Electronic Plagiarism Seminar

"Responding to cheating is perhaps one of the most distasteful, time-consuming, and undervalued tasks that a teacher can face." (Cizek 151)

Cyberplagiarism, cut and paste, cybercheating, high tech cheating, "patch writing," (R. M. Howard), theft of intellectual property: all these terms describe ways students use other's words and ideas without attribution, whether deliberately or inadvertently.

As more and more information appears on the Internet and in other electronic formats, making it easily accessible, it becomes equally easy to download, cut, and paste, presenting the information as one's own. In the past it was not uncommon for students to copy verbatim from something like Cliffs Notes, an encyclopedia, or MasterPlots. Now even lecture notes and Power Point presentations are available, and can be used to create papers and as a way of avoiding attending classes.

Students no longer need to come to the library, use library materials, borrow from a roommate, or purchase the Notes, but rather can find essays and papers quickly and easily, download, reformat (if they choose and if they have time), and turn in. Try typing topicpapers.com, e.g. literaturepapers.com, to see how easy it is. They even provide you with links to other topics!

Graduate students too have resources available that allow them to avoid writing a thesis or a dissertation. Options range from bidding on one on ebay.com to buying a pre-written one, or if they are feeling less daring and have more money, paying someone to write the paper.

Given the pressures students feel to produce a number of papers and to get good grades, they may feel it is not worth their time to write an original paper for a class not in their major. Students give a variety of excuses for plagiarizing, ranging from "I didn't know." to "I don't care." They may know of peers who have plagiarized successfully, which in turn discourages them from doing their own work. Remember, those who don't get caught talk, those who get caught don't talk, so the perception among students is that everyone gets away with it.

It is up to us to insure that students can never claim that they did not know what constitutes plagiarism, and to give them all the tools they need to do their own work and to do it well.

This page was created on 2 December 1999 and last updated on 29 June 2005.