Academic Dishonesty & Plagiarism Academic

ACADEMIC DISHONESTY & PLAGIARISM Academic dishonesty has probably existed since the first educational systems in human history. Generally, the motivation for plagiarizing and other forms of academic dishonesty relates to achieving higher grades than those that correspond genuinely to the student's learning, ability, or performance level, or to laziness and the desire to acquire formal academic degrees as credentials for employment and/or social status.

Literary plagiarism is probably more prevalent than other forms of cheating, such as stealing exams or soliciting answers from other students during examinations, primarily for many of the same reasons that remote copyright theft of music is much more prevalent than the actual theft of tangible music recordings from retail outlets. Unlike other forms of academic dishonesty, plagiarism is incapable of direct detection in the manner that exam theft and communication between students is capable of being detected at the time that it is being committed.

Plagiarism occurs in private, just like illegal Internet downloads or unauthorized sharing of single-use software licenses. For this reason alone, plagiarism is perceived as being less risky from the outset. Plagiarism exists in several different specific forms, including the overt misappropriation of substantive authoritative text, the misrepresentation of prior research, the recycling of papers written and already submitted for course credit by other students, and in the use of professional ghostwriters.

Many times, plagiarism is deliberate, but other times (and in different forms), it is also capable of being perpetrated unintentionally. Overt Direct Substantive Misappropriation: The most obvious form of literary academic plagiarism consists of reproducing the text from authoritative academic sources like textbooks and journal articles verbatim and then presenting that work, unchanged, as that of the submitting student.

The growth of the Internet has greatly increased the efficiency and speed of deliberate plagiarism by allowing students to search through thousands of published sources online without ever having to go the library. The greatly expanded range of possible sources available to contemporary students also significantly reduces the relative risk that a teacher or professor will recognize the plagiarized material on reading it (Innerst, 1998; MJS, 2004).

To address the growing problem of academic plagiarism via online databases, an industry has emerged providing a means of detecting overt substantive plagiarism of this type. Generally, anti-plagiarism software allows instructors to enter text suspected of plagiarism into an online resource designed to identify similarities with vast databases of relevant material. Internet ventures like Turnitin.com provide membership-based services to academic institutions and instructors and retains all material submitted for scanning to detect any attempts by other students to reuse those works subsequently.

Overt Indirect Substantive Misappropriation: Whereas overt direct substantive misappropriation is the misrepresentation of unoriginal authoritative work as the student's own writing, overt indirect misappropriation involves original text but unoriginal intellectual contribution to the material presented as academic work. Instead of reproducing prior authoritative text verbatim, students engaging in this type of plagiarism rewrite portions of prior authoritative work, sometimes entirely in their own words, but do not give appropriate credit to the original source (Boon, 2003; Girard, 2009).

Unlike overt substantive misappropriation, this form of plagiarism can occur unintentionally as well as deliberately. Many students may commit plagiarism unintentionally simply because they do not understand that appropriate academic standards require that any unoriginal idea (outside of the realm of common knowledge or widely known historical fact). At the time that they paraphrase prior work, they may honestly believe that they are doing nothing that is dishonest academically.

Misappropriation of Research: Plagiarism also includes the misrepresentation of secondary research as primary research and the dishonest use of already existing secondary research as secondary research conducted by the student. Typically, a student might acquire a single piece of research such as an extensive peer-reviewed journal article as the sole appropriate authoritative source of secondary research. Instead of continuing to accumulate other appropriate research material, the student simply misappropriates titles selected from the sources acknowledged in that piece of writing.

In most cases, the student never sees the actual source referenced but provides citations in the proper format to that source and includes it in the list of references as though it contributed to the research conducted by the student (Boon, 2003; Slobogin, 2002). Recycling Old Papers: Before the Internet revolution, academic essay recycling was one of the most common methods of committing plagiarism on college campuses.

Typically, students simply traded, gave, or sold papers to other students; sometimes, students deliberately coordinated their schedules to include reciprocal classes, particularly where instructors were known to recycle examinations or assignments. Very often, fraternity houses maintained extensive files of hundreds of academic papers already submitted for course credit.

Those papers enabled students to rewrite papers that had already received high grades and change them just enough to present the same material as new; in larger universities, students sometimes submitted recycled papers to different professors without even bothering to rewrite much more than the title page with their student information and the date of submission. Nowadays, more and more instructors require students to submit papers electronically, specifically so that they can maintain a database of papers previously submitted in their courses.

Those databases can also be combined into the institution's computer system as miniature, institution-specific versions of Turninin.com. Professional Ghostwriting: The use of professional academic ghostwriters is probably the safest form of student plagiarism, because detection is not a significant risk unless the instructor detects a different comprehension level between a student's in-class verbal contribution to class and that exhibited in written assignments. Particularly in larger academic institutions of higher learning where instructors do not regularly interact with students individually or necessarily even learn their identities.

Likewise, tenured professors at many large universities provide lectures but rely extensively on teaching assistants (TA) to grade papers. Professional ghostwriting has existed long before the Internet, but, much like everything else, online capabilities have greatly increased the availability and otherwise facilitated the use of professional ghostwriting services by students for the purposes of plagiarism. Typically, students do an online search using search terms like "essays" or "academic + essays" which reveals thousands of Internet ventures dedicated to helping students present unoriginal academic work as their own.

Many of these sites merely collect large databases of prior essays on every conceivable academic topic in every possible academic subject matter area and resell them. In principle, this is just a much larger version of the traditional fraternity essay library, but some Internet companies also provide custom essay-writing services for which students pay a premium. They advertise their ability to provide any academic assignment required for as much as $50 or more per page.

Partly for this reason, Universities and other institutions of higher learning have begun to rely much more heavily on anti-plagiarizing scanning software to detect academic writing recycled in this manner. To combat the use of professional custom writing, many instructors now require students to submit outlines, literature reviews, full-sentence outlines, and one or more rough drafts of written assignments to help deter and complicate the use of professional ghostwriting in academia.