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| Souce: digest.stjohns.edu |
According
to the Psychological Record study (1997), 36% of undergraduates have
plagiarized written material. Another 66% of 16,000 prestigious universities
students in U.S. have cheated at least once, according to a study conducted by
Rutgers University (Check For Plagiarism n.d.). It is an alarming issue that for
the past ten years, plagiarism in students’ papers has increased (Kelly 2011).
Students find it easier to just ‘cut and paste’ as there is no need to retype
the text.
The
article entitled ‘Confessions of a Plagiarist’ talks about how Media Watch
caught Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatrist and Fairfax columnist, plagiarizing in his
columns. Tanveer Ahmed explains how he lost sight of it when he was putting
things together by using lots of copy and paste and writing around it for his
research. Many people, other than journalists have the tendency to commit the
plagiarism crime. In my opinion, students have to be taught about this issue. Plagiarism
is becoming an alarming issue in the education industry and it may be
increasing due to the advancements of technology and internet.
According
to the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary, plagiarism is defined as “take and
use another person’s thoughts, writings, inventions as one’s own”. However,
research shows that not many students have accurate ideas about what
constituted plagiarism. Some students think it is “adequate acknowledgement” by
merely supplying a list of references or bibliography in their assignments
(Sutherland-Smith 2008).
Furthermore,
some students are not prepared for tertiary education (Sutherland-Smith 2008).
They have poor time management skills, leaving their work till the very last
minute. They will eventually decide to plagiarize other people’s work just to
get their assignments done on time. Moreover, some students find it hard to
summarize key ideas in complex readings. This will lead to students caught for
plagiarizing the whole idea of someone else’s work.
Teachers
and lecturers have to guide students and let them know what constitutes
plagiarizing. Proper referencing and citation has to be taught in order to
reduce plagiarism. Teachers can exercise small assessment tasks to build the
skills to summarize main ideas from complex readings. Students have to
understand that plagiarism is often damaging in terms of public perception of
the standards of academic excellence of the university or college
(Sutherland-Smith 2008).
References
Aedy, R 2012, ‘Confessions of a
plagiarist’, Media Report, posted 19
October, viewed 7 November 2013,
<http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/mediareport/confessions-of-a-plagiarist/4321306#transcript>
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