Plagiarism – Avoid it

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What I fail to understand is why any student should commit plagiarism. Plagiarism is simple straight forward cheating; so what’s the point? To get a better score? To turn in an assignment on time? To me, it appears to be just sheer laziness that leads students not to do thorough research work and write original essays and term papers. It’s taking the easy road to score better grades. Sadly, it doesn’t work. Yes, you might think that it will work as you have managed to fool the teacher. But really, it’s going to come back at some point in your life to bite you.

When teachers ask students

to write an assignment, they expect them to go to the library, gather information and turn in an original paper. This is an essential part of learning and has to be done. One of the biggest curses of the internet is that it has made a horde of information on every topic under the sun available by just a few clicks on the mouse.

This has led to the belief

that by copying information, restructuring sentences, running it through a duplication plagiarism checker and changing sentences to conform and not get trapped, you can get away. Okay, so you do score well on the paper because the teacher has not caught on to what you have done, but before you pat yourself on the back, ask yourself this simple question; ‘is your conscience clear’? Now let’s think about this scenario. Your teacher has praised your work and asks you to explain it to the class. Will you be able to do it? I think the answer is pretty obvious.

Saying that there

is too much workload and you don’t have time to research and write original work are all lame excuses. You are neither the first nor the last student who is in this predicament. But what you need to do is to buckle down and get the job done. Remember copy/paste only works to a certain degree. Once you enter your professional life you won’t be able to get away with it. As that is the time when your professional knowledge will be tested and there you won’t find any escape avenues. Therefore don’t make excuses and just hit the books and stop looking for the easy way out.