Plagiarism can be divided into three basic varieties:
- Using another person's words without giving them credit. The rise of the Internet and advances in technology make this form of plagiarism easier than ever - with a simple point, click, cut, and paste, the student has someone else's words in his or her paper.
- Taking another person's ideas without giving them credit. Students often think that by paraphrasing, they can avoid plagiarism. However, simply changing words around or substituting synonyms is not enough - credit must always be given to the author with the original idea. This can be a difficult concept for students to grasp.
- Citing sources that you never looked at, or making up references. This form of plagiarism is likely to occur when a student is required to have a certain number of references in their paper. Instead of doing research on their own, students may be tempted to steal another person's sources.
How
common is plagiarism?
In 2001, Donald
L. McCabe of Rutgers University performed a study of 4,500 high
school students that found that, "74 percent of students admitted
to cheating seriously on an exam one or more times; 15 percent admitted
to turning in a paper largely taken from a Web site or a paper mill;
and approximately 51 percent admitted to not citing the source from
a Web site when using a few of its sentences in their papers"
(Straw).
Another study performed in 2002 asked 698 undergraduate students how often they plagiarized. In this study, only 24.5 percent admitted to having cut and pasted text from the Internet without proper citation. Interestingly, more than 90 percent of the undergraduates reported that their peers were probably doing the same (Kellog).
An article on the National Science Teacher Association web site reports that, "In another poll, 80 percent of top high school students admitted to cheating during their academic careers, the highest percentage since the "Who's Who Among American High School Students" survey began 29 years ago. In the survey, 95 percent of cheaters said they had never been caught" (Toppo).
Why
do students plagiarize?
From the University
of Alberta Libraries website:
Lack of
research skills
Problems
evaluating Internet sources
Confusion
between plagiarism and paraphrasing
Careless
notetaking
Confusion
about how to properly cite sources
External
factors (pressure from family/peers; attitudes toward school, etc.)
Internal
factors (poor time management, lack of organization, etc.)
Culturally
based attitudes toward plagiarism
How
do students plagiarize?
One easy way for students to plagiarize is to cut and paste text
from websites on the Internet. This cyberplagiarism can be difficult
to pinpoint. Envision a paper where a student has lifted a sentence
or two directly from one Internet source, inserted some original
material, followed by a close paraphrasing of a different web source,
etc.
Students
utilize free or for-profit Internet paper mills. The paper
mills that charge can be very expensive, but there is still
no guarantee of the quality of the work the student will
be receiving. Papers on these sites are often organized
by topic. Many of them, particulary on the free paper mill
sites, are written at a high school level.
Using work that has been written by another student is a
popular way to plagiarize. For instance, students copy other
students' work that has been posted to the Internet as parts
of personal or educational sites. Students also turn in
papers that have been turned in by other students in previous
years. Fraternity and sorority test files are still popular
sources for cheating.
Students copy from books and reference materials,
though they often hesitate to use books because they are
unsure how much a professor would be capable of recognizing.
Plagiarized material may come from journal articles found
in library databases such as EBSCOHost and LexisNexis, therefore
they are not detectable by search engines.
What
are paper mills?
According to the University
of Alberta Libraries website, a paper mill is "a term applied
to providers of pre-written term papers and other "educational
tools" via the Internet. Some web sites offer thousands of
papers online." Simply put, a paper mill is a place on the
web where students can download papers on a wide variety of topics.
Some paper mills such as BigNerds.com offer term papers for free. These sites are generally divided according to topic. Other paper mills operate on a trade basis - in order to recieve a paper, a student must submit a paper. Many other paper mills charge for access to their papers. Prices can range anywhere from $5 an essay, to $20 a page.
There are hundreds of paper mills on the Internet. For a list of many of them, see Kimbel Library's site on Internet Paper Mills.