"The Increased Need For Academic Integrity In The Digital Age"

 “The Increased Need For Academic Integrity In The Digital Age”

At first I was skeptical about the assignment from my Professor to plagiarize a 1000 words essay assignment from the Educational Technology on line course at Central Michigan University.  It was very easy to do.   Find the information, cut, paste, and save into a “My Documents” file.    The hardest part was to have it make sense for anyone who reads it.  Writing the essay did help me to learn a lot about plagiarism which I am guessing is the main purpose behind the assignment as well as the right time to teach about it as I become a student researcher.  The first time I scored a 62% and I know the software did not catch everything.  I did write about two paragraphs and did not get a chance to run it through a second time as of this writing.

One of the things I did learn through my research on plagiarism is how teachers are reacting to the increase.  It is forcing them to develop new lessons to prove knowledge gained by students, to show they know how to write, find research, cite sources, and draw their own conclusions based on what they know.  Many teachers are changing the way they are teaching and requiring term papers.  Students are doing more writing in the classroom to avoid the temptations to cheat.  It is always interesting to see how one issue leads to new needs.

The rise of plagiarism seems to have already created jobs for computer programmers to create easy to use software to find copied work.  I am wondering if the need to policing writing will lead to creating even more jobs in the future.  It is the computer age and this is part of computer work.

The increased computer internet usage and the popularity of the topic it is going to continue to be a huge topic and copying will more easily be caught with the development of internet tools.  It is a sad thing to see when someone is caught cheating.  Cheating is almost always frowned upon in society.  More frequently we are hearing about famous authors being accused of plagiarism, song writers stealing words and music from other writers and musicians, people taking parts of other curriculum's and not giving the original writers credit, artists using the style of famous painters and computer programmers stealing the groups work from college projects.  The list goes on and probably will continue because people do it with the hopes of not getting caught and in the hopes of big success and money making.

The more plagiarism is debated the more reasons will surface about why people plagiarize.  All in all it is not the right thing to do.  The knowledge about how to cite another person’s work is out there no matter what the reason is for using the work.  Could it be we are dealing with a shift in cultural values of our society?  Students from cultures which have a more collective sense of identity, for example, may have a difficult time understanding the distinctions some cultures draw between individual and public property.[1]

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[1]   Educational Tips on Plagiarism Prevention                                                                >ttp://www.plagiarism.org/plag_article_educational_tips_on_plagiarism_prevention.html retrieved on January 15, 2011.

Cartoon Image Source Page:  http://freeware4review.blogspot.com.com/2010/08/free-anti-plagiarism-checkers-for-your-html    retrieved on January 15, 2011.