Student Plagiarism: Are Teachers Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem? (original) (raw)

With the rise of the Internet, students now have almost limitless access to information, texts, and other people's words and ideas. For most teachers, this technology is both a blessing and a curse. In the pursuit of learning, students have lightning-fast access to vast storehouses of information, increasingly rich in its presentation and complex in its links and interconnections. Yet what students can find with computers also comes to them virtually unscreened and unevaluated, making the Internet like a huge shopping bazaar where good finds are hidden among large quantities of worthless junk. Worse, increasingly sophisticated search engines can find text -or entire papers -that respond to many common writing assignments: Kimbel Library at Coastal Carolina University has amassed over 250 Web sites where students can find thousands of papers representing hundreds of different courses in dozens of different fields (Internet 2003). So enabled, students can earn decent grades not fo...