News Article

Any search of the phrase ‘plagiarism survey’ pulls up thousands of references to articles and surveys in search of the truth, or as much truth as can be found among plagiarists. There are multiple references to the climbing numbers of plagiarism cases.

According to the article from The Daily Free Press by Grace Lin, Twenty-Five Percent of Students Plagiarize, a survey done online of students from nine colleges showed that 25% of those students plagiarized “sometimes to very frequently.” My initial reaction was that these numbers seemed high and that perhaps the definition of plagiarism was not completely clear. Perhaps what some felt was plagiarism, was not, or vice versa.

As I began to look more into the issue, it seemed that perhaps those numbers were in fact too low. With the advent of the internet, clearly it has become much easier to obtain completed essays and easily appealing articles to use, and the problem has exponentially increased. According to the survey 80% of annual academic misconduct cases are due to plagiarism. All is not lost however, many programs have been developed and protocol put into place in order to assist teachers in catching and reprimanding these students.

The article does not come with a publish date, nor a date for when the study was conducted. I would like to personally conduct an anonymous survey and see if the numbers differ, especially since BCC and Boston University vary greatly in size. I will continue this article once I have obtained my own data.