The Internet and Academic Dishonesty With the advent of the internet, more written material is being published than ever before, including essays written to fulfill college assignments. Is it any wonder that many students, ill-prepared by a culture of quick-fix solutions, choose to buy essays available online and submit them dishonestly as their own work? No. It's predictable.Some say that only a jaded person would draw such conclusions. Perhaps. Nonetheless, the number of websites offering the quick sale of term papers to desperate students is exhaustive. The sites devoted to the dubious cause of relieving stressed out students who, for one reason or another, cannot write their own papers are glitzy, attractive, enticing. Jaded or not, my contention that more and more college students will plagiarize to get a college degree is based on my own quick investigation. If demand drives the market, an increasing number of students must be pouring dollars into the plagiarism business. Why?The answer is simple. More students than ever before in history are attending college, and the standards that once applied, such as during my grandfather's era, no longer do. College students no longer have to master basic writing skills in order to be accepted by the best universities, let alone open door schools that cater to the needs of modestly literate high school graduates. In short, many college students are incapable of writing well enough to make convincing arguments, let alone well-researched, documented term papers. Freshman college students do not represent an academically elite body of students any longer. Freshman college students today are made up in large part of yesterday's unskilled laborers. I venture to guess that most of my fellow college students would have been sent out by their parents to lives of hard labor had they lived seventy-five years ago. Today, they are sent to college as a prerequisite to working in just ab...
