Plagiarism is one of the plagues scourging not only the American education system, but also America itself. Whether it is a Montana congressman or Notre Dame football players, it seems that passing off someone else's work as their own is something too many people are trying to do.
When something becomes a major problem in our country, something should be done to stop it. When drugs became a major problem in the 1980s, President Reagan began his war on drugs. In recent years as human trafficking has become a major problem in Northwest Ohio because of its proximity to I-75 and the Ohio Turnpike, law enforcement agencies have increased their efforts to fix the problem.
While plagiarism isn't anywhere near the importance of the wars on drug use and human trafficking, it is a problem which needs to be fixed. College professors and high school teachers are leading the way through the use of a variety of plagiarism detection tools like Turnitin with more success every year.
In an article about plagiarism from NPR, students seem to have mixed emotions about high-tech plagiarism detection, and many teachers appear to have the same ambivalence. Likewise, I at times struggle to know if a student simply doesn't know any better or if there was intent to cheat. Those times of ambivalence are often few and far between, though, because most of the examples of plagiarism I find are pretty clear cut: the student has copied and pasted large blocks of word-for-word text from a document. Is that ever accidental? No.
Will Van Buren ever start using a plagiarism detection service to identify plagiarists? Would it deter students from plagiarizing? Would the service ever falsely identify a student as a plagiarist? These are all questions we would need to consider if we ever did go that direction.
I'm interested in any opinions anyone has regarding plagiarism in general and plagiarism detection services. It's a problem education professionals cannot avoid because we must prepare our students for college and beyond.
