Sunday, May 1, 2011

Where Do Students Plagiarize from the Most?

I just found a list of websites that inform most of the student cheating. It's almost enough to make you lose faith in the younger generation to see where students mostly plagiarize from: 
Over all, the top eight sites for matched content were Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Answers.com, SlideShare, OPPapers.com, Scribd, Course Hero, and MedLibrary.org
 If they think that Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers are legitimate sources of information for college essays, this means we have been able to teach them nothing. Of course, if instead of churning out more idiotic paperwork, our bureaucrats occupied themselves with punishing plagiarism, the problem could be eradicated pretty fast.

3 comments:

Spanish prof said...

I've had a student turning in a paper and in the bibliography, it included the article X and the website where he had taken it from: www.elrincondelvago.net.

Catrala said...

I echo SpanishProf about students finding information on Rincon del Vago.

I've also found that they like to use the English version of Wikipedia, which is most obvious when the entries on a number of Latin American authors are just wrong. Sigh.

V said...

One of my students once honestly wrote, after half of the solution to the problem - "I am sorry I could not finish it, but the site demanded money for the second half of the solution"