TL;DR: Plagiarism has become a problem that is very well known throughout the schooling scene with students and teachers/professors alike. The true culprit behind its increase is the growth of technology and the Internet. We can fix this with certain solutions that need to be spearheaded by teachers and school administrations.

In the wake of the growth of plagiarism and its increasing occurrence, an argument has formulated between people who believe that technology has made plagiarism easier and others who believe that it has made it harder. There is no doubt that the wide availability of material and works which students can easily access, and even copy and paste, has made plagiarism a much easier proposition. Now while there may be a few objections to my claim, none eclipse the fact that plagiarism would be much more difficult and tasking if the Internet did not exist.

Like I said before, there are objections and people who claim that technology advances have made plagiarism harder for students. Possibly the biggest of these claims, and probably the most relevant one, is the arrival of websites that check work for plagiarism. The most prominent example is turnitin.com. Websites like these use complicated algorithms that check all other work on the Internet for material that is the same as in the work the student handed in. They have even become so efficient that students have tried to trick them and failed. One example of this is a student changing all of the e’s in their work to italic. The algorithms have figured this out and have made it almost impossible to trick. Although this makes it harder to plagiarize and is a useful tool, it is not being utilized enough.

There is another instance of plagiarism which relates to my experience in the computer science world. The website stackoverflow.com has become a valuable tool for developers as it has created on online community in which you can share code and projects. When in the wrong hands, however, this can be copied and used by someone claiming it as their own. This is a very strong example in which the growth of technology and its wealth of available resources has made plagiarism much easier. Without a website like this, it would be much harder to copy someone else’s code whether it be out of a book or some other source. John Larson, a professor at Purdue University claims that all of this new technology has made plagiarism easier by saying: “In the last 10 years, the Internet has become an amazing source of plagiarized material. You can type in a string of words that amount to the topic of the questions and it’s not too hard to get 50 to 100 hits that you can then go through and start copying paragraph after paragraph of material” (Goodrich). Dr. Larson makes the important point that not only does the Internet provide millions upon millions of sources, it also gives the student the ability to get custom results pertaining very specifically to their topic.

One solution that I believe would go a long way in stopping plagiarism is in the realm of bibliographies. Teachers and school administrations should start enforcing bibliographies a lot more because one key to defeating plagiarism is to convey to students why exactly it is wrong. If students were to learn more about why bibliographies are necessary and putting them on most, if not all, of the work that they hand in, it will resonate more in their heads that plagiarism really is stealing. Although students could possibly just lie and put random sources in their bibliography, I believe it would be a solid first step in decreasing plagiarism cases. Along with this, the technological advances that we have made in order to create the services such as turnitin.com should not go to waste. With teachers today still a little too old to appreciate and really understand technology, they are hesitant to bring it into their classrooms. As the next generation comes to the helm, I believe these technologies should and will play a large roll in stopping plagiarism once and for all.

Source code security plugin flickr photo by superk8nyc shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Editor, ALLIE GOODRICH Assistant Features. “Technology Makes Cheating Easier.” Purdue Exponent. N.p., 03 Sept. 2012. Web. 01 May 2017. http://www.purdueexponent.org/features/article_66d33fd9-b9e4-5a8e-bb71-33bead3c3f48.html.