Plagiarism, draft two.

The future leaders of America, the doctors who save lives, the policemen who patrol our streets; all of these occupations require rigorous work ethic from each of the individuals in order to reach a certain level of social higharchy. The aforementioned positions, as well as many other admirable ones, give society the impression that the people who hold these positions are “well-educated, trained professionals”, as many would say, but what happens if their educations were plagiarized? United States Vice President, Joe Biden, is a well-respected man in the eyes of our country, but what do those eyes see besides his leadership position? A cheater. Biden plagiarized on five out of fifteen papers he was assigned in college. The future of our country lies in this man (along with President Obama and numerous other White House officials) and he took shortcuts in law school yet managed to get so high up in society. Most people would say “That’s not fair! How could he have gotten to where he is?” and the answer would be because there was nothing to detect that his papers were plagiarized. Beach High is investing in plagiarism software, Turnitin.com, in efforts to “bring back the educational morals of students”, so says Samuel Brown. The site allows teachers to make an account and have students submit their papers online via the site. Once the paper is submitted, the software detects how much of the paper was plagiarized and sends the percentile to the teacher so appropriate action can be taken. With the internet and that handy-dandy copy-and-paste button, students are often tempted to plagiarize even against their better judgment. “I’m not a bad student or anything, but sometimes it’s hard to resist the temptation to just paste some information to Word and get it over with but with the software, I’ll keep in mind that it’s going to be checked thoroughly and will make sure to write using my own words”, according to sophomore Jasmine Lawrence. The software is going to set an incentive for students to do better quality work that is their own and will save teachers time and energy to do other activities. In a perfect world, no one would ever think of cheating or plagiarizing because it is immoral, but perfection ceases to exist. We live in an imperfect world, and have to pay the price to accommodate for our faults. The price, in Beach High’s case, is only $5,425 dollars out of the over $100,000 dollars made from the Boat Show; a small price to pay to prevent students from getting out of control and on the wrong track early in life. Besides, who can put a price on something that is going to help stop a growing trend that can mar our society?