Plagiarism Case

Plagiarism has long been an important concern in academia. In the days before a world wide web existed, plagiarists could turn to their local library or their local nerd for help in order to perpetuate their fraud upon their professors. Now, with technology advancing faster and faster still, information is blasted at us in incomprehensible volumes from all directions with minimal policing capabilities available. Cheating, for those without integrity or ethics, was probably always an easy decision. Now though, because of the accessibility and ease, plagiarism, particularly from the internet, has become a vast landscape of cherry trees from which to pick. I suspect the temptation to pilfer information from the internet is greater today than ever. We have more accessibility to more information on more devices with less time because of our full-time jobs or second jobs; and we're sitting, anonymously, in large classes or online classes where students don't even have to show up and look a professor in the face. The growing problem with plagiarism, according to research by Donald McCabe, a professor of management at Rutgers University (Kadaroo, 2012), is that students don't realize they're cheating. I think that's a naïve view and I question the validity of his survey results. We've become a society of denial. If we think we're going to be in trouble, we deny we knew it was bad or that we knew anything about it. Plagiarism is theft and I have serious doubts of its "dubious nature."

Preventing plagiarism will be a long road to walk. Unfortunately, there will always be people looking for the easy way out. I think the answer to preventing many of society's ills lies in accountability and it begins with our youth. Our children need to be instilled with pride when they do good work and they need to understand disappointment when they don't. I feel most adults are beyond retraining, so swift and stiff consequences should be the result of their plagiarism. In theory, one punishment doled out harshly could be a deterrent for everyone else. I feel that my generation was among the last to learn that a job well done is of value and that your word is your bond. We need to introduce that back into our children's lives and grandchildren's lives so there's hope for the future.