I believe that the internet has made students in today’s society less ethical and lazy when it comes to doing work in school. With so many different avenues on the internet to copy and paste information makes research unnecessary. Students will just type in their topic to google and over 100 web pages will pop up and makes the research available quicker than traditional ways. Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited. Internet access has made cheating easier, enabling students to connect instantly with answers, friends to consult and works to plagiarize. And generations of research has shown that a major factor in unethical behavior is simply how easy or hard it is. The Internet has changed attitudes, as a world of instant downloading, searching, cutting and pasting has loosened some ideas of ownership and authorship. An increased emphasis on having students work in teams may also have played a role. Also, it seems that few schools actually place any meaningful emphasis on integrity, academic or otherwise, and colleges are even more indifferent than high schools. We have a culture now where we have real trouble accepting that our kids make mistakes and fail, and when they do, we tend to blame someone else rather than fix the issue. Institutions do a poor job of making those boundaries clear and consistent, of educating students about them, of enforcing them, and of giving teachers a clear process to follow through on them. There are many different people involved in the internet and these people all have different agendas. There are companies who specialize in internet infrastructure, Internet Service Providers, as well as those who provide content. Not all companies provide services to all chat rooms or newsgroups and so forth. Therefore, ethics can only be applied when it is known who has
I believe that the internet has made students in today’s society less ethical and lazy when it comes to doing work in school. With so many different avenues on the internet to copy and paste information makes research unnecessary. Students will just type in their topic to google and over 100 web pages will pop up and makes the research available quicker than traditional ways. Cheating has become easier and more widely tolerated, and both schools and parents have failed to give students strong, repetitive messages about what is allowed and what is prohibited. Internet access has made cheating easier, enabling students to connect instantly with answers, friends to consult and works to plagiarize. And generations of research has shown that a major factor in unethical behavior is simply how easy or hard it is. The Internet has changed attitudes, as a world of instant downloading, searching, cutting and pasting has loosened some ideas of ownership and authorship. An increased emphasis on having students work in teams may also have played a role. Also, it seems that few schools actually place any meaningful emphasis on integrity, academic or otherwise, and colleges are even more indifferent than high schools. We have a culture now where we have real trouble accepting that our kids make mistakes and fail, and when they do, we tend to blame someone else rather than fix the issue. Institutions do a poor job of making those boundaries clear and consistent, of educating students about them, of enforcing them, and of giving teachers a clear process to follow through on them. There are many different people involved in the internet and these people all have different agendas. There are companies who specialize in internet infrastructure, Internet Service Providers, as well as those who provide content. Not all companies provide services to all chat rooms or newsgroups and so forth. Therefore, ethics can only be applied when it is known who has