The internet is making it easier to copy and paste
bodies of text into coursework to save time and effort for
students, post-graduates and even
teachers
Recently a German minister has resigned after
copying huge chunks of his thesis, this also comes when Colonel
Gaddafi’s son has the London School of Economics on his back as to
whether he plagiarised and had a ghost writer for his
coursework.
Although both these cases are high profile,
they are merely being used as the scapegoats, with so many students
given access through Google; yahoo etc to a vast library of texts,
the opportunity to gather material has greatly increased. It’s not
surprising that many students and graduates are being found to plagiarise,
because of the availability of such things as Google scholar the
information available for coursework is already there.
In the UK, universities have been using a
computer programme called Turnitin which analyses suspicious
essays. The company that provides the software said “The software
scans text for passages which match a database of 155 million
student papers, 110 million documents, and 14 billion web pages.
Back in 2006/7, more than 600,000 essays were checked in this way
in the UK. By last year, that figure leapt to three million.”
Although the software isn’t fool proof,
because of the amount of text that will be well picked quotes, it
will still need a human to check over the results to make sure
everything picked up has been referenced properly.
There are going to be graduates out there that
have achieved their graduate job and have plagiarised their way
through university. But what happens when they go into their
graduate scheme and they cannot think for themselves and have to
continuously take other peoples work.
Share and Connect
What are these?
|
Follow on Twitter |
 |
Link to us |
 |
Read our Blogg |
 |
Connect with us |
 |