Preventing Plagiarism

The rise  in instances of cheating among perceived scholars through plagiarism calls for a deeper understanding of the issue of plagiarism through awareness of copyright boundaries, new technologies, approaches and dissemination processes in education. By consideration of these aspects, scholars can avoid plagiarism, the simplest form of which occurs through copy pasting of academic content from materials such as magazines, academic articles, newspapers and internet sources. According to Harvard College (2013), it is better for an assignment to be turned in late rather than plagiarized due to laziness, confusion or lack of time.

One of the proposed ways of avoiding plagiarism in the school context is for students to effectively learn and understand how to cite information and reference following required standards. In addition to this, integration of information obtained from primary and secondary sources can help to avoid plagiarism. Keeping track of all the used and cited sources can be beneficial to students in that besides inclusion in the reference list, the students can also have access to the sources if and when needed. Apart from this, planning prior to writing assignments can go a long way in guiding the students towards prevention of plagiarism.

While planning, it is essential for the students to avoid verbatim quotations of sentences as well as phrases. Menager and Paulos (2010) suggest that instead of direct quotations, students should try as much as possible to paraphrase all pieces of information received from other sources while also incorporating aspects of personal understanding into the content of the paper. This is in order to give substance to the paper rather than filling it purely with paraphrases. Any paraphrased information should then be cited in-text while the direct quotations have to be placed in quotes and also cited accordingly.

References

“Harvard College”. (2013). How to Avoid Plagiarism. Cambridge: Cambridge College.

Menager, R. and Paulos, L. (2010). Quick Coach Guide to Avoiding Plagiarism. Boston: Cengage Learning

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