Plagiarism And Its Consequences In Tertiary Education: An Analysis And Recommendations

What is Plagiarism in Tertiary Education?

Question:

You are required to research, analyse, discuss and provide recommendations on the following topic, through the writing of an academic style report. 

Topic: ‘Plagiarism and its consequences in tertiary education, and how Plagiarism can be minimised’. 

Plagiarism is a term being used in the current tertiary educational institutions across the globe. The actions of plagiarism in the educational systems include the activities of the students to copy entire or part of the works submitted by other students and submit the same as their own. There are a number of impacts of plagiarism on the quality of education provided by the tertiary educational institutions along with the effects on the reputation of the institutions. The report analyses several consequences of plagiarism in the tertiary educational institutions. These consequences of plagiarism are of different magnitude and intensity depending on the frequency and quantity of the plagiarised content present in the work submitted by the student. There are a number of ways of minimising plagiarism in tertiary education, some of which are analysed in this report and are also mentioned as recommendations to the educational institutions. These consequences of plagiarism along with the preventive measures are considered to be one of the most focused module in any of the tertiary educational institutions across the globe (Bretag, 2013).

The topic under analysis is, ‘Plagiarism and its consequences in tertiary education, and how Plagiarism can be minimised’. This topic focuses on the term ‘plagiarism’, which can be defined as the action of presenting other’s work as own work in educational institutions. The topic focuses on the plagiarism in the tertiary level of education across the world and its effects on the quality of the education. Various programs such as management degrees in the tertiary education provide the students with a number of assignments, which allows the students to utilize the knowledge gained in the prior lessons. The question of the topic focuses on the importance of minimising plagiarism in the tertiary education and the impacts of the inclusion of plagiarism in the educational activities. The educational institutions across the globe give a lot of importance to the removal of plagiarism and gives it a lot of importance as it directly impacts the quality of education provided by the institution. This report tries to analyse the term ‘plagiarism’ first and then tries to reveal several ways of minimising it in the tertiary educational system (Gipp, 2013).

As mentioned earlier, plagiarism is considered to be the action of a student presenting or copying the creative work of another person as his or her own. This action can directly be compared to the theft of the intellectual property of an individual. The students of the tertiary educational system are assigned with a number of assignments and research papers to allow the teachers to evaluate the knowledge gained by the students in the lessons along with their capabilities to apply the same in the real-time scenarios. These research papers and assignments allocated to the students in the educational institutions require them to go through the study materials and utilize their creativity to apply their knowledge to real-time scenarios. This in turn makes some students to either copy some statements or entire contents from someone else’s work and present the same as their own. This is considered to be plagiarism in the tertiary educational system (Masic, 2012).

Consequences of Plagiarism in Tertiary Education

The educational institutions providing various tertiary educational programs to the individuals across the globe are very strict in terms of plagiarism in the assignments and research papers of the students. There are a number of consequences faced by the students due to the inclusion of plagiarism in their research papers and assignments in the tertiary education. Some of these consequences are mentioned in this section.

Generally, the teachers in the tertiary educational institutions take assignment-specific actions against the student in case of the presence of plagiarism for the first time or to a minimal extent. In such cases, the student is asked to redo the entire assignment or is given zero for the corresponding assignment, which is reflected in the final grade of the educational program. In some cases, the student is also allowed to redo the plagiarised parts of the assignment and resubmit the modified assignments (George, 2013).

Some of the institutions are very strict in terms of minimising plagiarism in the educational system. In some of such institutions, the student is failed for the corresponding course of the program, for the submission of plagiarised work. Generally, the teacher considers a minimum and maximum limit of plagiarism contained in a submitted work before failing a student for the corresponding course (Bretag, 2013).

Some of the educational institutions across the globe take extreme measures against plagiarism and to prevent the same in the work submitted by any of the students. In such extreme actions, the students are stripped of their ability to get a degree from the corresponding college and are not allowed to continue the corresponding educational program. Such extreme actions are generally taken against a student due to repeating instances of plagiarism in the assignments and research papers (Rodriguez, 2013). 

Some of the educational institutions allow the students to go through various training and seminars to learn more about the effect and consequences of plagiarism. These students are generally unaware of the plagiarism in their work and not aware of the consequences of the same (Chaddah, 2014).

There are a number of ways in which the presence of plagiarism in the tertiary educational institutions. Some of these ways are mentioned in this section.

The more the students are engaged in the class activities and the assigned activities, the less is the chance of having plagiarism in the assignments and research papers. The more engagement of the students in the constructive activities in the class allows them to have a better sense of the study materials and the assigned work (Kalani, 2013).

Developing questionnaires based on the subject allows the teachers to evaluate the knowledge of the students on the subject matter. This in turn ensures that the work submitted by the students don’t contain any plagiarism (Baugher, 2013).

The students should go through effective training activities to understand the effects and consequences of the presence of plagiarism in the work they submit. This in turn allows the students to have better understanding of plagiarism (Barrón-Cedeño, 2013).

There are a number of tools like TurnItin, which can be utilized by the educational institutions for the submission of the assignments. These tools ensure that the plagiarised work in the submitted assignments are found in an efficient manner. This in turn causes the students to avoid having plagiarised content in their work (Broussard, 2015). 

Conclusion

The term ‘plagiarism’ is gaining a lot of focus and importance in the tertiary educational institutions across the globe due to the increasing presence of the plagiarised contents in the assignments and research papers submitted by the students. The educational institutions across the globe manage the plagiarism in different ways in their courses and programs. These consequences of plagiarism range from very minimal actions to very high penalties. These consequential actions are taken against the students based on the frequency of the presence of plagiarised content in their work and the magnitude of the plagiarised content in the work submitted by the students. There are a number of ways in which the plagiarism in the tertiary educational system can be minimised and the educational institutions across the globe follow some of these ways based on a wide range of factors (Angélil-Carter, 2014).

Some of the recommendations to minimise plagiarism in the tertiary educational programs are mentioned in this section.

• The students can be allowed to work only on computerised platforms designed to track the activities and identify the plagiarism in the work.
• It should be mandated for the students to generate a plagiarism report using any of the tools available in the market, while submitting their work (Ghajarzadeh, 2013).
• The students should be asked to explain the process or methodology used for the completion of the assigned work. This allows the teacher to be cleared regarding the presence of plagiarism in the submitted work.
• The student should be asked to provide explainable and open references for the work submitted to the tertiary educational institutions, to ensure the minimal chances of plagiarism. 

References

Angélil-Carter, S. (2014). Stolen language?: Plagiarism in writing. Routledge.

Barrón-Cedeño, A., Vila, M., Martí, M. A., & Rosso, P. (2013). Plagiarism meets paraphrasing: Insights for the next generation in automatic plagiarism detection. Computational Linguistics, 39(4), 917-947.

Baugher, M. E. C. (2013). Plagiarism Scanning of HVAC&R Submissions: Making Sure Your Paper is in the Clear. HVAC&R Research, 19(6), 647-648.

Bretag, T. (2013). Challenges in addressing plagiarism in education. PLoS Med, 10(12), e1001574.

Broussard, L., & Hurst, H. (2015). Plagiarism Prevention and Detection: A Challenge. Nurse educator, 40(4), 168.

Chaddah, P. (2014). Not all plagiarism requires a retraction. Nature, 511(7508), 127-127.

George, N. G., Thuku, J. K., & Kamau, J. (2013). Plagiarism in Face of Turnitin Service: the Kenyatta University Experience.

Ghajarzadeh, M., Mohammadifar, M., & Safari, S. (2013). Introducing Plagiarism and Its Aspects to Medical Researchers is Essential. Anesthesiology and pain medicine, 2(4), 186-7.

Gipp, B., Meuschke, N., Breitinger, C., Lipinski, M., & Nürnberger, A. (2013, July). Demonstration of citation pattern analysis for plagiarism detection. In Proceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (pp. 1119-1120). ACM.

Kalani, V., & Twinwal, A. (2013). Plagiarism and its Consequences.

Masic, I. (2012). Plagiarism in scientific publishing. Acta Inform Med, 20(4), 208-213.

Rodriguez, V. (2013). Plagiarism, its consequences, and how to avoid it.