Plagiarism In Education: Prevention And Strategies

The Definition of Plagiarism

Question:

Discuss about the Plagiarism and its Prevention for Writings.

Plagiarism initially refers to the materials duplicated from others or stealing from another person’s work and naming it own work. Plagiarism has a specific definition, that is; plagiarism is literally a committed theft of existing ideas, denying the source and not disclosing the truth about the source. Plagiarism is infringement of the copyright law. The copyright law states that every person has a copyright on the activities, writings, blogs, songs, films or any other expressions for a certain span and copying or stealing it within that time without the permission of the owner is infringing the law (Lea & Street, 2014). There is also a clause of the law, which states that if the owner complains about the stolen material then the person will have to suffer imprisonment along with ransom.

Plagiarism in education is a growing issue that decreases the level of integrity in education. To avoid plagiarism, training the students to render their own ideas is referred.

This report discusses the use of plagiarism in education and recommends methods of how to prevent plagiarism.

There are some values in the academic way of integrity. Those values include honesty, own ideas, trust, responsibility to provide own thesis using own words. The students of the present generation have forgotten to write anything using their words. Studies say that a post-graduate student writes an essay with a large amount of plagiarism in it. The plagiarism in the student’s work in every form is present in the research part of the assignments (Newton, 2016). The students doing plagiarism are suffering from a lack of confidence of disclosing their own ideas because they have the fear of being insulted. The breaching of the academic uprightness includes plagiarism at a great extent and some includes collusion and cheating in assignment and downloading the full assignments from the internet. Among all these issues, plagiarism is the most strongly mocked violation of the academic morality as it sabotages the proposition of the contribution of knowledge.

The role of knowledge and research always has the focus of neglecting academic uprightness and having research on plagiarism on the undergraduate elevation. This includes targeted initiation, assistance and instruction on all commended students particularly from the background of an accord to tradition. Plagiarism is a manifestation of academic honesty that possibly places substantial rewards to the students for the value of their work or assignment. There are many strategies to dissuade plagiarism includes instructions regarding the development of the assessment, modules of the designs and educational skills (Gómez-Espinosa, Francisco & Moreno-Ger, 2016).

The rates of the plagiarism by students indicate that there is a problem of receiving appropriate information and knowledge both at the undergraduate and postgraduate level of education. The disaffection of integrity by the investigators is common. Plagiarism has negative results such as cancellation of the project, decrease in the credibility of the author and losing reputation. It is a very deep problem in academic uprightness. The researchers need to increase their perception about the plagiarism issues. The researchers need to have the ability to keep against plagiarism. The digital age is at a juncture where plagiarism is increasing daily with the increase of the pressure of studies on the students. The researchers need to deal with the students ideas and encourage them to complete the task themselves and not copying it from others (Glendinning, 2014).

Plagiarism in Education and the Decrease of Integrity

Many students are seen having problem regarding paraphrasing of texts and providing the exact citations as required. The students struggle to achieve the goal of good academic writing and fulfil the integrity of academic education. There are three aspects where plagiarism is the most determining; firstly, when the student has an intention to cheat with the thought of presenting work taken from some other sources and marks it as their own. Secondly, downloading the assignment and paraphrasing it by themselves causes the expansion of plagiarism. Thirdly, the possibility for the response regarding plagiarism requires the consideration of both the first and second aspects, which takes a disciplinary approach (Sutherland-Smith, 2014). Self-plagiarism is an issue that rotates around the apparent acceptance. Self-plagiarism is mainly submitting the previous work in a reprocessing way without assigning the resource of the original work and without consent of the teachers. The plagiarism creates many problems in submission of the assignment and at times, the students need to do rework on the topic, which can harm their studies (Foltýnek & Glendinning, 2015).

Students of the present generation intend to gain the qualification through assignments and dissertations. Fulfilling the qualification needs submitting of different specific topic with broad discussions and they either have an intention to assign a third party in doing the work or plagiarises the work themselves and submits to the teachers. These results in lowering the value of education and the third party involvement and the plagiarised assignments are discourage-able for the students performing well. The institutions are taking severe actions to stop plagiarism as is treated as a serious offence in most of the countries. The institutions lack in consistency of removing plagiarism. The growing amount of plagiarism is because of the increase in access of the internet, which helps the students to gather information and modify those to present them to the teachers. The students are very familiar in taking the work of another person and marking it as their own without even acknowledging the owner of the task (Eret & Ok, 2014).

The work assigned to the student is need to be done by themselves with the help of references from others work. There is always a secret war in the inner mind of assorting where the ideas of the references end and where the ideas of the student begin. For maintaining the academic honesty, few measures are applicable. The students have to increase the level of the interaction with the teachers and ask for their guidelines for an answer and check citations for references regarding their answer (Heckler & Forde, 2015). The first thing done before asking for guidelines is to plan the paper in a definite way to avoid plagiarism. The other sources required for the research paper is in need of planning. There should be a balance between the planned work and the references. Having an outline of the idea on the concerned topic helps the planning to get better (Lannelongue, Matías-Pereda & González-Benito, 2016). Another way to avoid plagiarism is to keep notes of the topic and records of the sources in a large number so that it helps the person to write more on their own and avoid using the access of the internet. The person can also avoid plagiarism by citing their own ideas with the help of the references can bring more authentications to the assignment and prevent the teachers from thinking that the information is a duplicate of the original. The names of the sites or the owners will give the assignment more reality than lying about the resource. One must have a clear thought of what to say through the assignment and in what way to say. The message or the discussion the assignment covers must be clear in every aspect because without a clear view of their own works they need to adapt plagiarism to explain the related issues and complete the assignments (Imrie, Cox & Miller, 2014). Paraphrasing is not the direct way of putting others ideas as own but it also needs references at the end. While paraphrasing, changing the words is not acceptable (Howard, 2016). The meaning of the sentence should remain the same after paraphrasing the sentence. The analysing and evaluation of the resources in the assignment will result in reality and authentication. One needs to mention the sources according to the help they got from it. The credibility of the source will make the teachers feel the participation of the student, support the works and appreciate the quality of writing.

Conclusion:

Plagiarism is a serious infringement of academic probity. Plagiarism diminishes the value of the honest work. The detonation of plagiarism focuses mainly on the undergraduate students as records say that those students rely a lot on the plagiarism. Plagiarism is a issue with lots of complications in it. To avoid plagiarism more interaction, involvement and training will ensure the improvement in skills and responsibilities of the students. The educational institute needs to acknowledge that the plagiarism requires focus a usual approach that promotes an academic community that adheres on the capability and performance of the academic honesty. The plagiarism issue diminishes the creative power of the student and this puts a negative impact on the students by limiting their thoughts. The students also determinate the name of their pursuing institution and develop less original relations with the instructors. The main consequence of the plagiarism is that they violate the school policies. The students may flank penalties due to plagiarism if they duplicate a major part of the work. Plagiarism affects a lot on the well-being of the student and the institution taking into considerations the violation of the copyright law. Plagiarism can help the students complete their project but due to plagiarism, the students can face many problems.

References:

Eret, E., & Ok, A. (2014). Internet plagiarism in higher education: tendencies, triggering factors and reasons among teacher candidates. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(8), 1002-1016.

Foltýnek, T., & Glendinning, I. (2015). Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education Across Europe: Results of the Project. Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis, 63(1), 207-216.

Glendinning, I. (2014). Responses to student plagiarism in higher education across Europe. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 10(1).

Gómez-Espinosa, M., Francisco, V., & Moreno-Ger, P. (2016). The Impact of Activity Design in Internet Plagiarism in Higher Education. Comunicar, (48), 39-47.

Heckler, N. C., & Forde, D. R. (2015). The role of cultural values in plagiarism in higher education. Journal of Academic Ethics, 13(1), 61-75.

Howard, R. M. (2016). Plagiarism in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Issue?–Introduction. In Handbook of Academic Integrity (pp. 499-501). Springer Singapore.

Imrie, B. W., Cox, K., & Miller, A. (2014). Student assessment in higher education: a handbook for assessing performance. Routledge.

Lannelongue, G., Matías-Pereda, J., & González-Benito, J. (2016). The Antecedents of Plagiarism in Higher Education: Support Tools for Teaching Staff. Arabian J Bus Manag Review, 6(227), 2.

Lea, M. R., & Street, B. (2014). understanding textual practices ‘in higher education. Writing: Texts, processes and practices, 62.

Newton, P. (2016). Academic integrity: a quantitative study of confidence and understanding in students at the start of their higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 41(3), 482-497.

Ocholla, D. N., & Ocholla, L. (2016). Does Open Access Prevent Plagiarism in Higher Education?. AFRICAN JOURNAL OF LIBRARY ARCHIVES AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, 26(2), 187-200.

Sutherland-Smith, W. (2014). Legality, quality assurance and learning: competing discourses of plagiarism management in higher education. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 36(1), 29-42.