This paper examines academic dishonesty with a focus on literary plagiarism, analyzing five distinct forms: overt direct substantive misappropriation, overt indirect substantive misappropriation, misappropriation of research, recycling of previously submitted papers, and professional ghostwriting. For each form, the paper explains how it is committed, why it persists, and how institutions attempt to detect and deter it. The paper also considers how the rise of the Internet has expanded both the opportunity for plagiarism and the tools available to combat it. It concludes by arguing that plagiarism devalues academic credentials and undermines the integrity of education for honest students and dishonest ones alike.
Academic dishonesty has probably existed since the first educational systems in human history. Generally, the motivation for plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty relates to achieving higher grades than those that genuinely correspond 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 far more prevalent than the actual theft of tangible music recordings from retail outlets. Unlike other forms of academic dishonesty, plagiarism cannot be detected directly in the way that exam theft and student-to-student communication can be detected at the moment they occur.
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 less risky from the outset. Plagiarism exists in several distinct forms, including the overt misappropriation of substantive authoritative text, the misrepresentation of prior research, the recycling of papers written and already submitted for academic credit by other students, and the use of professional ghostwriters. Many instances of plagiarism are deliberate, but in other forms it can also be perpetrated unintentionally.
The most obvious form of literary academic plagiarism consists of reproducing text from authoritative academic sources — such as textbooks and journal articles — verbatim, and then presenting that work, unchanged, as the submitting student's own. 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 visiting a library. The greatly expanded range of sources available to contemporary students also significantly reduces the relative risk that a teacher or professor will recognize plagiarized material upon reading it (Innerst, 1998; MJS, 2004).
To address the growing problem of academic plagiarism via online databases, an industry has emerged dedicated to detecting overt substantive plagiarism of this type. Generally, anti-plagiarism software allows instructors to submit text suspected of plagiarism to an online resource designed to identify similarities with vast databases of published material. Internet services like Turnitin.com provide membership-based access to academic institutions and instructors, and retain all material submitted for scanning in order to detect any attempts by other students to reuse those works subsequently.
Whereas overt direct substantive misappropriation involves presenting unoriginal authoritative work verbatim as one's own writing, overt indirect misappropriation involves original text but an 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 citation for any unoriginal idea outside the realm of common knowledge or widely known historical fact. At the time they paraphrase prior work, they may honestly believe they are doing nothing academically dishonest.
"Faking secondary research with fabricated citations"
"Trading and resubmitting previously graded work"
"Paid custom writing services and deterrence strategies"
Academic dishonesty, much like myriad other forms of dishonesty in society, will likely never be eliminated entirely, for many of the same reasons that general dishonesty outside the academic realm will not be eliminated entirely. Cheating and dishonesty are likely fundamental elements of human nature, which is exactly why societies require laws, police forces, civil courts, and penal institutions.
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