Writing at the Washington Post, Jay Mathews discusses the problem of plagiarism and poor writing skills by high school and college students. There will always be cheating, but what bothers me most is that the stigma of cheating seems to have disappeared.
One former student said he eluded plagiarism detectors by resorting to fiction. “I would make up statistics, facts, polls, essentially anything that would bolster a point I was trying to make,” he said. If he was careful to write on a topic about which the professor was not an expert, he was unlikely to be caught and he could cut the time required to write the paper in half, the student concluded.
If a young person sees no problem in cheating, what other forms of cheating will they engage in as an adult? I think this is a huge societal problem — lack of integrity, lack of ethics, lack of a clear moral code.
