Anna Smoak
Everyone feels bad about cheating, and no one doesn't regret having damaged how they are viewed by their peers and teachers, not to mention cheating themselves out of a valuable education. Being dishonest is a reputation that is hard to overcome, so don't become a lesser person just to get a better grade.
The above paragraph is something many college professors are seeing this day. It is a reearangement or paraphrase of a talking point from a cheaters best friend: Sparknotes. (http://sparkcharts.sparknotes.com/study/distancelearning/section7.php) While ethics and honor codes on college campuses are becoming more and more strict due to the sudden surge of resources on the web, students are become lazy and looking for as many ways to get around the rules as they can. Specifically, students have become well versed in simply restating an authors thoughts, in a variety of ways, and using the "I didn't know" rule to wiggle their way out of tight spots.
G. Thomas Couser, a professor of english at Hofstra University, refers to specifically to plagiarism, and one of the greatest resources of plagiarism in the past decade, Sparknotes. "SparkNotes is a problem not only because it was unacknowledged but also because it entirely short-circuite[s] [the] thinking process". So, no matter how cheesy it sounds, when students cheat, they are merely cheating themselves. Couser also notes that, "Student plagiarists often claim that they thought documentation is only necessary for quotation."
So as more websites like Sparknotes begin to surface on the web, the more opportunities students have to avoid doing any work by using these sources as their 'thoughts'. This is promoting a laziness in our society never before scene, and without help, it will be very difficult for professors to get this 'cheating epidemic' under control.
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