Plagiarism In Higher Education

First of all, let’s define plagiarism. For this we will share a list that was modified from Franklyn-Stokes and Newstead (1995):
• paraphrasing material from another source without acknowledging the author;
• use of translation services from foreign language materials ( Example: textbook in other language);
• doing another student’s coursework for him / her;
• using another’s whole piece of work and presenting as one’s own;
• re-submission of work when original work is expected (own and others);
• paying someone to write coursework for you (ghost-writing);
• downloading from the web and not citing the origin of the material;
• taking unauthorized material into an exam;
• library ‘misconduct’, making it difficult for other students to get required books;
• Allowing coursework to be copied by another student.
The question is why students use plagiarism and cheating. One of the most popular answers is: “I just had too much to do “- time management is one of the most important issues students have to deal with. Another common answer would be: “I could not keep up“. Again, time management is the main concern mainly because in most cases, many assignments come at the same time and students have a real problem dealing with all of them equally. The third answer would be: “I heard that our tutor has not noticed that others have copied chunks from the web. Why can I not get away with it too?”
Tutors are known for the fact that they don’t take any action for obvious infringement and the only thing they do is to say to their students not to do it again, that it is. As you can see, tutors don’t seem interested when it comes down to the effort students have to make. Another applicable answer is: “Last year students said that they had the exact same essay and offered me it. I just used it as guidance” – This issue occurs because same tasks are given each and every year.
One last answer would be: “Everyone else seems to get away with this, why shouldn’t I?”. Students aren’t really scared because the penalties are rather small in comparison with the personal advantages they have and also students want to challenge the authorities.
The overall situation is quite bad although researches regarding this issue are hard to conduct. If we have a look at the cases that have been detected, we are only observing the tip of the iceberg as the issue has deep ramifications. A U.S. study showed that 8.5% of the students that participated in this study used copy/paste for about 25% of the work.
The number of paper mills (people who are hired to write essays, cheat sites) is rapidly growing. Some of these websites offer students the ability to personalize their essays. These websites affirm that they don’t support plagiarism and they are doing this only for guiding students and to give them a “start” for their essays.
All things considered plagiarism is a real concern among high school and college students and solutions for resolving this issue are hard to find. Parents and teachers should form a united front in order to diminish this bad habit that students have.
Summary: This article debates the issue of plagiarism in higher education which is becoming a real problem not only for teachers but for parents as well.