TL;DR: The education system has failed to help students develop critical writing skills which lead them to commit plagiarism when they reach college.

The underlying problem with students plagiarism does not only fall on what type of students they are or on the individual’s ethics. It also falls in the type of education they had before they attend college. For students, high school is the stepping stone that will prepare them for college, but in some cases that is not true. According to a survey done by plagiarism.org, out of 24,000 students at 70 different high schools 58 percent admitted to plagiarism. We might ask ourselves why so high percent? Some might argue that this high rate of student plagiarism is linked to the ethics or background of the student. On the other hand, I argue that the education they received failed to prepare these students to develop critical thinking and writing skills while informing them about the consequences of plagiarism.

In order to better prepare students, English classes need to be restructured to develop crucial writing skills. Our education system needs to implement a different English class structure. This structure should consist of intensive writing sessions where teachers help students figure out different ways on how to write a different type of papers. Teachers can also use books to help students to better analyze their writing. For example, BUGS in Writing, Revised Edition: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose. In this new English class structure, there should also be a session that goes over plagiarism. The topics of this session should include the following: what is plagiarism, why plagiarism is a crime and the consequences of plagiarizing.

The education system should start implementing the basic concept of this new structure in middle school. The reason why middle school would be a great start is because middle school is where students begin to develop some writing skills and also they start writing essays. Others may challenge this structure by insisting that middle school students are too young to handle such workload and they should be focusing on other educational things. I argue that starting at an early age has many benefits. Middle school students will start to develop writing skills that will help them do better in their standardized English tests. They will be better prepared when they get to high school, where they will have to do a more intensive writing and their personal essay for college. Students will be better prepared when they get to college. They will have the skills that will help them throughout their college career and essentially they will not have to plagiarize when they have to write their papers.

With plagiarism being a problem that has been growing in high school and eventually branching out to college, we have to look at the different routes that lead students to plagiarize. The education system being one of those main routes, we have to change something about it. My solution is just the basics of a larger structure when it comes to changing English classes in middle school and high school. There are many other things that can also be added to my solution, but there will opposing sides to my solution as well. If we want to decrease the number of students who plagiarize, One route that must be changed is the education system and help students become better writers and develop writing skills at an early age.

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