Ways Students Plagiarize

            Let me say first:  Most students are honest.  Still, we are in the middle of October, and I have already had at least one student who plagiarized his paper.  What a shame.  He could have earned a low passing grade if he had turned in his own work even if the quality wasn’t high.  Instead, he earned a zero, and now I will be watching him like a hawk.

            Plagiarism has become very easy in the age of the Internet.  The more that there is posted online, the more there is for people to copy.  But let me tell you one sad truth about plagiarizing: It takes as much effort to plagiarize well as it does to write the paper yourself.

            Here are some of the ways my students plagiarize:

1.      Copy and paste someone else’s whole essay/article into his paper.  This is the laziest method of plagiarizing, and there are two problems with it.  The first problem is that he is copying someone else’s writing.  What is the chance that what he is copying and taking credit as his own will match his style of writing?  Teachers learn styles from reading all assignments.  The second problem is that lazy plagiarist will not take the time to delete links from the paper.  Yes, I have caught students simply because the blue underline link was still in the paper.

2.      Copy and paste from a number of essays/articles into his paper.  While more effort has been put into this form of plagiarism, it still doesn’t work well.  Now the person has two or three or more styles of writing in his paper.  The result is a paper that often jumps around and changes styles from paragraph to paragraph.

3.      Copy and paste from a number of essays/articles into his paper changing just enough words to not get detected by automatic programs.  Most students do not do this well either because they insert words randomly without taking time to read and find the right words to substitute.  By the time a student does that, he might as well have just written the paper.  It ends up being about the same amount of time.

So, if you do have to write and you are nervous, then work through the nervousness.  Don’t plagiarize.  It’s not worth it, and you won’t get any better at writing by not writing.  Find someone to help you write.  If you are a college student, go to the writing center at your college.  Almost all colleges offer tutoring services in writing that’s included in tuition costs.