The problem with plagiarism"The secret of creativity," according to Albert Einstein, "is knowing how to hide your sources." Unfortunately, what Einstein considered 'creativity', universities would regard as plagiarism, and punish severely. Nevertheless, the great scientist had a point: if you do want to pass off a copy of someone else's work as your own, the number one rule is to make sure that nobody finds the original. This is why copying material from the web is a bad idea. While the Internet makes such plagiarism frighteningly easy to do, it also makes it easy to detect. If tutors suspect that an essay contains 'recycled material', they simply have to enter an extract from it into Google, and its source will instantly be revealed. The other problem with taking material from the web, of course, is that its quality is often very dubious. Copying from your classmates is a more traditional method of cheating. Obviously, if a pile of identical assignments is handed in, your tutor is going to notice, but surely if you reword it a bit and change some things around, it'll look like a different piece of work? Unfortunately for would-be cheats, this type of plagiarism can also be uncovered thanks to new technology. The biology department at Edinburgh University has, in the past, employed the ingenious technique of comparing students' work using tools originally designed for identifying related sequences of DNA. These systems can spot vague similarities between two pieces of work, not just word-for-word copying. Similar technology is used by Edinburgh University's School of Physics to combat plagiarism in programming assignments. Clearly, plagiarising any material to which your tutors also have free access is asking for trouble. What about the various 'cheat sites' on the Internet that offer access to pre-written essays only to those who are willing to pay a small fee? At some sites, a few dollars will buy you access to a vast essay database. However, even amongst their hundreds of thousands of essays you won't necessarily find exactly the one that you want, and once again there is no guarantee of quality. It's also worth remembering that cheat sites aren't the only ones who build up collections of old essays. Online 'plagiarism detection services' such as JISC (currently being piloted at Edinburgh University) also maintain vast databases of previous students' work, and material downloaded from cheat sites, against which newly-submitted essays can be compared in order to identify plagiarism. The most sophisticated resources for cheats are web sites that can provide you with a university-standard essay specially written for your particular assignment. (Such sites insist, of course, that they don't condone plagiarism and that their essays are intended purely as research aids.) The downside of custom-written essays is that they don't come cheap – prices from one site start at £35 per 500 words! The providers of such essays guarantee that the work will be totally unique and confidential, and screened to make sure that it isn't identified by plagiarism-detection software. (However, none of this should matter because you're only going to use your £200 essay to help with your research, right?) Concealing your sources, of course, does not guarantee that illicit copying will not be discovered - other things, such as the style of writing used, may also betray you. Although universities recognises that it will "never be possible to eliminate plagiarism entirely", it may be that the only students who are likely to get away with plagiarism are those who are smart enough not to need to. |
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This article was written in 2004 for Hype, the Edinburgh University Students Association magazine, but never printed in full. |