Plagiarism is nowadays one of the major concerns in the field of education, while it is also has a significant relevance for science, art, and mass media. Plagiarism is essentially an act of stealing someone’s ideas or words and presenting them as one’s original work. Though plagiarism is not regarded as a crime in the academic field, it is a considerable ethical offense that is fraught with grave consequences, such as point deduction, course failure, destroyed reputation and even expulsion.
It is a common conception among students that plagiarism only involves copying and pasting someone’s work verbatim. However, plagiarism also extends to paraphrasing someone’s expressions or borrowing someone’s ideas without due acknowledgment of their authorship. Moreover, plagiarism involves turning someone else’s work as one’s own, failing to place quotation marks when citing, and providing wrong or inaccurate information about the source of quotation. Therefore, plagiarism is a broad concept that can pertain both to ideas and language formulations taken from any published or unpublished source.
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"Why Is Plagiarism Wrong".
In the academia, plagiarism is regarded as an act of academic dishonesty since it is accepted that students, professors and scientists should give credit to the authors whose works they use. Students who engage in plagiarism can be subject to different forms of academic punishment, the most common being reprimand, grade reduction, and course failure. Repetitive acts of plagiarism can result in the student’s expulsion from their educational institution. For post-graduate researchers, plagiarism can lead to even more serious consequences, such as marred reputation and conflicts with the researchers whose work they use without acknowledgment. Furthermore, plagiarism can involve the act of copyright infringement if the “borrowed” work is protected with copyright. In this case, failure to cite the source of a phrase or idea can entail litigation and monetary penalties.
Today, teachers and professors have access to a wide range of checking tools, such as Turnitin, which enable them to detect plagiarism with high accuracy. Therefore, students have very little chance to escape punishment when they engage in the act of plagiarism, whether severe or not. It is thus very important to avoid plagiarism in every written paper. The easiest way to avoid plagiarism is to always give credit to the authors whose formulations or ideas a person uses in one’s work. If a source is cited verbatim, it is crucial to place the quotation marks before and after the quote. In citing the sources, students should precisely follow the conventions of the assigned formatting style (MLA, APA, Chicago etc.) because failure to follow them can also be interpreted as plagiarism. The source has to be indicated even if a student paraphrases someone’s words profoundly. It is wrong to paraphrase long passages with providing only one citation in the end: the authorship of every statement has to be acknowledged, in order to avoid confusion.
Every educational institution and many professors have their own rules as to the limit of cited information in written papers, which should not be exceeded. In the overall, students should realize that, when assigning them essays or research papers, professors and teachers expect to see and evaluate the students’ personal views and ideas. Thus, original statements and judgments should be prevalent in academic papers, though there are some exceptions when only paraphrasing and summarizing are needed. Students should carefully edit their papers and check them with anti-plagiarism tools to make sure that they are unique and contain properly formatted citations.
In both academic and professional realms, plagiarism can lead to numerous adverse effects, such as diverse penalties and ruined reputation. While plagiarism is not generally considered a crime, it can involve the breach of law when the plagiarized information is protected with copyright. In order to avoid plagiarism, students should properly indicate the sources of their information, following relevant formatting rules and conventions.
