Plagiarism Essay Example for Free

Plagiarism Essay Plagiarism has become an increasing concern with the internet age. Many students are cutting and pasting information from the internet into personal papers without proper citations and using the information as their own. Many services such as Turnitin help educators determine the levels of plagiarism in papers and therefore how much authentic information is being submitted. If students are plagiarizing work, the education is undermined and schools are unable to guarantee the quality of education students are receiving. Plagiarism is â€Å". . . the act of passing off as one’s own the ideas or writing of another (Georgetown University 2006). † Many students will use someone else’s written idea, but change the words around to be their own. This is plagiarism and credit should be given to the person who had the idea first. Although plagiarism can be found in many forms, written plagiarism is the most prevalent. The internet has allowed students access to a much larger database of written works. Unfortunately, many students are becoming lazy and using other people’s written works as their own. Services such as Turnitin have been developed to help combat plagiarism. Turnitin is software that accepts written assignments from students; runs the papers through databases looking for sentence or phrase matches; and gives the instructor a similarity index for each submission (MacMillan 2007). Other websites such as plagiarism. org and iThenticate are also based on the same premise as Turnitin and provide information on how to combat plagiarism. Plagiarism is a rising problem in today’s education that will require centered attention. Services such as Turnitin and iThenticate have proved important tools for educators, but many questions remain about the effectiveness of these services. Similarity indexes have appeared that are not accurate on some papers submitted. Overall, the services are the best tools to date to combat plagiarism, but will need updating as time goes on for complete accuracy.