A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism Seems on the Rise
Author: Rimer, Sara
Publication info: New York Times , Late Edition (East Coast) [New York, N.Y] 03 Sep 2003: B.7.
ProQuest document link
Full text: A study conducted on 23 college campuses has found that Internet plagiarism is rising among students.
Thirty-eight percent of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in one or more instances of ''cut-and-paste'' plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source. Almost half the students said they considered such behavior trivial or not cheating at all.
Only 10 percent of students had acknowledged such cheating in a similar, but much smaller survey three years ago.
This year's study, organized by Donald L. McCabe, a management professor at Rutgers University, surveyed more than 18,000 students, 2,600 faculty members and 650 teaching assistants at large public universities and small private colleges nationwide. No Ivy League schools were included.
''There are a lot of students who are growing up with the Internet who are convinced that anything you find on the Internet is public knowledge and doesn't need to be cited,'' Professor McCabe said.
The survey solicited students' comments about cheating, and one student wrote, ''If professors cannot detect a paper from an Internet source, that is a flaw in the grader or professor.''
Another student wrote: ''One time I downloaded a program off the Internet for my class. I hated the class and it was mandatory so I didn't care about learning it, just passing it.''
Forty percent of students acknowledged plagiarizing written sources in the last year. As with the Internet cheating, about half the students considered this sort of plagiarism trivial.
Twenty percent of the faculty members said they use their computers, such as the turnitin.com site, to help detect student plagiarism.
Twenty-two percent of undergraduates acknowledged cheating in a ''serious'' way in the past year -- copying from another student on a test, using unauthorized notes or helping someone else to cheat on a test.
''When I work with high school students, what I hear is, 'Everyone cheats, it's not all that important,' '' Professor McCabe said. ''They say: 'It's just to get into college. When I get into college, I won't do it.' But then you survey college students, and you hear the same thing.''
The undergraduates say they need to cheat because of the intense competition to get into graduate school, and land the top jobs, Professor McCabe said. ''It never stops,'' he said.
One of the students from the survey wrote: ''This isn't a college problem. It's a problem of the entire country!''
Professor McCabe said: ''Students will say they're just mimicking what goes on in society with business leaders, politicians. I don't know whether they're making excuses for what they've already done, or whether they're saying, 'It's O.K. if I do this because of what's going on.' ''
Many of the colleges involved in the survey have begun trying to fight cheating by educating both faculty members and students on academic integrity and revising school policies.
Princeton University was not involved in the survey, but it is among the schools that have been taking steps to make sure students know that it is wrong to use material from the Internet without citing the source.
''We need to pay more attention as students join our communities to explaining why this is such a core value -- being honest in your academic work and why if you cheat that is a very big deal to us,'' said Kathleen Deignan, Princeton's dean of undergraduate students.
There has not been any noticeable increase in cheating at Princeton, Ms. Deignan said, with 18 to 25 cases reported a year. Administrators have noticed, however, that sometimes students and parents do not understand why it is wrong to ''borrow'' sections of text for a paper without providing attribution, Ms. Deignan added.
Princeton students are also concerned, and they have organized a campus assembly on integrity for Sept. 21.
''We live in a world where a lot of this is negotiable,'' Ms. Deignan said. ''Academic institutions need to say, 'This is not negotiable.' ''
Publication title: New York Times,Late Edition (East Coast)
Pages: B.7
Number of pages: 0
Publication year: 2003
Publication date: Sep 3, 2003
Year: 2003
Section: B
Publisher: New York Times Company
Document URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/432532491?accountid=45111
September 22 2013 16:39
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Bibliography
Citation style: MLA 7th Edition
Works Cited
Rimer, Sara. "A Campus Fad that's being Copied: Internet Plagiarism Seems on the Rise." New York Times: 0. Sep 03 2003. ProQuest. Web. 23 Sep. 2013 .
Rimer, Sara. "A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism Seems on the Rise." New York Times: 0. Sept. 03 2003. ProQuest. Web. 22 Sept. 2013 <http://search.proquest.com/docview/432532491?accountid=45111>.
Citing Practice
1. Using your St. Martin’s Guide, decide which type of citation you should create for a Works Cited entry for this article. Then, using the information above, write your citation here, paying careful attention to spacing and other elements of an entry (italics, dates, etc.). Practice getting this correct.
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2. Read the following information taken from the article above. Then, re-write the quotation, and create the appropriate in-text citation after the quote.
Many of the colleges involved in the survey have begun trying to fight cheating by educating both faculty members and students on academic integrity and revising school policies.
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3. Now paraphrase this quotation, putting it into your own words, using quotation marks around the last six words to utilize a direct quote.
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4. Now practice using a signal phrase to indicate to your reader from where you found this information:
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Identify the Problem… Side #1
Directions: Identify the problem(s) in the following example paragraph and Works Cited page. There are multiple errors. Extra spacing has been provided to give you more space to make corrections; feel free to use the space below as well.
“A group of persons, usually youths, who share a common identity and who generally engage in criminal behavior” is the definition given for a gang. Juvenile gangs often perform delinquent acts, not solely out of frustration with society but also out of a need to attain status within their group. A gang can provide the rewards a juvenile cannot get from his school or other institution. Unfortunately, many teenagers who join gangs are looking for some type of inclusion and seek any type of group to achieve the attention they crave. Not surprisingly, “Research also has shown that an individual’s criminal activity increases when he joins a gang and decreases to pre-gang levels when he withdraws from gang activity.” (“gangs”). About two-fifths of gang members are under the age of 17, and almost nine-tenths are under 25 (“gangs”).
Work Cited
"gang." Britannica School. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Web. 22 Sep. 2013.
"delinquency." Britannica School. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2013. Web. 22 Sep. 2013
Identify the Problem: Side #2
Problem #1: You should avoid beginning a paragraph with a quote.
Problem #2: The first sentence is not cited; the information is not attributed to any type of source.
Problem #3: The next two sentences beginning “Juvenile gangs…” is not in quotation marks, even though it
is a direct quote. There is also no attribution given for this information (no in-text citation).
Problem #4: In the sentence beginning “Not surprisingly…” the period at the end of the sentence should
appear after the in-text citation, not before the parentheses.
Problem #5: As written, the final sentence of the paragraph doesn’t fit with the information provided previously.
It needs a smoother transition so that it is appropriate there, or it needs to be moved to a new paragraph. Preferably, the writer will start a new paragraph in order to introduce the next set of information.
Problem #6: There is no commentary at the end of the paragraph. Avoid ending a paragraph with a quotation.
Example Corrected Paragraph
To begin to understand what a gang is, one should first look at the definition. “A group of persons, usually youths, who share a common identity and who generally engage in criminal behavior” is the definition given for a gang, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. The article continues by detailing the reason for poor behavior and criminal acts, revealing that “Juvenile gangs often perform delinquent acts, not solely out of frustration with society but also out of a need to attain status within their group. A gang can provide the rewards a juvenile cannot get from his school or other institution” (“gangs”). Unfortunately, many teenagers who join gangs are looking for some type of inclusion and seek any type of group to achieve the attention they crave. Not surprisingly, then, “Research also has shown that an individual’s criminal activity increases when he joins a gang and decreases to pre-gang levels when he withdraws from gang activity” (“gangs”). Clearly some type of intervention is needed in order to prevent youths from joining gangs, and this prevention must occur sooner rather than later.
Since “About two-fifths of gang members are under the age of 17, and almost nine-tenths are under 25,” it is critical for adults to realize that children and teenagers must be targeted early in order to thwart them from joining gangs (“gangs”). …
Works Cited Issues: Title needs an “s”= multiple sources, no bold in article title, database must be italicized, date needed, period at end of entry, alphabetize.
"delinquency." Britannica School. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2013. Web. 22 Sep. 2013.
"gang." Britannica School. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2013. Web. 22 Sep. 2013.