The Increased Need for Academic Integrity In the Digital Age

By: Lawrence M Luttrell

EDU-590 Cohort #6

         The blinding digital billboard adjacent the freeway changes frequently as you approach it.  Captian Morgans Rum, Fly Northwest Airlines, Charmin "the quicker picker upper", and then you see my picture, smiling with a seductive glare in my eye as I hold a copy of my new book titled "Everything You Needed To Know About...."   And that's all that you glean as you pass by at 80 miles an hour.  As your mind races through your confused memory you know something is very wrong.

          You immediately feel violated!  You know I have taken something from you, but for the life of you, you have no idea what it is!  You can't call the police for you have yet to figure out why?  You can't cry for you know not what you have lost.  You can't scream for no one will hear you as you drive down that lonely freeway of disparity.  You are in a state of panic and you're struggling to go into your happy place to regain a sense of safety and security.  You have become paralyzed in fear, unable to function and all you can think is "why do I know that jerk?!"

          Then you remember it was that "class" we had together in college.  The research you conducted on quantum physics!  You don't know it yet but I ripped it off from you in under a second!  The college had proudly published your hard work on the internet and after my Comcast blazing fast internet speed cut and paste, I "wrote" a best selling book about it and now I am on billboards across the country.

          Sound far fetched?  I struggled profoundly to purposely steal and capture relevant information off the backs of other writers to complete this assignment on plagiarism.  Relying solely on the internet for the theft I added a paragraph and changed some words here and there.  When I submitted it I expected to receive at best an 85 or above.  Apparently, I am a rock star according to "Safe Assign".  To my amazement I scored a 21 percent!  The programmers for Safe Assign should be sent back to "DOS" school.

          At this point "I" feel cheated.  I worked very hard for a few days looking for the right material to plagiarize worrying how difficult it would be changing a "Picasso" into a "Luttrell".  Had I known the ease of deception, I would have forgone the ethical labor over the theft and transitioned to plagiarization sooner!  The conversion of 90 percent "Picasso" into a 21 percent match rating was borderline on ignorant.  I expected a relentless fight from a program that produced flaccid results.   Many so called plagiarism detection services can only detect blatant word for word copies of text (Wikipedia 2011).

          Academic Integrity can't be effectively detected by computers.  It must be taught at home, in our schools, and at our places of employment.  It is not up to one source to ingrain the value of originality into our children and peers.  It is upon all of us to reinstitute ethical literary value into our society.  The internet vortex is sucking the originality out of this document I wrote and you read at this very moment!  "Safe Assign", really?  Let us have a moment of silence for "Academic Integrity", it has left the room and unless we do something, it will never come back.

Works Cited
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
Picture Source: adaptivedisplays.com