Plagiarism, in Webster, is defined as
“To take (idea, writings, etc) from (another) and pass them off as one’s own.”
I am a student in Jinnah university and I do get tortured by my lecturers for the sole purpose of finishing the Projects assigned. Many students take the wrong meaning of the word “Project” or “Assignment”. What is the use of doing a project where one can redefine their search skills, and copy / paste from a browser to word document. As one of my lecturer say, student use offline browsers (httrack) to make a project reports.
If there is desperate need for getting to some idea, I would go for an internet search, read some articles and then write the whole report on my own. Although I agree that it is tempting to make the report from the cut / copied material from the net, it would make a little sense that students should at least go for the trouble of referencing the source in report. I came across a student report, in which s/he mentioned under the heading of bibliography.
Sites visited: Some site I visited. I do not know the URL.
Again, browser history feature can be used to track down the URL’s. I am amazed (used sarcastically) by the level of Plagiarism University level student are performing. This is being performed on Lecturer level as well. My friend / colleague (who will remain nameless for dignity reasons) has been assigned a project in an Advertising class (oops I have just mentioned the class). What he / his group is doing in project is that taking a marvelous piece of presentation (already developed in Power point by some other group) and converting it (into Flash Presentation) with slight modification in credits. Their teacher has told them that it is ok if they submit the presentation by changing some of the things because it does not seems fair to the part time students to make this level of presentation. Talk about wishful thinking huh! We should, by now, accept the fact that the lecturers have failed to educate the students about the fact that merely changing the presentation from power point to flash does not let the student learn about Advertising in fact they are learning new tricks to plagiarise.
Take another incident. I am enrolled in Information Systems and Audit course. Our lecturer has given us an assignment of conducting an Audit for any section of a company and then present a report. One of my team mates is approached by one of our class mates for our report (under development). Let me ask the readers, given that we have to submit our reports on the same time frame, why is the report being asked before submission ? Off course, if I am being pessimistic, then it is for the reason of copying the report and making some modifications. Does this comes under the umbrella of Plagiarism? I hope I am thinking wrong.
I would say that it is the teaching methods that underpins the Student brains to go for Plagiarism. If the Projects are evaluated on anti - plagiarism concepts and students are NOT given marks on plagiarised material. Then I do not see any reason why would anyone go for cutting and pasting the material from the Net.
However, It does impose a greater work load on the lecturer in the sense that s/he has to constantly keep a look out for the sites where the relevant material can be copied from and think like a plagiarist, so that the students who copy from the Net can be crystallized. It is a known fact that the person is known by his/her style of writing. The lecturer, while examining the report, will realise the style in which the report is written and then it may be used as a weapon against plagiarism. A lecturer can introduce certain quota of marks in report for original Material. If a Plagiarized material is detected, then those marks should be deducted.
The students should have realized that by doing this act, they are digging their own grave, as when they will go in Professional Life, they may not plagiarize material, since then it will a matter of Company’s Grace.