During our junior year, our teachers informed us that we would have to write an Extended Essay: a lengthy research paper, written using many different sources of reference. They also told us that we would be submitting our papers to TurnItIn.com; a site that identifies the source of any plagiarized text in a submitted document. I wasn’t familiar with it so I went to the company’s web site to check it out.

Some customer testimonials on the site read: “I had a student confess plagiarism when I asked for an electronic copy of the paper . . . It was better for him to confess than to be accused. Deterrence is good.”

Another says, “I teach several English courses online . . . I have used Turnitin not only to catch several plagiarists, but also . . . to forestall other attempts.”

Without context one could easily think these teachers were talking about catching terrorists rather than students. Needless to say, I didn’t want to be one of those students.

As I plowed through dozens of sources for my paper I found myself citing everything, even if I thought I may have come up with it myself. I’m a firm subscriber to the “better to be safe than sorry” motto. When we got back to school, I heard that my friend’s essay came up as being 30 percent plagiarized. The site claimed that she’d copied text from sites she had never even heard of.

Even though I knew I hadn’t plagiarized anything, I couldn’t help feeling nervous about the results of my essay. Everything turned out to be fine, but the process was a source of unnecessary stress. Although I believe that plagiarism is an issue that needs to be resolved, I don’t think this is the way to go about it.

Confusion over what exactly constitutes plagiarism is part of the problem. Plagiarism is commonly defined as passing off another’s ideas as one’s own.

We all know that simply copying someone else’s homework is plagiarism; however, some teachers allow students to work together to complete assignments.

Quoting (and citing) someone in an essay is fine, but paraphrasing and rearranging a passage without citation is plagiarism. These and other seemingly conflicting rules for plagiarism make it difficult for students to know what to do.

With the proliferation of the Internet, the definition has become even cloudier. Some students feel that a “copy and paste” job will suffice as original work. While stringing together sentences from 10 different sites into a coherent piece of work may be quite an accomplishment for students, teachers aren’t quite as impressed.

To efface plagiarism, prevention is the key; but that prevention should be the result of education not intimidation. Teachers should make greater strides to inform students about what they consider plagiarism and how to avoid it. Concurrently, students must take more responsibility in insuring the honesty of their own work.

To the concerned student I say: When in doubt ask a teacher, cite the source, or take it out all together. Copying that one little sentence may seem fine when you’re finishing an essay at 3 in the morning; but is it worth a failing grade, or worse, the loss of your integrity?