Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty: Definition and Solutions

Abstract

In the real sense many people have mistaken on the meaning of plagiarism. It has been a matter that confuses all people including teacher and students. Variation exists between degree at which people understand the meaning of it and the degree at which schools and teachers teach and address the issues of strategies on how to prevent it. There are ways to prevent plagiarism and some of them are teaching the student on the proper way of citing the way as a prove of the source used in the work. A trusting learning environment can be provided and established through devising assignments to promote original thoughts especially in students.

Introduction

Education has been entirely changed all over the world since the Internet is the most appropriate and preferred means of searching as compared to library research. Internet searching has extremely became the fast paced in the world of research where has consequently resulted in many cases of plagiarism and academic dishonest.

The integral pert parts of online experiences are when the researchers share and borrow the work. Student will still be ill equipped if teachers do not actively promote integrity and academic understanding of plagiarism.

There are five fundamental values of integrity as to which the student and any researcher must be having in order t produce quality and original work: respect, trust, responsibility, fairness, and honest as the leading value of a good researcher. All those values should be promoted in within academic the academic communities. Before the students teacher should strategies their teaching in the following ways:

- They must discuss the ethical and moral issues that are related to plagiarism, that include the trust between the teacher and the student.

- In the beginning of every semester have students write a one-page response to any of the given topics inside the classroom. Teachers should as well become familiar with each student’s writing ability and for monitoring the progress of student teachers should save the assignment as examples on in-class writing.

- Discus the meaning of plagiarism length to make sure that student get the meaning of it.

- Teachers can include in the discussion how the bodies of knowledge are therefore generated by the great scholars who may have build up each others` work in a given discipline.

- You should not assign the student one long term kind of papers at the beginning of every the semester and taking long time to collect it.

- You should give student class time for practicing, summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting and citing pages of passages.

- Term paper for research strategies should be built and written into small assignment all along the semester. They could include developing the thesis outlining the paper, finding articles, proposing the topics, creating an annotated bibliographies and submission of multiple draft of papers.

In the other hand, students have a fundamental responsibility in Preventing Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty (Ehrlich, 2000). Some of the measures that student should take are:

- Students should separate their ideas from other students by the use of different color pens and or putting their ideas in bracket.

- Students should establish a good development for a good and quality note taking.

- To prevent alteration of ideas for plagiarism, students should always include the page number next to the quoted work in your notes.

- Whenever you copy word for word from a resource, quotation mark is advisable to be placed around the passage of your work to show that the work has been copied from a source.

- After a good understanding of reading paraphrase what you have obtained from the content sources such as getting from the entire page or looking away from the text. This help to ensure that the words are in the student’s voice.

- Students should cite their work containing the author, title and year of their notes.

References

Anastasia, A. Plagiarism and dishonest in academy in the future education. Review65:197–208.

Cooper, R. S, Kaufman, J. S., & Ward, R. Honest work and integrity . New England Journal of Research. 348(12).

Ehrlich, P. R. Human natures: Academic prosperity, and the human prospect. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.