IPG's Newsletter Article

Remember the newsletter I was asked to contribute to? Well here is the first article for the newsletter.

A savvy professor trembles upon hearing the word cheating. It has become a rampant problem not only in online education, but in the ivory towers of the traditional universities as well. The information is available and so easy for students to obtain. For example, there are websites that will write, design, and interpret data for their customers. Students can literally purchase a dissertation on the internet.

While overt cheating does occur the most common type of cheating is plagiarism. Plagiarism occurs when one steals the words or ideas of someone else, and pretends that the work is their own. Perhaps steal is a harsh word, but that is what plagiarism is. It is stealing.

Some students honestly do not understand the rules. They may honestly not know that they should not copy information directly from the internet and turn that information in as their own paper.

However I would point out to such students, what a pointless exercise that would be for your professor to assign. What after all is to be gained merely copying and pasting information? How has that increased knowledge? However some of these students are probably misguided. These days though nearly every school is making plagiarism a priority. Students are bombarded with information about what it means to plagiarize.

Faculty members are put in an awkward position. Some institutions do not make it easy for the faculty member to catch plagiarizers or to punish them. Additionally, the arduous paperwork required for faculty when dealing with cases of academic honesty is sometimes too leviathan a task to ask, especially when they are only adjuncts. In fact some adjuncts are not told of the process for turning in academic honesty reports.

One interesting trick students have discovered is to copy and paste giant chunks of text. As an example, eighty percent of the paper might be copied and pasted. However the student will cite every paragraph from the correct source. Is this student plagiarizing or not following APA guidelines? How should the faculty member handle this incident? One solution is for the faculty member to follow is to take points from the student for not following APA guidelines. The second action the faculty should do is to take points away for not including enough original content. This allows the faculty to circumnavigate the academic honesty process, but does not give the student an undeserving grade.

Finally, in order for a student to plagiarize successfully they must have the mechanics of writing down. It is impossible for a student that can not correctly put a sentence together to turn in a perfectly written paper. Unless the paper they are using was taken in its entirety it is impossible to correct the writing styles of the student's writing with the paper they are stealing. Fortunately for the faculty students have not figured that out yet.