Plagiarism

Plagiarism

Introduction

Intellectual and learning skills judged a writer's knowledge of a subject and his work. Therefore, it is necessary to have an understanding of the subject in order to express their learning in the form of words. In this context, plagiarism is considered to be a highly unethical practice, and writers should avoid using such unethical practices in their work.

Plagiarism

The word plagiarism is defined as the “[both] the theft and misrepresentation of intellectual property and the substantial unattributed textual copying of another's work (Skom 1986).”

In the academic sense, plagiarism is defined as the inability of the student about the knowledge of the subject because of which he is not able to write about it in a proper and ethical way. When writers copy from other sources and even paraphrase other's work without even giving credit to the relevant source, is typically categorized under plagiarism.

For the purpose of maintaining academic integrity, it is recommended to avoid plagiarism because it can lead to serious consequences for students. In many universities and educational institutions, any person convicted of plagiarism is liable to undergo legal processes and outlawed from the institution.

Why Students Plagiarize

The reason for copying or paraphrasing other's work is the lack of understanding of the student about a subject. Students copy other's work either because they are not able to find the right words for expressing their knowledge or they are too lazy and do not have much time for completing their given task in their own words. Plagiarism highly effects the presentation of your lack competency to write and makes it viable to be considered as an unethical approach of writing.

In addition to that, students often face difficulty while citing sources from the internet, which can also lead to plagiarism. Most of the students do not have a better understanding about plagiarizing and paraphrasing that leads to writing down a content that is counted under plagiarism.

Intentional vs. Unintentional Plagiarism

The intentional or deliberate plagiarism is when the person represents other's ideas and opinions with the view that it is his own content. This accounts for an act of stealing other person's information; most of the time in case of copy pasting the content. Every institution has its predefined limit of quoting texts from any source. A commonly observed limit of plagiarism is 10% in many reputable academic institutions.

The examples are discussed below:

Copying an entire document from a website and presenting it as their work without citing sources or references.

Paying someone else to do academic work rather than assigned student to complete the task.

The unintentional plagiarism typically occurs when a person carelessly cites sources or paraphrases and ends up giving misleading credit to any source of information. This plagiarism categorized under improper citation style, paraphrasing and substituting words usually with the method of putting in synonyms.

The examples of unintentional plagiarism are discussed below (Hacker 2003):

Improperly paraphrasing another person's ideas: In this case, the student may give the impression of theft by not properly using their own words to express ...