Turning to Turnitin to Fight Plagiarism Among University Students (Report‪)‬

Introduction Plagiarism is a problem that has hit the education world even harder since the inception of the World Wide Web. With information readily available in electronic form from the Internet, it has become easier for students to copy and paste material into their assignments or reports and submit it for grading as their original work. In the past, for students to plagiarize, they had to take time to write down material from books, but with the Internet, they just cut and paste into their work within a short of period of time (Cromwell, 2006; McMurty, 2001). With billions of articles available on the Internet, it has not been easy for instructors to determine where the students could have lifted the material from. Jones (2006) says the Internet has become a cesspool of plagiarism. Many practitioners agree that plagiarism is a growing problem and they believe that the Internet is partly to blame because it makes plagiarism very easy (CQ Researcher, 2003; McKenzie, 1998; Renard, 2000). The University of Pretoria reports that in a study on plagiarism conducted among 150 undergraduates, 80% of the participants admitted that they often plagiarized assignments directly from the Internet (Russouw, 2005). McCabe (2003) says that plagiarism is more prevalent today because many students do not consider copying from the Internet as cheating.