COLUMN: Plagiarism brings out the child in college students

Jennifer Thomson
University Wire
05-18-2001
(Mustang Daily) (U-WIRE) SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. -- Cheater cheater pumpkin eater!

In fourth grade I copied just about all of the report I did on the San Diego Mission from the Encyclopedia Britannica. In eighth grade I borrowed passages I wrote in a science paper on trees from a reference book at the city library. In 10th grade I turned in a paper the captain of the swim team wrote two years earlier.

This fall I wrote my own media law term paper because I knew better.

College students across the nation are reverting to their childhood days of copying, cheating and plagiarizing, but at a much more expensive price than having to tell Mom and Dad their Indian civilization report is due the next day and they haven't started.

So-called online paper mills that recycle, reuse and renew term papers charge as much as $35 a page for custom reports at sites like www.schoolsucks.com. Web sites such as these provide students with a quick and easy alternative to putting their own blood, sweat and tears into a project. Databases with thousands of papers online are easy to access and fast to download. Most of these sites attempt to shirk responsibility for the plagiarism service they offer by stating that they are only quick fixes and should not be used when original work is warranted.

Original work is always warranted.

Of course, it's tempting to turn in one of these easy alternatives. Most professors don't even know my name, let alone my writing style. But the morals instilled in students as children should hold them back from committing such an infraction on today's ideals.

Recently developed software is beginning to make a mark on those students whose morals and ideals are so misguided as to plagiarize something from the Internet, or worse, turn in a complete term paper downloaded from a cheat site.

Professors are using services like www.turnitin.com to take a digital fingerprint of a student's paper and scan the Internet and the group's own database looking for matches, highlighting passages that match and providing links to the online source, according to a Reuters article published May 13.

A University of California at Berkeley team of professors, led by John Barrie, created the program. Barrie said that hundreds of thousands of papers have already been checked by the program. According to the Reuters article, of those hundreds of thousands, 75 percent came directly from the Internet.

Seventy-five percent is a big number. That means that 75 percent of those students' parents did a bad job teaching their children right from wrong. And what's worse, those 75 percent of students let themselves down by freely plagiarizing someone else's work.

I'm sure it came at some price, though. That old saying, "you get what you pay for," comes to mind. I'm sure most students are disappointed with the quality of work they receive when that download comes over the Internet and into their hot little hands two hours before the paper is due. Which proves that Web sites like www.houseofcheat.com are ripping their customers off by giving them a quick fix and not a final solution.

A final solution would be to do away with all sources of plagiarism. That would mean discontinuing the CliffsNotes series. I'm sure we've all found ourselves up late at night trying to convince ourselves that how the CliffsNotes passage put it was exactly how we would have said it. Putting an end to plagiarism would also mean barring these Web sites from the Internet, which would be censorship, doing away with solution manuals and threatening raids on all fraternity and sorority houses if they did not destroy their hundreds of test files immediately. While we're putting an end to plagiarism let's also discontinue the publication of all second edition course booklets, because I can't begin to count how many times students, myself included, have gone to an exam only to find that each test question was strikingly familiar to the one they studied out of the booklet with the answer circled by some student two years ago.

What I'm getting at is that there are many avenues and ways to go about plagiarizing, cheating and borrowing -- too many to stamp out so that students may live a life free of temptation and destruction. Plagiarism has been a pillar among the student community for hundreds of years, and knocking it down is no solution. Finding another way around it is.

Do like my friend Scott and wait until the weekend before your senior project is due to actually put a dent in it. Write your own paper two hours before it's due. At least then, it's your own work that you can take pride in. Whether it's a D or an A paper, it's your failure or success and you didn't have to pay $35 dollars a page for something thousands of students have already turned in. Better yet, stop acting like fourth-graders and do your own work. You should have learned that lesson back in grammar school.



(C) 2001 Mustang Daily via U-WIRE