| "Plagiarism is theft and
lying--using information that doesn't belong to you and passing it off as your
own"
(Brandt, 2002). |
| The Crime |
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In
October, 2000, a Gallup poll identified education and a decline in
ethics as the top two problems facing the country (Statistics,
2000).
By all
accounts, cheating and plagiarism appear to be serious problems. |
Surveys and studies indicate that
- 70 percent of university students admit to cheating
on exams and 84 percent admit to cheating on writing assignments (Gerdeman).
- Over 50 percent of high school students admit to
having plagiarized work from the Internet (Slobogin, 2002).
- 12 percent of students in a study of 31 prestigious
universities identified themselves as regular cheaters in 1991
(Carroll, 2002).
- "58.3 percent of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5 percent did so in
1989" (Altschuler, 2000).
- incidents of cheating by college students doubled
from the 1960's to the earlier 1990's (Carroll, 2002).
- between 1993 and 1997, cheating increased at the
University of California at Berkley by an estimated 744% (Carroll,
2002).
- 52 percent of college students in 1999-2000
"reported copying a few sentences from a Web site without citing
a source" (Carroll, 2002).
(Click Motivation
to continue.)
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