The Problem of Plagiarism - Essay Example

Cheating Everyone Involved Plagiarism is a factor that is continuing to be taken more and more seriously in academic institutions around the country. A few brief statistics on plagiarism help to indicate how widespread and popular the practice has become as a means to provide quick, easy answers to questions that were originally intended as a means to provoke thought and discussion among the student body. According to a 2009 study of nine university campuses in the United States, 84% of respondents admitted to cheating on academic papers. Of course this statistic captures other activities besides plagiarism; however, the ultimate impression that the reader should gain from such a statistic is that the practice is both widespread and increasingly pervasive. As this is an issue that effects the academic integrity of the learning institutions that exist as well as the quality and type of education that the students receive, this brief essay will seek to explain a few of the ways in which plagiarism works to cheat not only the student of valuable educational merit but the underlying roots of the educational system as well. The most pressing concern when dealing with the topic of plagiarism and its derivatives is to clearly define and differentiate what specifically plagiarism entails and how intertextuality and paraphrase plays into such a working definition. A most basic definition of plagiarism therefore hinges upon the fact that plagiarism can be defined by attempting to pass off another individual’s work as one’s own. Similarly, intertextuality is a far more gray concept (Hansen 189). Whereas paraphrasing is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it is cited appropriately, intertextuality is similar in that it requires the author to plainly note the manner of the sources that provoked the response that is being presented. In this way, the difference between plagiarism and incorporating useful points of intertextuality hinges upon the ability of the student to incorporate relevant and pertinent citations regarding the material they are dealing with. Firstly, consider the fact of what the educational system itself represents. Ultimately, it is a system that has a primary objective to impart knowledge to the participants within the process. One particularly effective means of doing this is to engage the participant with varying forms of feedback. Assigning papers, responses, critical analyses, discussion speeches etc are but a few ways of achieving such a goal. By means of eliciting this “feedback” system into the educational format, educators can seek not only to “grade” the student but to ascertain to what level the class is engaging with the material is being presented. As such, providing the professor/teacher/instructor with useless feedback in the form of plagiarized work is not only a disservice to the invidivual participants, it is a disservice to the instructor as well as the rest of the class. Due to the fact that the instructor/professor/teacher is given a false representation of how well the student grasps key material and concepts, the pace of the learning can be affected and the negative externalities for the other classroom participants can also increase. Naturally, the most obvious affect of plagiarism is the fact that it is more often than not a willful misrepresentation of the facts by the individual involved. As such, the individual is of coruse cheating themselves of one of the most valuable mechanisms that our society has to offer; that of a superior education. Unfortunately, our society has placed such a premium on results as the expense of the means by which these results are acquired that a higher and higher percentage of students have little to no compunction regarding the practice of plagiarism. Many educators go to great lengths to explain the differing levels of plagiarism; however, in a way a lot of this is somewhat gratuitous. As each and every course syllabus clearly defines what is and what is not plagiarism, it is of little doubt in the minds of most thoughtful students that such a practice is not only morally wrong but is well defined and without much, if any, of a legitimate excuse. Failing to cite sources is another prominent way in which plagiarism is achieved (Porter 36). Whereas many individuals assume that plagiarism is confined to merely copy pasting another’s work into one’s own and passing this off as an original, the fact of the matter is that many times, relatively lower degrees of plagiarism are exhibited as a means of providing key insight/thoughtful analysis into an assignment and seeking to misrepresent this analysis as originally constructed by the author in question. Seeking to incorporate key analysis into an assignment is of course, in and of itself, perfectly acceptable. However, it is necessary to make proper citation of all such inclusions and reference all tangentially related source material so that the reader is acutely aware of how the author arrived at a given determination. It should be noted that plagiarism is not relegated solely to students. Recent authors have been charged with plagiarism and have seen the level of their career suffer greatly as a result of their oversights. As a recent news story indicated, one of the participants in the 2006 Global Warming Report to the US Congress received a great amount of press attention and was forced to resign from his post at the University of Massachusetts due to the fact that for the report to the Congress he lifted entire passages from his colleague’s own textbooks, other journals, and even information from Wikipedia (Davis 163). Although this may seem a bit comical, the fact of the matter that this author is attempting to convey is that plagiarism can strike at every level of academics as well as the professional environment. As such, it should never be tacitly assumed that once a certain level of scholarship has been met that plagiarism will no longer be an issue. Similarly, an often disregarded aspect of plagiarism, at least from the student’s perspective, revolves around the somewhat nebulous yet nonetheless grave aspect of self plagiarism. Whereas it is fairly obvious to determine what constitutes plagiarism with respect to lifting another individual’s work and claiming it as your own, self plagiarism is a practice whereby an individual justifies the fact that since it was their work originally, there should be no need to have to cite themselves. However, this is not the case as original thought demands original analysis. As a means to avoid plagiarism, one must strictly adhere to the laws of citation which dictate that any and all ideas, information, suggestions, and inferences that have been drawn from the work of others must necessarily be cited appropriately (Posner 16). Naturally, there can be occasional oversights which serve to provide a situation in which a student/professional is unaware that they have borrowed an idea of previous scholarship; however, such instances are necessarily rare and should not be overemphasized. This brief essay has analyzed a few of the many facets surrounding plagiarism as it exists within the current context. A more thorough analysis would be required in order to analyze each and every aspect of plagiarism; however, for purposes of this brief summary, it has been the intention of the author to broach the subject as well as provide key insights and background into some of the more nuanced and troubling aspects of plagiarism as it exists within our current system. Work Cited Davis, Lajuan. "Arresting Student Plagiarism: Are We Investigators Or Educators?." Business Communication Quarterly 74.2 (2011): 160-163. Business Source Premier. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. Hansen, Brittney, Danica Stith, and Lee S. Tesdell. "Plagiarism: What’S The Big Deal?." Business Communication Quarterly 74.2 (2011): 188-191. Business Source Premier. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. Porter, James E. "Intertextuality And The Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986): 34-47. ERIC. Web. 19 Nov. 2012. Posner, Richard. The little book of plagiarism. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007. Read More