It’s easy to blame our problems on the Internet. Those guys from eHarmony always dump me. Facebook keeps me from doing my homework. (No, really, it does.) The ease of surfing the Web makes students think they don’t have to cite online sources.

According to The Associated Press, students at the University of Texas at San Antonio who were writing a code for academic honesty copied large parts of it from another school. Without acknowledging their source.

Oops. That’s gotta sting.

Cheating experts including Daniel Wueste, director of the Rutland Institute for Ethics at South Carolina’s Clemson University, are trying to blame the plagiarism on the Internet and college students’ treatment of the Web. The AP quoted Wueste as saying, “It doesn’t feel like what would be in a book. You Google it, and here it comes.”

He has a point there. Many of us use the Internet for testing out Facebook’s new messenger, looking up funny YouTube videos about Matt Damon and other fun procrastination techniques. So we may still be in entertainment mode when Googling research for a report.

But I don’t think it’s fair for “cheating experts” (who are these people, anyway?) to say college students, according to the AP, are “sloppy” and “think of our computers as cut-and-paste machines.”

The truth is, if we collectively don’t know how to cite our sources the right way, that doesn’t mean we’re just lazy and think we can get away with it. It means we haven’t been taught. That’s sad, because almost all of us have to spend at least one semester in an English class. And the electronic component of the class is there to help us learn how to communicate through the still-larval Internet. That includes citations. I’m sure other universities have a similar requirement. So I’d think our instructors would take this opportunity to teach us how to cite Web sources.

For instance. I would never intentionally plagiarize. I have too much respect for intellectual property. But sometimes you really don’t mean to. Of course, that wouldn’t fly in a court of law. I think that must be why my English 250 professor, Dr. Gilchrist, made sure he just scared any inclinations to take short-cuts right out of us. After that class, I always triple- and quadruple-check what I’ve cited. Maybe every English 250 teacher should leave their students wide-eyed in fear.

And, you know, students grow up to be professionals. Too often these expert researchers aren’t immune from plagiarism, even though they should have learned how to cite sources long ago. When professionals do plagiarize, their careers are often over. If they somehow manage to keep their jobs, their credibility is still destroyed.

Just another reason it would be good to scare students against academic dishonesty. If we learn it now, it may never affect our professional careers.

Every once in a while, people do intentionally plagiarize. They create Wikipedia pages so they can cite them or hand in their best friend’s paper on the Civil War. But most of the time, plagiarism is an accident, resulting from genuine human error.

That in no way excuses plagiarism or academic dishonesty. But it does show that it doesn’t help to blame problems on the big scary Web or those young whippersnappers. That would mean the problem can’t be solved. When, in truth, it can be. Through education.

– Bailey Lewis is a sophomore in English from Indianola.