Journalism and Communication - Plagiarism - Essay Example

More often than not students merely paraphrase the existing works of other authors in a bid to evade plagiarism without proper citation of the original sources of information. It is imperative to acknowledge and cite the original sources that were used to access the initial information if students need to avoid plagiarizing. In general terms, plagiarism entails the replication of someone’s ideas without giving credit, stealing of ideas, failure to put quotation marks and proper reference to a quoted phrase, provision of inappropriate information regarding the sources of the quoted information as well as alteration of the wordings in a sentence structure without giving credit to the original author (Alfrey, 2012).

Why Students Plagiarize Students plagiarize their work due to various conflicting reasons. Some students plagiarize their work intentionally while others plagiarize unintentionally. Some of the common reasons for plagiarism are: unexpected deadline in class work, overwhelming assignments, the confusion in research and plagiarism boundaries, and lack of explicit ideas and training on how to avoid plagiarism (Purdue University, 2007) Intentional v. Unintentional Plagiarism From the accessible facts, it is clear that, some students and scholars plagiarize their work deliberately. . Moreover, some students have difficulty in the interpretation and analysis of the available online data.

This category of students copy paste complex information from the internet without proper synthesis of ideas or paying attention to the authors. Some students also believe that, the quality of their original work is low compared what is available in the internet. This leads to direct copying and hence plagiarism. Most contemporary scholars lack the most effective way of developing their own ideas and style, limiting them to direct utilization of the existing written information. The pressure from the lecturers, peers, families’ course, job requirements and scholarship admission are and failure to meet strict deadlines are acknowledged as the main factors that motivate students to engage in intentional plagiarism.

Internal and external pressures portray education as the only ladder to success rather than for a self valuation process. Due to this, students tend to embark on the end result of education rather than on valuing the skills and competencies in training and education. Many students fail to understand the significance of the acquired research and writing skills in their future career development. Intentional plagiarism is necessitated by peer influence. Poor assignment planning coupled with poor time management skills are also common prerequisites for intentional plagiarism amongst college students, especially since many students are always less aware of the time required in completing a research paper.

Naive students are sometimes compelled to use the other scholars’ work without due authority. In most cases, these mistakes occur as a result