Why Students Cheat and What to Do About It?

Plagiarism is defined as copying someone else’s work and passing it as your own work without giving the other person the credit.

The courage to do what is right even when no one is watching.

Cheating has been and still is an enormous issue in schools. Almost all students have cheated at least once in their life without taking into consideration their rank or what school they attend. Even some of the most prestigious schools that have the smartest students have told to be victims of cheating.

With this issue arising more than ever, schools have been finding new ways to combat cheating by including parents to monitor their children, issuing less work, and revising their grading policy.

Jayson Blair was accused of plagiarism since many of his sources, quotes, and events were copied from someone else’s work. Katie Couric had her own blog were supposedly she will write her own personal columns but instead hired another person to write them.

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All of these artists knew what they were doing by using the same base, style, or words of other artists except for George Harrison. His court over plagiarism determined that it was, “subconscious plagiarism,” which means the artist did not copy on purpose but just failed to check his work in comparison to others before releasing it. Facebook, in my opinion, has taken measures to prevent and encourage the use of citing sources and made them easily accessible to the public. The article, mentions an example of how you could just click the share button on Facebook and share content with already automatic cited content.

The same goes for twitter and Snapchat since they too count with a share button including the original publisher’s name and information. There is not much more than online media can do than what they have already put in place.

Plagiarism is looked down upon by people because it illustrates the inability to create your own ideas and, most importantly that you cannot help but steal other’s work. The idea of plagiarism is drilled into society’s mind as a form of stealing which is a crime penalized with jail or a fine. So when someone commits plagiarism it is looked upon just as bad as having committed a crime since the ideas are being stolen from someone else without their consent.

If a student is caught plagiarizing the consequences should be reasonable depending on the level of the act. Let’s say if a student forgot to cite or mention the original figure that should follow with a lesson about citations and a verbal teacher warning. If a student is copying off another student knowingly then he should face a parent-teacher conference and have to apologize to that person. If it is something on a greater scale then the punishment should be a fine towards the parents.