Please reply to: Plagiarism is one of the main issues in colleges which heavily affects the integrity and originality of student content. Since the internet has so much information for students to use, students are prone to rely on plagiarism just to get the assignment over with.
The colleges use certain approaches to prevent plagiarism from happening. Some of these approaches involve seeing plagiarism as a matter of morality and treating it as breaking the rules or a crime (Boss, 2017, p. 356). I heard about how plagiarism is considered a crime or a way of breaking the rules of the college which has been something I made sure not to do. In every class I have taken since I started college, it is a rule we all must follow as students to ensure original content and to credit the authors for the work we used.
The traditional methods of preventing plagiarism are not as effective as they seem. They often fail because students do not have a solid idea of what it means to have academic integrity (Boss, 2017, p. 356). Schools that push the notion of academic integrity cannot necessarily get the students to understand it as they want them to. As a result, students continue to plagiarize.
During the 1960s and 70s, the originality of student content was much different than today. During the 60s and 70s, it was the peak for unique, isolated, authentic selves for students and their writings but compared to todays standards, the perspective of originality has shifted to attempting to try different approaches, sharing freely, and they are more focused on success which has enabled them to become more likely to be accepted to highly selective institutions (Boss, 2017, p. 356). As a result of this shift, students went from the traditional way of writing assignments to using other ways to achieve their goals with their assignments.
After looking into the different factors that influence the use of plagiarism and the reasons behind them, Blum offered some ways for dealing with student plagiarism. These ways include organizing conferences with faculty members and college students to speak about the issue, admit that intellectual property is not an eternal value, broach the topic that there is a disagreement between students and faculty members, introduce the issue of intellectual property as theoretical and historical, and divide the dimensions of intellect, legal, and bureaucratic when speaking about academic citation (Boss, 2017, p. 357). These methods bring students and faculty members together to address the issue head on and in a neutral manner instead of simply saying that plagiarism is wrong. These would lead to an agreement among students and faculty.
