Views on Plagiarism

My views on this after reading the two stories is that i agree that plagiarism is a serious offence and steps have to be taken to educate especially students not to do this as it is not worth it because it would lead to serious consequences for them.

Plagiarism is the use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work. Thus, the people who plagiarize, especially students need to realize that this is wrong and that many schools are very strict about this. If they are caught, they can wind up suspended or in the worst cases, expelled and when you're kicked out of one school, it can be hard to get into another. Therefore, this is no laughing matter and this should be taken seriously.

In my opinion, some ways to avoid this is firstly, through educating students from a young age not to plagiarize and emphasizing about the consequences of it so that they would not do it. Secondly, while it is wrong to use other people's work and pass it as your own, but personally, i feel that it is alright to use part of other people's idea as long as you give them due credit or write it in quotation marks to indicate it has been taken from some other source because as a student myself, it is inevitable that I would have to find information from sources such as books or the internet to help me with my work and as long as you give them due credit or even learning how to correctly paraphrase, write and cite resources from the original sources, i don't see that as a problem at all and you would not be committing plagiarism in the process.

However, i feel that the best way to avoid this is to simply for the schools and its teachers to encourage students to do their own work and not copy from other sources by teaching them the proper ways of research and writing. The reason i feel this way is because it is only when we do not know what to write in our assignments that we resort to plagiarism. If we had our own ideas and thoughts, there would be no need to steal or cheat someone else’s ideas. Thus, learning the correct way to search reliable resources such as libraries and internet and writing them down properly is a sure way to avoid plagiarism.

WEI JIE