Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism in Academic College Work

Understanding and avoiding plagiarism in academic college work

Un Puthearoath

American University of Phnom Penh

Understanding and avoiding plagiarism in academic college work

In college, there are many rules and regulations that are mandatory to follow in order to avoid both intentional and unintentional academic misconduct. For example, in university, it is not a wrong idea to use other people’s work as a guideline to make it into one’s paperwork, but it is academically not acceptable to commit such a thing in the college because it could result in many negative consequences such as getting expelled from the school and ruining academic records. That is why plagiarism is being introduced to almost every universities freshman on how to avoid it. The purpose of this paper is to discuss about plagiarism definition, the reason why students plagiarize and methods to avoid plagiarism.

        Plagiarism is defined in many ways according to some scholars. Hussin & Ismail (2016) defined plagiarism as the indirect way to commit unacceptable intention against the academic regulation by stealing and cheating. In a similar fashion, according to the College success (2015), plagiarism can be defined as the use of information and making it as if it were one’s possession from a certain source without asking for the permission which is categorized into two forms of plagiarism such as copying exact same words from a certain source and duplicating the original ideas into a different kinds of context without citing the source.

        There are several reasons that explain why students plagiarize in universities. According to the Darwish & Sadeqi (2016), they conduct a research by asking English major first years all female students in a particular Kuwait school to fill out a simple questionnaire which includes some items about the plagiarism. They found out that, “the majority of the participants need high marks to impress their instructors and pass the course. In fact, the great majority of students had studied English as a foreign language for twelve years, in public elementary, middle and high schools. They could speak English fairly fluently if not always correctly, but they were not able to write effectively. Also, EFL students are taught to memorize model answers for the sake of passing the examination. Consequently, memorizing sentences and model answers causes students’ lack of confidence in themselves especially in English as a foreign language which has a great effect enforcing students into plagiarizing.” (Darwish & Sadeqi, 2016, p.103). Moreover, as reported by Hussin & Ismail (2013), they stated that, “Research students whose first language is not English but are pursuing their degree in an ESL or EFL context are required to do their written tasks in English. Their lack of proficiency in the English language may hinder their understanding of content of source materials, making them feel intimidated and in awe of the work of the established scholars leading to a reluctant to critique the source. They might feel diffident even to formulate their own sentences. If this is the case, they might have the tendency to quote excerpts verbatim from the source. However, too many verbatim quotations in the text might render the student’s text to be considered plagiarized work”.