[neveh-l] Fw: NYTimes.com Article: A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism

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A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism

September 3, 2003 By SARA RIMER

A study conducted on 23 college campuses has found that Internet plagiarism
is rising among students.

Thirty-eight percent of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the
last year they had engaged in one or more instances of "cut-and-paste"
plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a
few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source.
Almost half the students said they considered such behavior trivial or not
cheating at all.

Only 10 percent of students had acknowledged such cheating in a similar, but
much smaller survey three years ago.

This year's study, organized by Donald L. McCabe, a management professor at
Rutgers University, surveyed more than 18,000 students, 2,600 faculty
members and 650 teaching assistants at large public universities and small
private colleges nationwide. No Ivy League schools were included.

"There are a lot of students who are growing up with the Internet who are
convinced that anything you find on the Internet is public knowledge and
doesn't need to be cited," Professor McCabe said.

The survey solicited students' comments about cheating, and one student
wrote, "If professors cannot detect a paper from an Internet source, that is
a flaw in the grader or professor."

Another student wrote: "One time I downloaded a program off the Internet for
my class. I hated the class and it was mandatory so I didn't care about
learning it, just passing it."

Forty percent of students acknowledged plagiarizing written sources in the
last year. As with the Internet cheating, about half the students considered
this sort of plagiarism trivial.

Twenty percent of the faculty members said they use their computers, such as
the turnitin. com site, to help detect student plagiarism.

Twenty-two percent of undergraduates acknowledged cheating in a "serious"
way in the past year - copying from another student on a test, using
unauthorized notes or helping someone else to cheat on a test.

"When I work with high school students, what I hear is, `Everyone cheats,
it's not all that important,' " Professor McCabe said. "They say: `It's just
to get into college. When I get into college, I won't do it.' But then you
survey college students, and you hear the same thing."

The undergraduates say they need to cheat because of the intense competition
to get into graduate school, and land the top jobs, Professor McCabe said.
"It never stops," he said.

One of the students from the survey wrote: "This isn't a college problem.
It's a problem of the entire country!"

Professor McCabe said: "Students will say they're just mimicking what goes
on in society with business leaders, politicians. I don't know whether
they're making excuses for what they've already done, or whether they're
saying, `It's O. K. if I do this because of what's going on.' "

Many of the colleges involved in the survey have begun trying to fight
cheating by educating both faculty members and students on academic
integrity and revising school policies.

Princeton University was not involved in the survey, but it is among the
schools that have been taking steps to make sure students know that it is
wrong to use material from the Internet without citing the source.

"We need to pay more attention as students join our communities to
explaining why this is such a core value - being honest in your academic
work and why if you cheat that is a very big deal to us," said Kathleen
Deignan, Princeton's dean of undergraduate students.

There has not been any noticeable increase in cheating at Princeton, Ms.
Deignan said, with 18 to 25 cases reported a year. Administrators have
noticed, however, that sometimes students and parents do not understand why
it is wrong to "borrow" sections of text for a paper without providing
attribution, Ms. Deignan added.

Princeton students are also concerned, and they have organized a campus
assembly on integrity for Sept. 21.

"We live in a world where a lot of this is negotiable," Ms. Deignan said.
"Academic institutions need to say, `This is not negotiable.' "

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/03/education/03CHEA.html?
ex=1063599524&ei=1&en=6797ea0a8 fec1e2b

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