UTEP sees increase in plagiarism
by Adriana Gómez Licón / El Paso Times
Posted:09/08/2010 12:00:00 AM MDT
With all the world just a few keystrokes away on the Internet, it should come as no surprise that cheating and plagiarism are on the rise at UTEP.
However, dishonesty cases are still pretty uncommon at the University of Texas at El Paso - less than 1 percent of the student population.
"Students today don't have to go into a library to do research. There is a sense that the Internet is a free site," said Catie McCorry-Andalis, assistant vice president for student affairs.
May Mendoza, a junior, said she thought about plagiarizing because she was under time pressure. She passed on the temptation, though others don't.
"It crosses my mind, copy and pasting here," she said. "But they'll catch you."
Total cases of dishonesty rose from 136 in 2007-08 to 194 last school year, according to records obtained by the El Paso Times through the Texas Public Information Act. UTEP's enrollment was 21,011 in 2008.
The most common academic offense at UTEP is plagiarism. These cases went from 82 in the 2007-08 school year to 131 last school year. Plagiarism is stealing someone else's writing, ideas or work product.
At UT Austin, where 51,000 students attend school, officials reported 421 cases of academic dishonesty in the year 2008-09, according to the student newspaper.
What some studies on the subject have concluded is that more students view plagiarism as something common, and not as cheating.
A study released this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research
found that some students did not know they were cheating when they copied material from the Internet.
"Undergraduates are less likely to view plagiarism from resources that are available online as a form of academic dishonesty," the report stated.
Anti-cheating policies at UTEP include a tutorial on how to properly attribute sources. But not all students have to go through the tutorial, even if they are caught plagiarizing.
The Office of Student Affairs typically disciplines offending students by putting them on probation or giving them a zero for a tainted assignment. But depending on circumstances, punishments ranged from suspension to nothing at all.
In 46 cases of cheating in 2006-07, the university took no action against students, records showed. At the other extreme, UTEP has suspended 11 students for cheating since 2006.
Records showed that in most cases, cheating students received a zero for the assignment or exam in question. Other times, professors dropped the students by a letter grade for the class.
In a few cases, students had to enroll in an ethics class or write a paper about what they did wrong.