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ShareGone are the days when students used to painstakingly do their homeworks every evening. The kids nowadays just run a Google search and voila -- readymade materials are there on the Internet for their picking. They just need to cut-paste or download them, and their homework is done.
Websites, such as schoolsucks.com, echeat.com, which provide readymade homework, have made conventional assignments a cake walk for the students. All they have to do is register for free and start downloading the assignments. Be it Shakespeare's Macbeth or Newton's laws, the ready-to-download homeworks are tweaked to suit the Indian style.
City schools are striving hard to keep a check on this plagiarism. "Students lift materials from the net, and feel proud about it. Most of them do not even realise that this shortcut is going to cost them dear in future. To make them aware of the danger, we recently arranged an interaction between the students and our alumni who are well settled now," said Avanita Bir, principal, RN Podar School, Santa Cruz. The school has also enlisted help of the class teachers to frame the right kind of homework that would encourage more creativity and research rather than copy-pasting off the net.
"We do not have any software which will suss out copied text, but our teachers thoroughly check the projects submitted to them. Furthermore, we have taught the students to tag a page to their assignments, acknowledging the source from which they have gleaned information," Bir said.
Lina Ashar, chairperson, Kangaroo Kids Education Ltd, said that "policing" would not be effective in countering plagiarism. "Schools have to be more creative in framing homeworks for students. Instead of assigning essays or opinion pieces, they can ask students to conduct surveys, or develop questionnaires for interviews," she said.
A south Mumbai teacher said plagiarism was becoming more and more rampant. "Every time I come across a homework, written in very good language, I get suspicious. As a teacher, I know which of the students are capable of writing well. So, whenever I find an unlikely candidate excelling in homework, I google the keywords and find the source the material has been lifted from. Internet may help them to cheat, but it also helps us catch them," she said.
