“Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.” Albert Einstein could not have made a more accurate statement that would pertain to today’s issue of plagiarism. From an educator’s perspective, the significance and ramifications of plagiarism are life lessons that need to be taught in classrooms beginning at a very young age. As we approach an ever-increasing digital age, the need for teaching academic integrity in everything we do should be addressed, modeled and taken very seriously with our students.
Upon completing the Plagiarism essay, I was completely dumbfounded as to what SafeAssign did and did not pick up. There seemed to be a few extra resources that came up as being plagiarized. Looking at this issue from one angle I thought it may not be such a bad idea as students have access to several different websites and it is hard to tell which sites would be utilized based on their searches. On the other hand, I became skeptical. Were some of the websites I used not reliable sources? Did some of these websites partake in the activity I was trying so hard to steer my students away from: plagiarizing? This really got me thinking. Additionally, the last four paragraphs of my paper were copied and pasted from an article on www.theautochannel.com. Not one of these paragraphs were picked up as being plagiarized. This too raised some questions.
While writing the Plagiarism essay, I was also amazed to find out that there were actual websites that you can go to and either pick a pre-written paper or have the website supposedly write a paper for you. A few examples are schoolsucks.com, a1-termpaper.com, and OPPapers.com (Other Peoples Papers). It was even easier to get out of writing your own paper than I had thought! The school sucks website even had a slogan that stated “Download your workload” and although it did not “promote” copying or plagiarizing, it certainly made it easily accessible to do so. One thing I have learned from my engineering career and in teaching chemistry is that nature and systems like to function in the lowest energy state. Human nature is no different. If students can get by utilizing someone else’s work and get away with it, they will do so. We as educators must enforce consequences when such actions take place.
As a high school teacher, I continuously preach to my students that their K-12 educations are merely tools for success in the “real world”. As we all know, some students have a tendency to learn lessons the hard way and no matter how much we talk about why plagiarism is ethically wrong, there will still be that student who will decide to cheat, copy and/or plagiarize. I strongly believe that the consequences should be taken out to the fullest while in school. Let’s face it, a zero on an assignment or a missed recess is not going to be as detrimental as losing a job due to cheating or dealing with the legal ramifications of something like a patent infringement. Teaching our students to have integrity in everything they do from an early age will not only help them become better students in school, but also better individuals in whatever they decide to do.
"Are you down with OPP/oh, you know me!" I was in college when that song was the rage. Now it stands for "Other People's Papers." Got to love it. Great post.
ReplyDeleteI loved reading your thoughts on plagiarism. As I was writing this blog I never really thought about whether the websites I was getting information from may also be plagiarizing from other websites and resources too. It is so easy to plagiarize, it seems, but with new technology to catch the “thieves,” it will hopefully get easier to catch them in their act. When I also found different websites leading people to copy a pre-written paper, I felt that it just made it seem “OK” to those searching a topic. These ideas need to be addressed in the classroom so that students can understand that it is wrong and the Internet is just like anything else in life; you have to make a wise moral decision of what is best to do. I also agree that consequences need to be harsher when they are in school because we are there to give these students the morals they will need in life.
ReplyDelete