Student Plagiarism in an Online World: A Review

Introduction

Even as educators advise students on the proper techniques for citations and warn them about the consequences of plagiarism, this form of cheating has grown increasingly common with the rise of the World Wide Web. According to Julie Ryan's article "Student Plagiarism in an Online World," the Internet has made it easier than ever for students to pass off others' work as their own. However, Ryan also notes that the Internet makes catching cheaters easier than ever, and she suggests that professors and teachers use basic search engines to identify dishonest students.

Plagiarism essentially entails passing off someone else's work as one's own, and the act can take several forms — from purchasing ghost-written material from a willing writer to blatantly cutting and pasting blocks of text from online or print sources. Regardless of the means or method, plagiarism is both illegal and unfair.

What Plagiarism Is and Why Students Do It

While Ryan does not delve deeply into the various psychological reasons behind cheating, she does mention that laziness is one of the main motivating factors causing students to plagiarize. Many students who are caught or suspected of plagiarizing will deny it outright or act as if what they did was perfectly harmless, according to Ryan. A professor of an information security class, Ryan finds it ironic and disheartening that as many as one out of six students plagiarize their work when submitting reports, essays, or term papers. Furthermore, when a student fails to properly footnote his or her ideas, he or she comes dangerously close to plagiarizing. The issue of academic dishonesty is therefore broader than outright copying alone.

However sneaky students may be and however simple it is for them to copy the work of others, professors and teachers can utilize online and other electronic tools to expose cheaters. While it may not be possible to catch every student using a search engine, these tools offer a quick and easy way to find out if certain blocks of text have been copied directly. Ryan mentions her own experiences using Internet search engines, advising readers to place quotation marks around a string of words or a phrase so that the search is narrower and more targeted.

Using Search Engines to Catch Cheaters

Ryan also identifies several methods that teachers can use to detect preliminarily whether a student's material is original. First, plagiarized material may stand out because of a noticeable change of context within the text. For example, Ryan recalls one student who was supposed to write about security policies in Korea but whose paper contained material about Massachusetts law. That the student failed even to review the material being copied demonstrates that plagiarism is largely driven by laziness.