cheating/plagiarism

As a grader for one of the history professors, I was sure I'd run into obvious evidence of cheating, but so far I have not. I'm not sure it would make a difference as nearly all of the tests I have graded thus far have been almost uniformly mediocre. If someone is cheating off someone else who is getting a 28% on a test, they've received their reward. That said, I'm sure cheating is pretty prevalent on campus. I guess I don't have a lot of faith in people's integrity.

As for plagiarism, I know that's a problem here. The mere fact that there is a push to use Turn It In indicates that the professors are concerned about it. As a former writing tutor, I know that many people here have trouble putting together a coherent sentence, let alone a paper, so it wouldn't surprise me if people were pulling paragraphs from un-cited sources. One professor has told me how a student copy-pasted a Wikipedia article and handed it in as their paper. As ridiculous as that sounds, it doesn't really surprise me.

As someone who has been an active member of a blogging community for over four years, I run into plagiarism occasionally, other sites pull my content and tout it as their own. More often than not, however, there is proper citation (or what the blogging community considers proper citation). So, I think there is something to be said about having an open publishing community, where observers and content owners can spot issues like that so easily. In an academic circle as small as Cornerstone, that's much harder.

The wider world has mechanisms for catching plagiarism and one that is rising in importance is the internet. It makes it possible to type a phrase, hit enter, and get a list of places that phrase is found. As more and more print content goes online, catching plagiarism from previously non-internet sources will be much easier.