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About Plagiarism and Students Who Are Not 100% Honest



EssayChat / Jan 5, 2024

By definition, plagiarism is taking another person's thoughts, expressions, or opinion or and using them without acknowledgment of the ingenious source. In numerous cases when doing literal works, it is paramount to incorporate ideas apart from the writers own in order to effectively convey the message in the literature. In doing so, these borrowed ideas cannot be perceived as the writer's original thoughts and therefore must be acknowledged as someone else's. The lack of this acknowledgement is what constitutes plagiary and is considered ethically wrong and a serious academic offense (Karper). This paper seeks to explore what plagiarism entails and provide an analysis based on a self assessment test on plagiarism. It will highlight significant areas that proved difficult to comprehend and measures that can be taken to curb this problem, including resources that could aid in avoiding plagiarism.

Book citationsPlagiarism has been on the increase at an alarming rate. Most often, students are required to write essays and term papers whose content has to be researched. The Internet being the commonly used source for the content presents a platform where information can be reproduced and duplicated without appropriate acknowledgment of its source. Plagiarism has been on the rise mainly among students as it is perceived as an efficient method that saves time on the part of the student (Blum).

A self assessment test conducted to ascertain the extent of knowledge of plagiarism revealed, imperative dos and don'ts in regards to avoiding plagiarism. A pre and post test was performed where a series of questions were administered and true or false answers indicated. In these self assessment tests, both results were a perfect score. The assessment ranged from the appropriate use of citations and word count to elude to internet sources, quoted phrases, presentation of common knowledge, paraphrased ideas and summary of blocks of text from another person's work. The test highlighted several significant aspects of literary works that if not appropriately cited could result in plagiarism.

More often than not, contrary to popular belief, content published on websites across the internet cannot be regarded as common knowledge and therefore it is paramount to accredit the origin of the idea by citing the relevant source, in this case the www site. In addition, the usage of quotation marks to denote words as stated by another individual is not sufficient and relevant citation has to be observed at the end of the text. When summarizing blocks of text, it is important to paraphrase the entire text, without altering the context and the relevant citation is necessary at the end of the paraphrase. It is also of paramount importance to distinguish between common knowledge and ideas that deduce facts. The former requires no documentation as it is generally known by a lot of people whereas the latter requires citation of the ideas' source (Lathrop).

Several measures can be taken into account in order to avert plagiarism. Any information that is directly captured from the text should be enclosed in quotation marks. When presenting another person's words in speech or writing, it is important to paraphrase the entire content, maintaining the context in order to relay the intended information as in the original work. Paraphrasing itself is not considerably adequate and they must be proper acknowledgement of the information source by documenting appropriately in accordance to the relevant documentation style. It is not necessary however to document common knowledge or generally known information, for example, proverbs and the birthdays of presidents. It is important on the other hand to document quotations whenever they are used in the text (Neville).

In conclusion, plagiarism has been observed to be intellectual larceny. It should be shunned by giving recognition whenever the use of someone else's opinions, statistics and facts that cannot be regarded as common knowledge, quotations of another individual's utterances or words in writing and paraphrases of the same.

References

Best Essay Service - Is Plagiarism Only the Student's Responsibility: best-essay-service.com/student-educator-plagiarism

Blum, S. D. My word!: plagiarism and college culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Karper, E. Plagiarism. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University [Writing Lab, English Dept].

Lathrop, A., & Foss, K. Student cheating and plagiarism in the Internet era a wake-up call. Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited.

Neville, C. The complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism. Maidenhead: Open University Press.


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