Plagiarism is a very popular topic in academic circles, among students and teaching staff. There are two main ways of thinking about plagiarism...
Plagiarism is a very popular topic in academic circles, among students and teaching staff. There are two main ways of thinking about plagiarism and dealing with it: as something illegal and punishable, as something morally wrong. Unfortunately, neither of these methods has proven to be completely successful in achieving the intended effect.
Educational institutions which use the latter of these two methods – looking at the issue from the positions of morality – usually adopt some kind of honor codes. These honor codes involve some principles telling students what is right and what is wrong. The institutions which stick to this approach believe that, under some social pressure, the student will choose the right thing. So they ask their students to confirm that they will act in a way that is considered to be good and right in academic circles.
Although students subscribe to honor codes, there are other moral principles which may contradict the principle of non-plagiarizing. One of such things is a principle of solidarity among students, or friendship in other words – it often turns out to be more important than adherence to the honor code.
The first, also very common, approach is treating plagiarism as a crime or illegal activity that can be punished. Many colleges and universities develop sets of strict rules concerning plagiarism and make sure that these rules are obeyed by students. These sets of rules are regularly looked through and improved. Faculty members are encouraged to be very careful in order to notice any signs that these rules are broken. Also, colleges and universities often use electronic document plagiarism checker and different kinds of essay checker software. With the help of these tools, teachers submit and check essay of a student and can find out if there any matches or part matches with the texts already in the database.
Not all of students treat these sets of rules in the same way: while some obey them without hesitation, others do not consider them important and ignore them. There are many reasons why anti-plagiarism efforts fail. First of all, students do not always understand what is meant by the term “academic integrity”. Secondly, the rules of intellectual property right and, thus, plagiarism policy are constantly changing. Also, modern students do not value originality of work and statements as much as the students of ‘60s and ‘70s did.
Except that, modern students focus strongly on success and achievement. This focus has what helped them get into chosen colleges and universities. They do not appreciate education for the process of learning, as most of their professors do.
All of these facts represent a clear sign that some alternative approach to plagiarism prevention should be developed. Within this third strategy, the ability to cite sources should be learned as a set of skills. The approach has two aspects. First, students have to be taught about the value of citation — it is obvious, that now they do not fully get the meaning of it. Second, they have to get instructions as to how to cite properly. In this aspect, it is important to note that expectations towards citation and quotation differ to a great degree, depending on the academic subject.
Given the complexity of the issue of plagiarism, it is obvious that students cannot be simply given some instructions and be expected to follow these instructions. So, colleges and universities can do the following:
