After reading the responses from both professors, I realized that they both had good arguments. Sadler, a professor at University of South Florida, argues that the issue of internet plagiarism is wrong. One point she made was that plagiarism could raise the teachers grading scale making the honest students have weaker papers and those who plagiarize have stronger papers. As a whole, Sadler does not approve of plagiarism and it’s unfair to students and teachers. Russell Hunt, a professor at St. Thomas University, doesn’t necessarily disagree with plagiarism. As a result to how the school and grading system has been created, hunt feels that students turn to plagiarism to satisfy certain requirements. Hunt even says that plagiarism challenges the overwhelming pressure for grades which our institutions have created and foster. As a college student, I notice how a lot of students plagiarize way too much and that isn’t okay. Although there are times when the school punishes students for plagiarism in which there was no need for punishment. For example, I could write a paper that was written on the top of my head, but when I put it in Turnitin.com, it will say I plagiarized more that 20%. I would have to say plagiarism is looked at way too closely and it’s need to be allowed to a certain extent.
I agree with the fact that plagiarism is checked way too closely. Though I felt like Sadler had much more reasoning in why plagiarism is wrong. Plagiarism is definitely wrong because it is unfair to the students that put all their effort into one assignment. It abuses teacher policies and its not helping a student learn. Hunt definitely has a point to why student cheat because they are pressured to get those good grades and therefore they plagiarize. But I don’t think it’s strong enough to make plagiarism a positive thing. I think plagiarism is ok when you are using it the right way. If you understand what you read and what you taken from the text I think it should be ok to just take parts of it. I feel like all teachers teach differently and student should be able to use outside resources to support themselves.
ReplyDeleteI feel that some of the programs that check for plagiarism are inaccurate. As college students we do most of our research for papers on line. There are plenty of websites for us to get information for our papers on. The problem with the programs that check for plagiarism continuously flags the paper as having more than the 20%. I have written papers that I did not copy from other sources and it insist I did. It is actually very frustrating. I tend to agree with Professor Hunt’s opinion that the pressure placed on students puts pressure on them to turn to plagiarism.
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