If you have taken an English class anywhere, you know that plagiarism isn’t allowed.
In fact, it’s a serious issue-one which many schools are attempting to stop by using online plagiarism reviews.
Here’s a basic summary: the most used of these sites, www.turnitin.com, allows a teacher to enter in the text of a student’s paper for review. The Web site takes the text and compares it to the text of books, other published sources and other papers entered into the database by anyone else using the site.
Once the comparison is complete, the teacher is sent a color-coded copy of the student’s paper. These color-coded sections indicate where the student has plagiarized, whether it is from a book, magazine, Web site or another student’s paper.
State’s policy requires that all graduate students teaching an English class take up two copies of every student’s paper: a hard copy and a copy on disk.
The traditional hard copy is used as it always has been, to be graded by the teacher. The disk/e-mail copy is used to make entering each student’s paper into the plagiarism review site easier for the teacher.
Thus, for those taking English classes taught by graduate assistants, State requires that all of your papers be reviewed electronically for plagiarism.
This method of grading should be stopped, not only at State, but at all schools.
Copying another person’s work, words or ideas is wrong. But requiring a student go to such great lengths to help prevent plagiarism is not fair.
When writing a paper or essay, most teachers require copies of sources and some form of citation within the paper. These methods, though not 100 percent effective, should be efficient enough for a teacher to recognize a plagiarized paper.
After a student spends several hours, even days, working to finish a paper, he should not be required to go to extra lengths to make sure his teacher believes his work is truly his own.
After all, teachers are paid to grade and check a student’s work, not only for grammar and content, but for plagiarism as well.
This system that requires the disk/e-mail copy along with the hard copy seems to violate the legal precept that all people are “innocent until proven guilty.”
When a student has written a paper, cited his sources and provided copies of all sources, his work should be done. If all of that is done correctly, that should be plenty proof of his original work and accurate citing.
Requiring that a student turn in additional resources assumes his guilt before his paper is even read.
Preventing plagiarism in schools is important, and teachers should be careful to recognize plagiarizers to the best of their ability. But it should be done in a way that doesn’t inconvenience students.
Proving innocence should not be a burden placed on a student who hasn’t given any reason for a teacher to suspect his guilt.
State’s policy that requires students to turn in papers on disk or e-mail as well as a hardcopy to the teacher should be amended, thus ending the practice of having a student prove his innocence before a reason for guilt as been established.
This policy was established because the administration feared plagiarism was a problem among students, and they were looking for a way to deter and catch plagiarizers.
Instead of forcing such policies on both students and teachers, students should be held responsible for their work. Accurate citations, correctly paraphrased quotes and grammatically correct content should be carefully considered by the student when writing and the teacher when grading.
But ultimately, it should be the responsibility of the teacher alone, without the help of an Internet site, to find errors in a paper, whether they are content, grammar, citation or plagiarism errors.
Shaina Hanson is a freshman political science major. She can be reached at [email protected].