Plagiarism

Why Plagiarize?

It's late in the semester, and the work is piling up. You have presentations to complete, review sessions to attend, and multiple papers to write. How are you possibly going to fit it all in? Most students stock up on caffeine, order in for dinner, and get ready for some long nights. Unfortunately, some students see this scenario as an invitation to plagiarize.

While students have always borrowed papers from friends, the Internet has made it even easier to engage in plagiarism. Any paper a student or researcher has ever posted on a website is available for the taking. Some have turned this online search into a profitable business, with pre-written high school and college papers available for the right price. If your professor has exacting requirements, and an off-the-shelf paper won't do, there are even sites with stables of writers who will create custom papers in any subject. Of course, these companies claim that their papers are for research purposes only, but it's not hard to see what happens to most of these "research" materials.

Consequences of Plagiarism

While it may be tempting to use the words of others, it is never right. No matter how you try to rationalize your actions, it is cheating. When other students are putting in long hours and hard work to finish their homework, is it really fair for you to earn the grade with no effort? Is it fair to your future employers and those who will depend on your supposed knowledge and expertise? Would you want to be treated by a doctor who cheated her way through biology or have your children taught by a teacher who bought his/her senior thesis?

If issues of morality and fairness don't convince you, perhaps the threat of being kicked out of college will. Many colleges have academic honesty policies to outline the standards for dealing with issues of plagiarism. Drew University College of Liberal Arts and the University of Rochester provide two representative examples of these policies. If you turn in a plagiarized assignment, at the very least, you will fail the assignment. It may even be grounds for dismissal from the course or the school. It just isn't worth taking that kind of risk to save a few hours of work.

Unintentional Plagiarism

Every year, students plagiarize without realizing it because they just don't understand the research process and proper methods of citation. It may start innocently enough with copying most of your information from the encyclopedia for an elementary school report, and soon repeating the words you find in reference materials becomes the only research method you know. A college writing course can help you get a handle on correct research techniques, or you can stop by your university's writing center for some helpful resources and one-on-one help.

If you're not sure how to properly cite your references in writing, tip sheets are available for the MLA, APA and Chicago Manual of Style forms of citation. Some disciplines require a certain style while other professors are happy as long as quotations and paraphrased information are fully attributed. Ask your instructor for clarification if you're unsure.

But how will your professor ever know your paper is not your own? Everyone has his or her own writing style, and a paper acquired from an online source or written by your roommate isn't going to read like one created through your own efforts. Also, while teachers always hope students will improve over a semester, they're going to be suspicious of a freshman suddenly producing graduate-level work by the end of a course.

Many schools rely on services like Turnitin to check for plagiarism. These sites compare submitted papers to content available on the Internet and their own databases of papers. Even if a school doesn't subscribe to a plagiarism-checking program, suspicious professors can type a few sentences into Google and bring up the original source of borrowed content.

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