Description: More than half of students in the United States admit to cheating during college. Students today can easily copy work from online data bases or even purchase essays written on their behalf. But are students the only ones to blame for this trend?

Source: The Guardian

Date: October 5th, 2012

More than half of US university students admit to cheating in some form; slightly fewer do in the UK. Much of that cheating is in the form of not attributing others’ writing, cutting and pasting sentences from the web – but this is only part of the story. Essay mills, which provide papers for students to pass off as their own for a fee, account for a substantial portion of cheating. Such services, when generating original content, cannot easily be caught by plagiarism-detection software. In any case, there are questions about whether the software works at all, but what is certain is that using it only furthers the cat-and-mouse ethics of teaching which can undermine classroom trust. The truth is business is booming for the clandestine writers who deliver high school essays, university term papers, MSc theses, and even PhD dissertations in the massive custom-essay industry.  Read Rest of Story 

Questions for discussion:

1. How does society collectively treat education, in the authour’s opinion?

2. Aside from students taking responsibility, what actions are recommended to help curb plagiarism?