By Emma Schor Staff Writer Plagiarism is a growing concern that has gained more awareness and drastically increased throughout today’s society. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, students have easily had access to various websites and search engines that make it easy to copy information and even cheat. Some examples include Google, Yahoo!, Firefox, and even different AI websites. There has been access to these websites for quite a few years now. However, everything was switched to a digital format because of the pandemic. This format has now become the default for most schools, with very few teachers handing out physical worksheets. Even tests have now defaulted to an online format. Tests can be given through websites like Google Forms, Formative, Pear Deck, and Canvas. Back in March, there was an initiative to proctor the SATs and ACTs online. According to the US Department of Education, these are tests that have been given on paper since 1926. This form of testing has been around for almost 100 years, and now it is being switched to a digital format. This can result in plagiarism and cheating on these larger exams - students are easily able to copy and paste the questions into Google and have the answers pop up in front of them. Most students, including my peers, are prone to plagiarizing sources. They tend to do this because they want to get their assignments done. They don’t really care about the quality of their work. There are also those who aren’t properly taught how to create a works cited page, and even some who aren’t taught at all. If an outside source is not cited that is considered plagiarism, which is also considered cheating. The exact definition of plagiarism, stated by Google, is the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. In most cases, students are caught copying paragraphs and even entire essays off of AI websites. In today’s society, it is extremely easy to give AI a prompt and have it write for you. An example prompt can be something along the lines of, “Write a 750-word essay on how dogs are better than cats,” and AI will write that exact essay on how dogs are better than cats. What’s even worse is that some teachers and professors won’t even mark down or take note of this plagiarism. However, this is different for every teacher. There are those who have AI checkers available and ready to use, but there are also those who don’t check at all. In most cases students will be marked down for plagiarism, as well as not doing their work properly. There is now a demand for AI checkers, meaning that students’ work will be checked every time it is submitted. Those teachers who don’t check for plagiarism will be forced to. We are lucky that most teachers already detect plagiarism, as well as catch it early on within a term or semester. Students don’t just copy work for English classes, they can go online and have apps like PhotoMath do their math homework for them. How will students learn and advance their skills if they are just relying on and copying from an outside source? If a student is plagiarizing and not learning from anything, there is no benefit to that assignment. Plagiarism also takes away the ability for students to be creative. Teachers need to encourage various tools that can be used to help promote a more honest and creative academic environment for everyone. When students simply lift content from various sources without rephrasing it or giving proper credit, they miss out on the real learning experience, which is all about understanding and expressing ideas in their own unique way. There are even some students who won’t plagiarize at first, but as the semester or term goes by, they will begin to fall into the plagiarizing habit. They could potentially begin to lose their academic motivation and just want to finish their assignments. If someone is only using copy and paste, what information will stay in their minds?