It happens all the time, according to teachers.
Students have an essay due, so they turn on the computer, go to Wikipedia, left-click the mouse to copy, enter Microsoft Word, and paste paragraph after paragraph of someone else’s words. After removing a few hyperlinks, increasing the font size and deleting telltale words they don’t understand just in case they’re caught, they press print.
It’s an outright example of plagiarism, which is stealing the ideas or words of someone else and passing it off as your own.
Nevertheless, according to a study of high school students conducted by professors at Rutgers University, 51 percent of high school students admit not citing sources from websites when copying sentences for a paper, and 15 percent admitted to turning in a paper largely taken from a website or a paper mill (a service that sell essays and papers online). Whether it’s an expository essay about medieval economic practices, or a research paper on the life of animals in captivity, high school students and even college students are tempted by the ease of plagiarism, void of any and all creative thought processes. What many high school students are unaware of, however, is that the consequences for plagiarism can be severe.
Why plagiarize?
According to the University of Alberta’s website, students plagiarize due to internal factors such as procrastination and disorganization, lack of research skills, confusion between plagiarism and paraphrasing and external factors, such as peer pressure from friends.
In the modern world, where information is constantly at fingertips and entire papers are ready to be falsely claimed as anyone’s with the click of a button, many students take the easy way out.
Check yourself
Turnitin.com is one of the many websites in existence that automatically checks for plagiarism, using the 140 million source content matches in its database to identify inauthentic writing. According to English and Spanish teacher Carla Ware-Parker, not only is plagiarism rampant among high school students, but checking for plagiarism is a very time consuming task for teachers. Ware-Parker’s site of choice to catch students red-handed is plagiarismchecker.com. Teachers and professors sometimes pay to use websites like these, where they set up accounts and have their students send their papers to them, allowing for instant analysis of plagiaristic laziness. These sites have recently become central and are growing in popularity in the information age to allow professors and high school teachers to help their students identify plagiarism and take proper action.
Plagiarism is unfortunate, says Ware-Parker, “because the teacher now questions your integrity and you don’t learn along the way.”
In high school, Advanced Placement Coordinator Kara Shuell suggests that students often don’t realize the error of their ways. “Kids don’t understand that when they take things from the Internet, they have to acknowledge it,” Shuell said. A former AP English teacher, Shuell has seen all sorts of plagiarism, from poems to whole papers. She says teachers “learn the voice of a writer and read something and know the writing style.” This way they are able to quickly identify when a student plagiarizes.
High school penalties
Consequences in high school can range from warnings to parent-teacher conferences and even possible suspensions, not to mention taking a failing grade. In addition to not learning and growing as a student, plagiarizing can leave a lasting scar on your character.
College penalities
In college, the risk one takes when plagiarizing is often much greater than in high school. Hampton University Admissions Officer Omar Howard says colleges often choose to reject students with plagiarism in their past or with evidence of plagiarism in their admissions essays. “We usually would not accept students who have been found guilty of plagiarizing,
but if so, it would solely be at the discretion of the provost or head of Admissions.”
Even before enrolling as a college student, admissions officers can potentially submit an admissions essay to an online service such as Turnitin.com or Writecheck.com to catch an applicant in the act. Once admitted, students still must maintain their academic integrity.
University of Michigan-Dearborn Admissions Officer Charley Eaton says students who break the University’s code of honor are liable to receive failing grades and even expulsion from the school. Plagiarism undoubtedly leads to the demise of one’s academic character which, if ever proven, can mar an academic career forever, Eaton said.
Ware-Parker, a University of Michigan grad herself, says that choosing not to plagiarize in college was an easy one. Her “fear of being kicked out of school, fear of losing all that money invested, fear of ruining my reputation” kept her on the right track.
Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) has some advice for students in high school and college. One of the best ways to resist plagiarizing is to gain confidence in your own academic ability, OWL advises. That means taking your time when writing papers and always remembering to cite sources, whether it be a website, book or news source, OWL advises. And know that it’s a bad idea to paraphrase entire pages of information because at the end of the day, your paper will still reflect academic dishonesty.