Monday, April 6, 2009

Plagiarism

In the magazine called "The Journal" there is an interesting article called "Taking The Work Out Of Homework". Matt Villano the author of this interesting article is researching and interviewing teachers about catching copycats in the act. Since the internet is being used to research assignments, teachers are finding that students are using the cut-and paste method of plagiarism. Instead of creating their own work they are taking from other authors and putting them in their reports. In this article you will read about how a teacher named Roland Herberg at Oak Park High School in Ventura, CA assigned his Advanced Placement English students to create a brochure. After the class finished reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the class was to pair up and make a brochure from the book that had to contain an essay about totalitarian tendencies in modern society. The work had to be orginal! Unfortunately one pair of students didn't understand the concept of orginal. Two 17 year olds created a brochure titled "Religion is Terrorism" and thought that Mr. Herberg wouldn't be suspicious. Mr. Herberg thought that the essay was to sophisticated for two 17 year olds to come up with on their own and decided to see if the words in the essay belonged to another writer. Mr. Herberg went to http://www.google.com/ and typed in "Religion is Terrorism." He discovered that the first four pages were used in their brochures taken from a book on the same subject. Herberg gave the students a C- and confronted the students about the plagiarism. The students confessed to the accusation but didn't think what they did was wrong. But these teeenagers aren't the first to plagiarise. Since plagiarism is becoming world wide educators are taking the matter into their own hands and fighting back with technology. Now teachers are using solutions such as www.ipardigms.com and www.questia.com . These websites help teachers catch students in the act of cheating. So as a warning to all students who are planning on cheating or plagiarising: BEWARE! Teachers have their ways and will eventually catch on.

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