Plagiarism

PlagiarismThe consequence of plagiarizing material carries with it shame, exposes academic lethargy and may become costly. Most students take away with them the importance of academic integrity from professors, counselors, peers and even the media. With so much emphasis put on the subject one would think plagiarism would be unheard of amongst writers. However, data presented by Associate Dean of Student Discipline Steven J Tyrell (2004) studies showed 24 students were accused of academic misconduct in a single school year.

Webster's dictionary defines plagiarism as "A piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work" (Webster). The act of plagiarizing is taking someone's words and idea's and using them as if they were your own. Plagiarism has contributed too many students getting poor grades, and has even cost some students their academic careers. With so much at stake, why would a student take the risk? Some students don't' know that they are, in fact plagiarizing.

Students in the incubation room at the Woodbine Ag...

black = plagiarized from one source, red = plagiar...

Sponsoring 4th Plagiarism Conference

Poor research skills and lack of proper timing on the student's part along with poor preparation can make it very easy for the student to plagiarize without them even knowing, and then there are the students who plagiarize because it's so easy to do that they feel it must not be wrong.

There are many types of plagiarism, and reason on why students commit plagiarism. Unintentional plagiarism usually occurs when someone uses someone else's material and they do not cite it in their work or places it on their reference page. There are many types of unintentional plagiarism, citation confusion is when the writer does not know or ignore the rules of proper referencing and citation. Paraphrasing is when the student tries to copy varies works but they stay with the original idea. Word Substitution is...