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Probably the most detestable task for a student is the projects they have
to do at school. Not a few resorted to cheating that was thought to be the
easiest
solution to the problem. Copied papers were handed in and claimed to be the
original ones. Now that the command of the Internet has become inversely
proportionate to age, the process of cheating has turned out extremely easy.
High school, college and university students log on the internet download
papers or articles and present them as their own. And since there is plenty
of material in the English language, the cheating phenomenon in English speaking
countries has acquired the magnitude of an epidemic.
A research being conducted in the University of Virginia, 122 students of
which are being accused of plagiarism in an introductory physics course, has
brought the issue to the surface. Yet, the problem is not confined within universities
alone. Donald Makabe, a Business Administration professor at the Rutgers University,
has been conducting annual researches focused on plagiarism within the educational
system. In his last research 4,500 students attending 25 USA high schools took
part. More than half claimed that last year, they copied parts or complete
papers without referring to their sources. The percentage of university students
who claimed to have cheated, amounts to 10-20%. Professor Makabe has said that
he is utterly worried, not by the rapidly increasing percentage of plagiarism
alone, but also by the fact that the perpetration of plagiarism is being demoralized
really fast. “There is gradual corruption having to do with concepts
such as “right and wrong” he stated in the New York Times newspaper.
A lot of high school students claim that cheating is not an evil act. “Everybody
does it,” they say.
University students are more cynical. “The comments the researches are
accompanied with, never fail to surprise me”, Dr. Makabe says. “I
get surprised by the fact that young people put the blame of cheating on social
problems so easily. A lot of students say: “When Clinton can do this
or Mike Milken (author’s note: the king of jack-bonds who devastated
many an investor and social security organizations in the USA selling totally
worthless high risk bonds and was finally forced to pay a single fine) can
do that, why what we have been doing has to be evil? What they are saying is
really, absolutely persuasive”, he adds.
So, where does the solution to the problem lie? There is a new website under
the title turnitin.com that offers to solve it. Schools and Universities sign
in for an annual fee of $ 1,000 and 2,000 respectively, and teachers submit
the papers they are handed in by their students there. The computer compares
them with hundreds of thousands of written documents that are on the web and
emails the results. Mr. Steven Hardinger, a UCLA professor, claims that he
uses this website not so much to restrain but to prevent students from cheating. “Using
turnitin.com is more beneficial as a deterrent of plagiarism. We don’t
want cheating in our University, we don’t want plagiarists, but we do
want our students to be aware of the fact that we know what’s going on
around us…”
By Pashos Mandravelis.