NOTE: While you are reading this paper, reflect on the citation errors this student made.

I am writing this paper on plagiarism for this class because I took the easy and lazy way out of doing a paper the correct way. I plan to discuss what plagiarism is and how to avoid plagiarizing a paper, as well as the possible penalties of plagiarizing a paper. First of all, what is plagiarism? Plagiarism by definition is "literary theft and is a serious form of cheating." "It is the act of deliberately presenting as one's own, the ideas and discoveries of another person" If you do not acknowledge the source, you are stealing material from another writer (www.lib.uconn.edu). This is a very serious offense in college.

Now, I would like to share with you the best way to avoid plagiarism, which is proper citation of your sources. This way you can use their information, but you are not taking the credit for someone else's work. Another good way to avoid plagiarism is to paraphrase the information, but still give credit to the author of the work.

Next, I would like to discuss the possible penalties when you get caught plagiarizing a paper. The first thing that would happen would be a teacher realizing that there is a problem with the work handed in by a student. The next step is basically up to the teacher. They can either deal with the student themselves on their own, or they can notify the college examinations board which would then be obliged to notify the university. The minimum penalty for plagiarism is a grade of zero be given to the student for the plagiarized material. A much more severe penalty for plagiarism is failing the guilty student for the entire class. But the most severe penalty for getting caught plagiarizing a paper is the possible threat of being expelled from school (www.ucrysj.ac.uk.).

While looking on the Internet for a couple of sources for this paper I stumbled upon a paper by a University of Maryland student named Maria Stroffolino that was titled "How to Plagiarize Papers Off the Internet." I found this paper very interesting. In this paper the author told about web addresses that specialized in papers. She gave useful information such as which search sites to use such as Infoseek Ultra, as well as all4one, and MetaCrawler, which can engage several search engines at one time. There is even web sites for those people who do not even have a topic. The most popular site is the Evil House of Cheat, which is a searchable database of over 1200 essays. Some of the other sites mentioned in this article are Term Papers for Free, School Sucks, and The Term Paper Warehouse. By exposing these sites, it gives teachers a way to find those students who they feel have been guilty of plagiarism.

LIST OF SOURCES

1. "How to Plagiarize Paper Off the Internet." Maria Stroffolino, University of Maryland 1996: http://www.orbits.com/~maria/plagiarize.html

2. "Plagiarism, Fair Use and Copyright: Guidelines for Students." The University of Connecticut Libraries: http://spirit.lib.uconn.edu/LILT/htmls/fairuse.html

3. "Plagiarism": http://www.yorksj.ac.uk/centres/inter/plager.htm.