Plagiarism Essay Example for Students

Plagiarism refers to the misconduct of presenting the creative work of others as one’s own work without acknowledging the author or the source. In other words, it is the theft of someone else’s work without crediting the author. Students plagiarize their academic work for various reasons, such as lack of proper writing skills, poor organizational skills and time management, improper knowledge about citing sources, pressure from the teachers and various cultural factors . In order to achieve good grades with little or no effort, students optimize their time and resources by employing the method of plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious problem in academics as it is not only unethical, but also deprives the learning opportunities of the students. It hampers the researching skills of the students as they find it easier to copy and paste content from the internet rather than spending ample time on researching the content. Moreover, plagiarism leads to the infringement of copyrights.
There are various strategies that help to counter plagiarism. Since intentional plagiarism is unacceptable in academic environment, it is important to avoid it by following accurate referencing standards. Paraphrasing the ideas of the author and citing the sources is another method to avoid plagiarism. One can also prevent plagiarism by avoiding the use of other students’ work. The most useful method is to spend enough time on the assignments to research the content from various libraries. Plagiarism detection software is available in abundance on the Internet, which plays a major role in detecting the plagiarized content so that the students can rephrase the paper. Students should put their efforts and hard work into practice in order to improve their thinking skills as well as writing skills so that they never need to rely on someone else’s work . Thus, one can avoid plagiarism in academics and present a genuine content.

References

Fisher, M. (2015). Why plagiarize when you can rip off a writer’s thoughts? Columbia Journalism Review.