College Essay Plagiarism

Shelley has worked at several institutions, including Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Rice University and the University of Edinburgh. Kaple is a writer, musician, and ethnographer specializing in the study of music, language, and American culture. In 2012, developers of Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection software, found more than 50 percent of college papers contained plagiarized material from the Internet.

This is one of the quickest, easiest scholarships you’ll ever apply for.

Plagiarism is not a new problem in academia, but it is a serious issue.

If you just find someone else’s work and say it’s your own, you’re not actually learning anything. When you finish school, that’s knowledge that you missed out on, stuff you needed to know for the real world. Plagiarism is a serious thing and you want to make sure to avoid it at all costs.

Sure, you won’t use everything you learn in high school and college, and you might save some time on an assignment by plagiarizing, but is it worth risking all that time and money and your reputation? Note: Did you know you could win a $10,000 scholarship for college or grad school just by registering on College Xpress?

Technology makes it possible for students to easily purchase assignments from paper mills and submit the work as their own.

Even copy and paste functions may inadvertently lead to accidental plagiarism.This guide also demonstrates the proper way to quote, paraphrase and cite from text sources and provides current resources that explain how to recognize plagiarism and prevent it. Is it Internet access, academic competitiveness, or pressure to excel from sports teams, family, or advisers?Shelley Errington Nicholson Shelley Errington Nicholson is a doctoral student in educational policy and leadership at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A 2011 survey of college presidents by Pew Research Center discovered a majority (55 percent) believed plagiarism in student papers had increased over the previous 10 years because of Internet websites, blogs and social media sites.Unfortunately, along with creative expression comes the risk of plagiarism.Students plagiarize for many reasons, according to the Council of Writing Program Administrators, including poor time management, fear of failure, disregard for consequences and carelessness.And as easy as it was for you to hop on Google and find that essay, it’s just as easy for your professor to do the same…and fail you. Let’s say you’re writing a paper about civil engineering and you look it up in the encyclopedia to get a definition.Second of all, many professors run essay they receive through special plagiarism-detecting software—software that’s way better at finding plagiarism than you think. If you read the encyclopedia article and explain what you learned in your paper, that’s not plagiarism.So any time you want to use someone else’s words or ideas, make sure you give credit to that person. In terms of how to cite something, different schools and different departments have different citations styles (MLA, APA, and Chicago styles, just to name a few), but your professor should make clear how to cite your work at the beginning of the semester, so make sure you know what they expect from you.Okay, so now that you’re super clear on what plagiarism looks like, let’s dig a little bit deeper into why you should never, ever do it (no matter how tempting it can be).The three most common examples are taking another author’s musical idea (melody), lyrics, or reusing a portion of a sound recording (sampling).Copyright Infringement While plagiarism is an ethical issue, copyright infringement is a legal construct.