Brooke Kelly
Managing Editor
Imagine being called to your graduate school dean’s office only to find out upon arrival that you were getting indefinitely kicked out of the program for plagiarizing. Sound unreal? It was astonishing to me when I first heard this, but it can happen at Jackson State University and at college campuses around the nation.
Students know plagiarism is wrong, but who really cares about plagiarizing? Statistics prove that for the most part, students don’t.
Plagarism.org reports that in a U.S. News and World Report article, almost 85 percent of college students said cheating was necessary to get ahead. The surveys also indicated that 80 percent of high school students considered to be high achievers admitted to cheating. This information came out in 1999, and I’d assume those numbers are up by now.
At JSU, the question is, do you believe plagiarism is a problem? If you believe it is widespread, do you believe consequences are adequately being enforced? Lastly, and most importantly, do you believe that students who continually get by with plagiarizing or don’t even realize they are plagiarizing will face academic and/or professional consequences later in life?
While it could be guessed that some if not most students don’t always strive for complete academic honesty, some students would argue that some professors don’t care. According to the JSU student handbook academic sanctions, probation, suspension, and expulsion all can result from plagiarizing and committing academic dishonesty, but how often are these punishments given out? When students believe an instructor is unconcerned or a subject matter is boring or unimportant, plagiarism.org reports they don’t feel as bad about cheating.
Some professors really try to help students prevent plagiarism in their papers, but some don’t question student work that has been plagiarized. Maybe some of the latter professors don’t have time to thoroughly search for plagiarism, or maybe they haven’t become familiar with plagiarism detection websites.
Whatever the case, I believe both students and professors have a vested interest in reducing the amount of plagiarism on campus.
To reduce plagiarism on campus, the university must enforce academic sanctions and further consequences for plagiarism in order for students to care about academic dishonesty. More professors will have to start helping students understand all the different ways to not accidentally plagiarize by not attributing sources.
The Richard Wright Center for the Written Word is one place students can go to find out how to avoid accidental plagiarism. Writecheck.com is one of the leading websites used by students to avoid plagiarizing. The website goes through over 14 billion current and archived web pages; more than 150 million student papers; and over 90,000 top publications including text book publishers, newspapers, and magazines; to determine to what extent a student paper is plagiarized before the student turns the paper in to his or her professor.
At the end of the day, you get out of an education what you put in to it, and when you continually use other people’s brain power to do your work you’re left with as much knowledge as you had before the assignment.
Every student has to decide for him or herself what he or she is looking to get out of a college course and the whole collegiate experience.
