Students Plagiarizing While Taking Free Online Courses
Many people have signed up for the free online courses offered by Coursera. These free courses are
taught by professors and are free for anyone who wants to take them. Other students are grading the
papers and essays written by the course takers. However, as one student who was grading some papers,
coursework and essays found that the entire paper she was grading was lifted by the popular website,
Wikipedia.
The reason some of these students may be doing the plagiarism is because they are worried about their
grades and are trying to get a leg up on them. This is still no excuse. If you are worried about your
grades, you need to study hard and actually do the work instead of looking up the answers online and
copying them from websites.
Some teachers and professors say they can tell if something has been plagiarized just by reading a
passage of their work and noticing something that does not sound like their own work. However, they
also have plagiarism detectors and can also use Plagtracker and other such plagiarism detectors found
online.
They are saying they can increase the use of online education but do need to ensure the students who
take these courses and others submit their own original work without using other peoples words.
