Social media is not only governing students’ social lives, but it is also playing a part in their academic careers.

According to a study done by iParadigms –– creator of Turnitin, one of the most popular plagiarism detection services on the market — user-generated websites have now become the most popular resources for student copying.

In its study of what sites are used most for unoriginal content, iParadigms found that websites created for the purpose of cheating constituted less than 15 percent of plagiarism.

Questionable sources

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, one third of all “matched content” found with plagiarism-detection services like Turnitin come from content-sharing sites and social media, in which students took or used information without attribution because of character limits in status updates. Among the top eight sites that plagiarism-detection services found matches for when comparing student papers and web content were sites such as Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers and Answers.com.

“The problem with these types of websites is that the credibility, accuracy and quality of the source is highly questionable and cannot be verified,” said Hayoung Kim, a professor of Biblical Interpretation and Spiritual Formation. “At the college level, I would say that the only use for these sites would be to get a broad idea of the topic as a first step, before diving into credible sources.”

“I would think that people would go on other less common sites than Wikipedia since we hear so much about it not being accurate,” freshman Morgan Gage said. “But I think maybe people go to Wikipedia because they think that people can change the answers, so teachers aren’t really looking for plagiarism there as much and it wouldn’t show up on any database because the information changes more often.”

Junior Sylvia Brooks said she recognized that with all the plagiarism-detection sites, it has become increasingly easier for teachers to see when students are plagiarizing when they see students copying ideas from social media sites word for word. In spite of that, Brooks thinks that plagiarism in social media happens because students do not realize that what they are doing is considered plagiarism.

Research vs. plagiarism

In an attempt to make the distinction between how to use social media in the context of research as opposed to plagiarism, Gage said, “I think that if you’re going online to research stuff, you’re going to look at different sites and that’s fine to get different outlooks, but it’s not a good thing to just copy and paste. If you’re not putting in the effort or taking your own time, but rather just taking other people’s opinions, then it is not a good thing at all. It is helpful to use them to expand your outlook.”

Brooks and Gage agreed that the discrepancy comes from whether or not one is putting in the effort to display ideas in words and actually learn or whether they are just trying to steal the ideas to save time and avoid learning from the material.

“Students definitely don’t learn anything academically from plagiarizing,” Brooks said. “We are paying thousands of dollars. We might as well learn something.”

Perhaps students don’t think they are going to get caught, said Brooks, or aren’t aware that there are plagiarism-detection sites, but in any case it is morally wrong.

“If we take someone else’s work and we represent it as our own, we are committing a falsehood and we are doing it in a context of a Christian education. ” said Dr. James Hirsen, adjunct professor of journalism who teaches Mass Media Law and Ethics at Biola in addition to teaching at Trinity Law School.

Unethical and dishonest

“Ethically it is a clear violation,” Hirsen said. “Also important to note is that legally it breaches copyrights laws. It takes someone else’s property. When you don’t give attribution and we take it illegitimately it’s stealing. And the Bible says thou shalt not steal.”

Several Biola students agreed that even though copying information from social media websites seems minor, it is still sinful. Junior Lamar Whaley said he is completely against plagiarism because it goes against what the Lord forbids in the eighth commandment — theft.

Fortunately, it appears that Christian universities have less of a problem with plagiarism than most other colleges. According to an article from Milligan College, a Christian University in Tennessee, research showed that one out of five students at secular schools are academically dishonest in their work, while less than 1 percent of students have been exposed for cheating at Christian universities. Hirsen, Brooks, and Gage all agreed with the findings as they compared it to what the have heard in their own lives. All three claimed that they heard a lot more about plagiarism at other non-Christian schools, than they have in their experience at Biola.

“I’m sure it’s still going on at Biola but I have not really heard about it,” Gage said.

Defining a generation

According to Hirsen, the bottom line is that the art of plagiarism is changing and becoming more frequent with all the social media sites available to students.

“It is more common than ever before,” Hirsen said. “Part of the reason is because many students grow up in educational institutions where anti-plagiarism is not taught properly. Plus technology has made it easier. It is more rampant than ever.”

“We have to think about how to apply what we already know to plagiarism in social media,” Kim said. “It will really define this generation as a whole as social media takes more of a front seat in young adults’ lives.”