Plagiarism ?

(Glogster 2009)

Plagiarism is the act of taking another person's writing or idea and passing it off as your own (What is Plagiarism, 2011). Commonly, plagiarism is one word that most of us will familiar with especially students. Lecturers will always be the one who remind us not to plagiarize. According to Plagiarism.org (2011), in a sample of 1,800 students at nine state universities, 84% admitted to cheating on written assignments, and 52% had copied a few sentences from a website without citing the source. Besides that, according to Attwood (2008), in a survey of 93 UK higher education institutions, a total of 9,229 cases of plagiarism were recorded in one year.

As Maurer et al. (2006, p. 1050) mention, plagiarism in the sense of "theft of intellectual property" has been around for as long as humans have produced work of art and research, however, easy access to the Web, large databases, and telecommunication in general has turned plagiarism into a serious problem for publishers, researchers and educational institutions.

There's this article named 'Plagiarism: The Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V boom' which was published on BBC News Magazine about the issues of plagiarism has been a problem for many years which not only students commit in such act but same goes to well-known politician people, and the internet now offers students unparalleled opportunities to duplicate and to fabricate such as Google who gave students access to a much greater library of texts thus, the opportunities to harvest material have increased by as easy as Googling the subject matter and hitting Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V (BBC News Magazine 2011).

In my opinion, by just taking someone's idea without citing them isn't fair for the person who originally created it. To avoid from such act it's real important to take note of this tips when you're going to use someone's idea next time which are paraphrase-never use someone else's words, use quotation marks when you going to use the words exactly in a sentence, and make sure you cite who is your sources (Buzzle.com 2011). Thus, all this plagiarism should have placed a 'full-stop' to avoid such unfortunate act that would harm you and others.

References:

• Attwood R. 2008, 143 students expelled for plagiarism, online, retrieved 5 June 2011, from http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=402351
• BBC News Magazine 2011, Plagiarism: The Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, online, retrieved 5 June 2011, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12613617
• Buzzle.com 2011, Ways to Avoid Plagiarism, online, retrieved 5 June 2011, from http://www.buzzle.com/articles/ways-to-avoid-plagiarism.html
• Maurer H., Kappe F., Zaka B. 2006, 'Plagiarism - A survey', J.UCS (Annual print and CD-ROM archive ed.), 0948-695X, Vol. 12, Issue 8, pp. 1050-1084, retrieved 5 June 2011, from http://apps.isiknowledge.com.ezlibproxy.unisa.edu.au/InboundService.do?product=WOS&action=retrieve&SrcApp=Summon&UT=000243998000005&SID=3Ci8jhaMfFJEOLOgPl3&Init=Yes&SrcAuth=SerialsSolutions&mode=FullRecord&customersID=SerialsSolutions&DestFail=http%3A%2F%2Faccess.isiproducts.com%2Fcustom_images%2Fwok_failed_auth.html
• Plagiarism.org 2011, Did you know?: Plagiarism statistics, online, retrieved 5 June 2011, from http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_article_did_you_know.html
• What is Plagiarism 2011, online, retrieved 5 June 2011, from http://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/plag/whatisplag.php