Plagiarism, among the main scourges in academics, seems nothing but is a harmful act. Let’s first explain what plagiarism is? Plagiarism is simply the act of stealing someone else’s work, idea and representing it as of yours without indicating the source. So here a question arises that is plagiarizing acceptable writing practice? No. it’s not acceptable to enjoy the fruit of someone else’s hard work. This is a social as well as a moral issue.
In this era of technology plagiarizing has become a serious offence as tech has made it easy. Various plagiarism checkers, tools and software are out there which has made it easier to just copy and paste the work of others without giving them the credit for their hard work. These tools just spin the words and present the same idea in different wordings. This immoral act is adversely affecting students and the education system. So why do students plagiarize? Here are some reasons leading to plagiarism.
Reasons behind Plagiarism
Students avoid hardworkingly:
Many students avoid working hard. Working on academic tasks requires gathering information from primary and secondary sources. After gathering the information, analyze data and build thoughts and ideas. This whole process requires hard work. To avoid hard work students just simply choose a shortcut and just copy and paste other people’s work and to avoid detection of plagiarism that just simply use rephrase tools. Along with tools and software, various cheat sites provide copy and paste material, hence students have to do less work because these cheat sites are efficient.
Lack of information:
Students lack information. When students have a topic but are unaware of the content, they look for others’ work. Information gathering, analyzing, and interpreting are difficult processes. Students lack proper guidance in this matter. They should be provided with proper assistance with subject to the gathering of information, analyzing, and interpretation.
Lack of thoughts:
Your writing depicts your thinking. The main portion of every text is your thinking, what you think about the given topic, and secondly how you write. Most students are unaware of the topics, writing process which results in plagiarism, stealing the work of others, sentence rewriting, etc.
Time pressure:
Writing is time consuming and lengthy process. You have to develop understanding, build your thoughts, etc. All of these require time and hard work. Approaching deadlines or little time provided to the student to submit their writings put pressure on students and to escape from such kind of pressure they just plagiarize the text.
Plagiarism Checker paraphrasing tools:
It’s become quite easier to plagiarize with plagiarism checker paraphrasing tools, plagiarism detectors, sentence rephrase and rewriter and plagiarism detector. This software paraphrases the text and removes plagiarism within seconds. These comforts brought by these tools have made plagiarism attractive. In this way, it becomes quite easier to fetch other people’s work and present it as yours. So instead of Researching students spend more time searching.
Secondly, the Plagiarism detector only relies on databases that already exist. Any text will be detected which is present in their database but stuff out of their database will go undetected.
Implications of Plagiarism on Education
Plagiarism Prevents Learning:
One of the biggest drawbacks of plagiarism is that it prevents students from learning. We enter school or college intending to learn and understand, researching and writing is part of it. Assignments are not for grading but for learning. When you do research, gather data and write, you learn a lot from this process but when going for a shortcut way and plagiarizing someone’s work, you will not learn anything. Your learning stops thought process stops and you are just a dull person.
Questioned the credibility of Work:
Plagiarized research can have serious repercussions and if it’s medical research, it can put people’s lives in danger. It decreases the value of research as it’s a cheated document so it’s worthless.
Destroy student Reputation:
Plagiarism can destroy the reputation of the student. A student involved in this immoral act might be expelled from the institution depending upon the rules and regulations of the institution. This can be a dark spot on the character of the student and erodes morality
Erodes the integrity of institution:
Plagiarism affects the integrity of the educational institution. Educational institutions built the character of students and determine values. As plagiarism is an immoral act, it will bring a bad name to the institution. If institutions don’t discourage plagiarism, this will lower their integrity. Employees also reject graduates from defamed institutions.
Hinder in innovation:
Successful research concludes with some new ideas, concepts, thoughts and leads to innovation. All developed countries have kept research on top priority, allocating special budgets for research and development. Plagiarism is the biggest hurdle that curtails innovation. This copy-paste practice doesn’t produce anything new. Innovation comes with research.
Well, it’s very difficult to stop plagiarism because of technological advancement. Plagiarism detector, similarity checker, rephrases tools all are aiding in plagiarism. Machines have limitations but we can build moral characters of students so that they might not choose plagiarism. Students should be guided, proper research procedures should be taught with minimal pressure. RESEARCH Spirit is commonly missing among Pakistani graduate and postdoctoral students. Students lack critical thinking and analyzing skills. Students are preoccupied with reading content and don’t use research to form their own thoughts and arguments.
In Pakistan, however, research begins in universities as part of graduate or post-graduate programs. This presents challenges for a student who is unfamiliar with research procedures. To build research abilities, research activities should begin in college. Pakistan’s educational system already falls well short of international norms.
Furthermore, our institutions have hardly any research centres, and those that do exist are under-resourced. As a consequence, the research is of poor quality. Another impediment is a lack of research funding, particularly for PhD research programs.
The government should establish programs and subsidies for students who want to pursue careers in research.