Free Essays,College Free Essays,Free College Essays at Anti Essays

Plagiarism has never been easier than it is today. Before the internet, cheating was labor-intensive and obvious. Potential plagiarists had to find appropriate works from a limited pool of resources, usually a nearby library, and copy them by hand. Since these resources were almost always professionally written, the risk of detection was very high.
The Internet now makes it easy to find thousands of relevant sources in seconds, and in the space of a few minutes plagiarists can find, copy, and paste together an entire term paper or essay. Because much of the material online is produced by other students, it is often difficult or impossible for educators to identify plagiarism based on expectations of student-level work.
Even when an instructor does suspect plagiarism, the sheer size of the internet seems to work in the plagiarist's favor. Search engines can be useful for tracking down suspect passages, but even they have their limitations, given the number, variety, and password-protected nature of many websites. Even where search engines do prove useful, manually searching the internet for matches of hundreds of student papers can be a formidable task.
Additionally, the seemingly "public" nature of online content blurs the distinction between publicly and privately owned information. Electronic resources, by nature easily reproducible, are not perceived as "intellectual property" in the same way that their material counterparts are. Just as file transfer programs such as Napster make it easy to trade copyrighted music files most people would never think to steal in physical form, the internet makes plagiarism easy for students who might have thought twice about copying from a book or published article.
Perhaps the greatest resources for would-be plagiarists are the hundreds of online paper-mills, or "cheatsites", that exist solely for the purpose of providing students with quick-fix homework and term-paper solutions. Many of these...