Essay:How does the digital age influence plagiarism and cheating?

How does the digital age influence plagiarism and cheating?

We live in the digital age; it means that we are environed by vast amount of information. Sometimes information can be truthful but often misleading, that’s why a man spends a lot of time tries to understand: “Is this information useful him or not?”.

With the emergence of the Internet and modern technologies, our generation has more resources to be dishonest in compare with students a previous generation. It’s obvious that plagiarism and cheating have been represented centuries ago. Our parents and grandparents spent huge quantity of time reading books, encyсlopedias searching for information. They were the only means of mass media. They wrote information in their exercise books it was their creativity. It was better for then in comparison with our generation because they comprehended information and remembered it. Nowadays, students search for necessary information than copy, paste and print it (ctrl+c, ctrl+v, ctrl+p). Ready! It’s awful that often our students don’t read what they should retell to their mates and the don’t know main idea what they speak about.

The explosition of the Internet and online resources has made easier for students to get to online resources which contain a vast amount of information. In the web it is simple to find special resources which help students to be dishonest with their teachers. There are some sites where you can buy your control tests or exams. But such option is for students who have money. Frequently students don’t have opportunity to buy the test or exam because of its cost.

The emergence of laptops, tablets, smartphones is added insult to injury. A lot of students have access the Internet through their mobile devices. It allows them to copy amounts of information at their fingertips via portable devices. Today, teachers have deal with more academic dishonesty in student work than 20 years ago.

The digital age is characterizing not only with portable devices, the Internet, it is also characterizing with social networks. Social networks let students to be dishonest with teachers. It allows them in no time share necessary documents, tests, exams and their solving for all of their community. It lets them cheating.

Modern text editors can help you in cheating. It has a variety of fonts, formatting options. Sometimes papers are word-for-word identical but because of different formatting options, fonts they can look differently from others.

On the other hand, nowadays there are a lot of tools and apps which help teachers to cope with plagiarism and cheating. Most of us know that plagiarism is wrong, but we copy information without thinking about it every day. A sociological survey was carried two years ago. It showed that 70% of high school juniors admitted to copying several sentences from the Internet without sitting a source.

To sum up, I strongly believe that it will be important and useful for students to do their work themselves. I consider that we should use the Internet, portable devices as we live in the digital age for searching for information, sharing information, be in touch with relatives and friends, do shopping, travel but not for cheating.