Got a paper due tomorrow? Not to worry…. Sift through several related studies and papers. Pick up ideas from myriad sources. And voilá! You are ready with your paper!

Hold up. It’s not that easy. With the widespread use of Internet, it’s simple to submit papers with finely-worded phrases and compelling facts, especially if you’re using other people’s words and ideas. To curb the adverse affects of plagiarism, schools have made it high priority to detect and stop this growing trend.

Today,many professors spend a lot of time examining articles using plagiarism detection software such as Turnitin. This software compares students’ research papers with all Internet text and a database of more than 15 million student papers. Regent University’s Assistant Dean James Davids makes it a point to use Turnitin.

However,detection software is not the only tool that professors use to spot plagiarism. The simplest way to detect plagiarism is to use an Internet search engine. Wikipedia suggests using keywords or key phrases as your search topic to see if similar text already exists.

Oftentimes, professors get used to a student’s style of writing. As soon as they come across an extraordinarily different writing style, red flags are raised and they make sure to double-check.

Case in point: One of Davids’ students turned in a lucidly-written paper, which raised doubts in Davids’ mind.  Previously, the student’s paper was filled with verbose sentences and long paragraphs. Davids’ intuition was right. After turning to The Chronicle of Higher Education, David found that 83 percent of the content matched another article.

Plagiarism is no doubt a serious and growing offense.

A 1999 survey by The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University found that 10 percent of students wrote without properly accrediting the source. In 2005, the number of students who admitted to plagiarism hit a 40 percent high.

Many a times, students end up in a mess simply because they follow the “Cut and Paste Policy.” Plagiarism can seriously affect a student’s career prospects. In your first offense, your course grades can suffer. If you are a repeated offender, you can be expelled from school! Actual punishments vary from school to school. It would be a nightmare to have something like this hampering your budding legal career.

Critics of the heightening plagiarism scare reason that there are hundreds of people writing about the same topic every single day. How on earth do you expect a paper to be completely original? Ideas will certainly be recycled.

However, the legal academia agrees that it’s wrong to simply copy and paste the hard work and efforts of another. Rather than allow someone else to accuse you of plagiarism, it is better to accredit your ideas and words to the right person. Comb over your paper like a hawk.