Observer

Issue date: 2/13/06 Section: News

As the semester carries on, the desire students get to plagiarize to make life easier for themselves grows with each new assignment.  And according to some professors, plagiarism is a major concern at Rutgers-Newark.

Even though professors tell students constantly that there are new programs on the Internet that show whether or not work is being copied, some of the students still turn to the Internet to find an easy way out.

Phillip Cerny, a political science professor at R-N, said he is "very concerned about plagiarism" after he discovered three "particularly egregious examples" of cheating by students on a term paper assignment last semester.

"It is important to tell students clearly, early on in the course, what plagiarism consists of," he said. 

Cerny distributes to each student at the start of a semester a hand-out that clearly defines plagiarism.

If Cerny takes a while to grade his students' papers, it's because he's combing through them to make sure there is no plagiarism.

"I spend days Googling the papers  - manually entering phrases, etc. - and highlighting the similarities."

In the case of his "egregious" spring 2005 term papers, "all three were failed, and one suspended for a semester."

Not every professor has such a hard time with students copying the work of others.  John Straus, a professor of English at R-N, said he gives assignments that make plagiarism unnecessary or difficult to do.

"In my classes, plagiarism rarely occurs because the assignments I give ask students to show their own thinking in their own voice. I can recognize the sound of a writer's voice," he said.

"The students know that quoting and acknowledging other voices can make their writing stronger. Why try to pass someone else's work off as their own?"

The university's policy on academic integrity defines plagiarism as the "representation of the words or ideas of another as one's own in any academic exercise."

To avoid plagiarism, the policy suggests students properly quote from texts and cite paraphrasing.

Cerny said there are three reasons why students turn to plagiarizing instead of doing the work themselves. 

"The first is panic about not having done the work. The second is naiveté; sometimes students seem to think their job is to find the right things to copy, rather than to write things in their own words and to have the occasional original thought.

"The third, of course, is outright cheating. I think the first two are more important, day-to-day, and the most difficult to deter."

Continued...

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