The Increased Need for Academic Integrity in the Digital Age

The Information age has brought access to tools that have expanded plagiarism, falsification of documents through electronic means, and conveyance of false information through electronic media to an unbelievable scale.  For years officials have been pleading both the moral and legal implications of stealing and modifying information.  It is obvious however, that this approach in itself has not been very successful.  Most people can recite the FBI warning on movie DVD's and television movies, but pay very little heed. They simply fast forward to the movie that they are copying to another DVD or flash drive.  The feeling there is that I have paid for it once, therefore copying it and passing it to friends is part of the package.  The subtle implications are apparent in popular music, particularly hip-hop.  When a DJ hears the samples of old soul or other contemporary artists in the background of their favorite musical renditions, they feel they can do the same.  They never realize that the rights to use the samples have been bought by the artists; so when he or she is distributing sample CD's with ten artists' music mixed in, there is no apparent problem.

       As educators at all levels, most of us face plagiarism on an astounding scale. The growing lack of this particular integrity in speaks to the national emergency with reading and writing.  Teachers do not always have the time to run all of their students' papers through plagiarism detectors, so they are more or less stuck with local safeguards.  A student is not going to worry about the FBI or other federal agents kicking their door in because they squeezed in a quote from Henry Adams' "Education of Henry Adams" as their personal assessment of religion versus industry, without a reference citation. 

Many students feel they have no alternative but to copy for research reports and other written assignments, since translating and paraphrasing most of the finished product seems beyond their means. 

      The future success against word theft and other forms of copyrighted thievery begins with education.  Students that are taught creative writing skills and drilled in vocabulary and contextual reading in the early stages of school will not be prone to plagiarize.  The flexible and creative educator can Instead of preaching the legal ramifications of the impropriety, educators should tout its depreciation of the individual mind by taking shortcuts and use the topic of plagiarism as a viable teaching tool.  If employed in the early years of education, anti-plagiarism lessons are a way to address the basic skills that are measured by the No Child Left Behind curriculum standards.  The teaching should be  a  year-long "Building Skills for Honest Research and Writing" agenda with anti-plagiarism checks and safeguards built into lesson plans. The other general academic integrity issues beside plagiarism can only be helped by education to good citizenship and civic duty; the hardest task of all the near-impossible integrity challenges we face.