The Problems of Plagiarism

Plagiarism is an academic misconduct in which students use someone’s ideas or information in their work without proper referencing. While western culture insists that sources of words, ideas, images, sounds be documented for academic purposes, “plagiarism is now recognized as a serious problem especially in university where students are just copying words from web sites or someone else’s work” (The Owl At Purdue, 2007 ). According to East (2006, p.16), “many Australian universities are now developing and presenting policies which deal with standards of integrity and attempt to define plagiarism and specify its penalties”.

Student plagiarism is problematic in all academic disciplines as a result of various factors, and is a current social phenomenon which universities must address in order to preserve academic integrity. There are issues relating to defining plagiarism , course and assignment design to prevent plagiarism, and best practice concerning plagiarism. However, while plagiarism may be related to the intention of cheating, it may also occur through a sharing of information with friends who have been given the same topic for an assignment and are meant to be working independently.

Neverthless, students have an obligation to use information honestly and in proper ways so as to avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism can be an accidental borrowing of words resulting from the practice of notetaking and paraphrasing, or “too much” editing and proofreading by a fellow student or helper. Presenting another person’s ideas as your own is a form of plagiarism. Failure to acknowledge sources is also a common form of plagiarism. Using quotation marks around quoted words and paraphrased ideas are accepted practice with proper citation ...

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...rstanding of its implications. This confusion is being corrected by educating students, promoting lecturer student communication, and developing a culture of antiplagiarism. Detection and prevention of plagiarism is being implemented by individual checks by educators, the use of multiple antiplagiarism software and online services, the use of penalties and the careful structuring of research assignments . It is widely accepted that the issue of plagiarism can be avoided when students are educated to understand the concept and expectation of the academic institution, possess high level English skills and use their own words to rewrite and develop their own information using references to support their own ideas with appropriate citation. A combination of student education programs, and various plagiarism detection processes is being applied to manage this problem.