Plagiarism

Plagiarism is an act of stealing someone’s ideas or piece of work without any acknowledgement and crafting it as one’s own. It can happen either through deliberate cheating or by accidental copying. But this theft of ideas is classified as unethical and equated to be a grave academic fraud. 

In many countries, people who violate and commit such immoral and dishonourable acts are even subjected to potential legal implications. Such immoral drill of taking someone’s ideas furtively is intolerable in many parts of the world and that even a little spark of coincidence can at times ignite a huge inferno of plagiarism row and allegations, and subsequently hit the headlines.

However, plagiarism is still one omnipresent academic epidemic that is generally witnessed and easily received in most of our educational institutions and publications. Just because there is copy and paste buttons, we take advantage of the technology to dishonestly sneak someone’s work and present it as ours. School magazines and newspapers have reportedly been the brothels of plagiarism for many of our students. And project work is no exception.

 

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The allure of plagiarism does not fade in the genes of our students. But as an educator, such practice of unlawful duplication of someone’s knowledge has a big reason to worry. Technologies that have transported the information to the doorstep of our fingertip has largely made this generation, complacent and lazy to invent their own ideas. 

Chronic procrastinators don’t agonize because they are highly acclimatized with the climate of accepting plagiarized work to be safe and permissible. As a result, they submit themselves to be ardent players of systematic plagiarizers.

In the schools, in the event of doing class works, either intra-corpal (copying the work from their mates) or extra-corpal plagiarism (copying the work from external sources such as websites or books) is highly rampant. And during the publication of magazines, few switch to self or auto-plagiarism (resubmitting the work that was previously submitted).

While many of our students are aware that plagiarism is detrimental and inappropriate for them to practice, due to the silent approval of our culture, its business is still mushrooming. It is certain that in the schools, the teachers are responsible to watch this practice die young because such practice focus more on “product than the process”, but our parents at home are also equally liable for such lapses. 

After all, educating our youth is the shared responsibility of both the parents and the teachers and not simply the teachers alone.

“Plagiarism is the fear of a blank page”- Mokokoma