.

     I found the first and the fourth bulletin very interesting. Faculty members don't want to deal with reporting cheating because it is such a huge problem. Reporting this is such a long process and can lead to expulsion. Many teachers do not want to put the time and effort in reporting plagiarism because they already have so much going on as it is.

     This second website had a lot of information on how technology has increased plagiarism. It stated that "the internet has created new opportunities for students to become better cheaters and as a result created new challenges for educators." Some web sources encourage plagiariam and students can find different ways to copy information from these sources to make it look like they have not been cheating. "Cyber-plagiarism"/"Patchwork-plagiarism" is when information is copied from the internet and put into different areas of a research paper to make it look like your own. Also, students can use a thesaurus and change the words around from something they have copied.
 
    Many colleges and universities are now starting to use online plagiarism services to catch cheaters, such as Turnitin.com and The Internet (Roach). Some of these services are free and some cost quite a bit. The services that are costly are kown to be more powerful because they make their own databases of source material and use a more specific search criteria. In contrast, the services that are free do not take language alterations in account.

Ethics in School

     Since as long as I can remember I have always been told what good ethical principles were in school. In many of my classes, my teachers have handed out academic integrity papers saying not to cheat and to report anyone you have seen cheating. However, I would never feel comfortable reporting another student cheating since cheating can be defined in so many ways. Cheating can be copying some math homework answers, forgetting to site a source in a paper, changing another person's words around to sound like your own, looking at another students test, telling a friend the test format, finding answers online, etc. I know everyone has cheated once or twice in their life. I know I have and I have seen many students cheating. If students told on one another for cheating, then more than half of the students would have "academic dishonesty" reported on their records. So I've always thought, what is the best ethical principle for witnessing cheating? If I reported it, I would be telling on a fellow student who could also be my friend and if I didn't report it, it could be considered as lying. I don't understand why schools would put students in this kind of situation. I believe that students should not be responsible for reporting other students cheating.