Plagiarism – Causes and Effects Essay

Plagiarism, defined as the action of copying of the other work without citation and the author’s knowledge, is considered a huge crime in educational area. According to Nancy J. Girard, she defined plagiarism as stealing. She also claimed that stealing one’s works is harder to probe rather than that of money or tangible items. (Girard, 2004). Plagiarism is rampant to university or college students when dealing with tons of assignments. Despite the fact that they all know it is morally and ethically wrong, the act of plagiarism still, is an action they profusely commit.

There are several causes and effect of plagiarism that all people should know.

The first cause that contributes to plagiarism is due to poor time managements. This does ring a bell to university students mostly. When students fail to have their time managed properly, they tend to do last minute works and the easiest way to choose to cope with that is by plagiarizing. Few students from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia have come out with their survey on the causes of plagiarism out to 100 students in their campus and 80 per cent students agreed that poor time management caused them to plagiarize.

(Azman, 2009).

Sometimes assignments are to be submitted quite early, so students do not have enough time to study them thoroughly, so they commit plagiarism checker online and free. Few lecturers or employers are unexpected. They will sometimes ask their students or employees to submit the assignments earlier than its due date. Those with poor time management must rush to run the assignments done, so the only thing comes to their mind is to plagiarize.

The second cause why people tend to plagiarize is due to the ease of use of Internet. With much easier accesses to the Internet such as wireless and broadband connections, dependency to the sources from Internet makes people indolent to go searching sources at the university or public library which are more trustable. It will also be easy to find many sources from the Internet rather than that of the books and tangible reading materials which might be a bit complicated. Even though library provides free access to well-known, established online journals, still they incline to choose any other sources online due to easier access and findings.

The last cause why people commit plagiarism is the lack of awareness that it is strictly unacceptable. They do not realize when they plagiarism, their credibility as a student or worker will be questioned. Due to the unawareness, they contribute to the increasing of plagiarism since most of them think that their lecturers or employers will not know that they plagiarize.

People also are not alert about the illegals of plagiarism because they do not know about citation. In the survey carried out by students from UKM, the respondents also said that they were not aware about plagiarism because they did not have the basic on how to cite a source. (Azman, 2009). In this case, students or workers should be, earlier, exposed to the basic of citation in schools and higher learning institutions so that plagiarism will not occur.

Much of the time, plagiarism is seemed to be a diminutive issue among these people. From not thinking ahead and rationally, they end up opting to plagiarize by without knowing that the effects of plagiarism can vary into their educational and occupational life.

One major impact of plagiarism is that one will be lacked of dependability in terms of doing works on his or her own. As they used to be contingent to much sources of others by without knowing how to cite, there will be probability that their credibility will be questioned once they work. There used to be many employees performance evaluation or assessment, hence employer will know either their employees are credible or vice versa. Apart from that, their self-esteem also seems to be underestimated because of too much plagiarizing. Consequently, they might lose their job or have the relationship broken or even not be trusted anymore.

In conclusion, plagiarism is strictly abandoned and morally and ethically wrong. It is not only those who plagiarize will be affected but also the writers and also publishers. Dr Garner of UT Southwestern Medical Center in his research regarding plagiarizing said that he wanted to goal substantial effect at handling scientific publications from time to time. (Garner, 2010). This simply means that many parties are also affected, not only the plagiarizers. So if you plagiarize, better stop it now or you are going to cry over split milk.

(This essay is submitted in completion to Academic Writing Skills subject in Malaysia University of Terengganu)