Unoriginal Sins
Victoria Laurie
Are we creating a generation of people unable to distinguish between an original idea and a
borrowed one?
'Cyber-cheating' and 'cyber-shoplifting' are new words coined to describe the worldwide
rise in plagiarism and abuse of copyright. Universities, in particular, are reeling from this new
version of plain old academic dishonesty, with students copying entire slabs or essays with a
click-and-drag motion, buying essays from cheat sites; or even paying people to write them.
Jan Thomas, a pro-vice chancellor at Perth's Murdoch University, knows how easy it is to 'lift'
information from the internet. On her desk is a 2000-word essay liberally highlighted with yellow
markings. On a sheet beneath is the article the student cribbed from. His entire philosophy
essay on friendship has been copied verbatim, with the exception of about 50 words. 'This
student probably put "friendship" in the search engine and found a 1996 article about Aristotle's
writing on achieving a good life,' says Thomas. 'But this is an extreme example.'
All Murdoch University first-year students are given mandatory instruction on
referencing and critiquing other sources. 'It's three strikes and you're out,' says Thomas.
'But you can be excluded from the university on the first occasion if the breach is severe
enough.'
If she has suspicions, Thomas uses a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! to enter key
phrases and find out if slabs of text have been lifted. But it's time-consuming. 'In a division of
500 students last year I saw five definite cases. It probably means we are missing about 50.'
One of Thomas's colleagues in another department says she deals with 20 cases of plagiarism
a semester. She says some students change every third word to avoid detection on search
engines. One student even plagiarised her bibliography - detected when eight of the sources
she cited were not stocked in the university library.
Plagiarism and cheating are, of course, not new - what is new is the fact offenders are being
caught, says Thomas. 'I think we're more rigorous now.'
Current reliable figures on the incidence of plagiarism are surprisingly scarce, perhaps
because universities are loath to reveal them. This is one of the reasons CAVAL, a
university-owned information resources group, conducted its own investigation last year on
behalf of six Victorian universities. It checked nearly 2000 essays over 20 subjects using a
new plagiarism-detection program called Turnitin.com, which can scan 2.6 billion journals
for matching text. Plagiarised parts of an essay are highlighted in red and the original source
displayed.
Research leader Steve O'Connor says one in eight students was found to have
copied 25 per cent or more of an essay from the internet. But he believes this is just the
tip of the iceberg and estimates as many as 500,000 essays a year could contain some
plagiarism. Adding to the problem are a host of new websites such as 'School Sucks',
'Other People's Papers' and 'The Evil House of Cheat', which offer downloadable university
papers and essays.
Dr Garry Allan, director of information technology at RMIT, says plagiarism 'needs to be
addressed within the framework of academic integrity. [The problem is] social values and
nature of learning are lagging behind technology.' Allan floats an intriguing idea: one day every
computer user in the world may find themselves pressing an 'originality check' button on their
keyboard. 'At the moment you have a spellchecker in your word processor. In the future you'll
have an originality checking button and when you press it, it will underline in a particular colour
all the text strings that are not identifiably original,' says Allan.
QUESTIONS 14-17
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet, write:
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
QUESTIONS 18-23
Using information in the reading passage, match each of the following actions with the
purpose it was meant to achieve.
Write the appropriate letters A-G in boxes 18-23. There are more letters than you will need.
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