According to Oxford University, Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgment. Moreover, it is act of intellectual dishonesty. There are a variety of reasons why students plagiarise or cheat.

Firstly, students may have poor time management or organizational skills or maybe they do not have confidence that they can actually complete an assignment. Therefore, they believe that they have no choice but to plagiarize and most of the students considered it normal. Secondly, some students have pressure from their family, completion for scholarships, and jobs. Family members and personal expectations may put a lot of pressure on students to have a specific grade point average no matter what they study even they have an interest in that subject or not. The main thing that is becoming concerned is just to get a good grade no matter what their children learn. Also, when students are competing for scholarships, employment, or graduate school admission, grades are often all that matters. For some students learning is not the point of education for them, they just want to pass the course and this mode of thinking will lead to academic offenses. thirdly, Students are unsure what constitutes academic dishonesty because they lack clear instructions from teachers and are unclear about the aim of education. Last but not least, many students do not know how to cite resources properly, they do not realize that internet resources must be cited. They just do copy and paste, write down the whole article without mentioning the reference.

In order to avoid plagiarism, students must adopt academic integrity because this is important for several reasons. Academic integrity means others can trust us. It will make a strong relationship between student and teacher. students will develop good reputations by being honest, fair, and trustworthy. Adopting these good ethical habits will help students to face ethical issues in the future in any field. Apart from this, teachers should teach the students how to correctly paraphrase, quote, cite materials, particularly web sources. In addition, during class, mentors should discuss plagiarism as a moral and ethical issue. Besides, we all know that the relationship between instructor and student is based upon trust, therefore, teachers should teach them about the value of academic honesty and not to do cheating. This will become the students honest with themselves and others.

References:

Plagiarism. The University of Oxford. (n.d.). Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism 

Why students plagiarize: Middle Georgia State University. (n.d.). Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://www.mga.edu/plagiarism/why.php 

Academic honesty. Houston Texas Bauer College of Business. (n.d.). Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://www.bauer.uh.edu/current/academic-honesty.php