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Plagiarism, Original Works and Academic Integrity It is generally known that plagiarism (Latin plain steal) is the act of appropriating the ideas, or literary composition of another author, or passages and excerpts from somebody's work when a person presents these ideas as his own. Such appropriation of somebody's authorship or so-called academic cheating becomes the issue of the day. Nowadays plagiarism is often understood as use of the text written by another author (published in press or in electronic sources) with no reference or proper citing. The modern concept of plagiarism is often related to modern understanding of authorship, rights and moral. It is important to know that rules of proper quoting appeared in great antiquity and were used during explanations of a Holy Bible and other holy books. Progress in technology and development of science and literature is impossible without rules of proper quoting and citing because it is difficult to trace the succession of scholar thoughts and scientific ideas.
Plagiarism is often identified as a certain breach of copyright. Copyright regulates legal relationship related to creation and use (publication, accomplishment, demonstration, etc) of works of art, science and literature (the results of human activity in these areas of knowledge). Copyright provides authors with moral and material incentives of creative people. It stimulates people to create works of art and science and dissemination of these ideas in society. Author has rights for publication, reproduction and distribution of his works. Use of his works by other people is prohibited without the authors consent.
So, what is authorship or the original works of authorship? According to the U. S. law regulating copyright, the original work of authorship means the distinctive and original piece of art created by an author.
Authorship (or the original works concept) and ownership guarantees the indefeasible right for work of art. It means that only author can make changes or can allow other making changes in his works. Besides, author has right for getting fee when somebody else uses his works. The problem of plagiarism became more important with advancement of new technologies (especially internet). Many users of internet have illusion that internet publications have no copyright. Therefore, they can be used by anybody and can be taken and presented as their own ideas.
However, the only difference of internet publication from publication in press is difference in information-carrying medium. In both cases the author accomplished certain work in order to write the work of art. The act of appropriating ideas belonging to others and getting profit / benefit owing to that is breach of the law, irrespectively from the type of information-carrying medium. Plagiarism is a problem not only in issues related to the ownership, but also a problem of increasing concern for schools, colleges and universities.
Internet provides students with possibility to use somebody's works and to present them as their own. Many students use copy and paste method for copying of pieces of works and use internet publications in their own papers. Universities of many world countries continue to struggle with student plagiarism. The concept of academic integrity within the framework of academic expectations from students is often expressed as Dont cheat! There are five core values of academic integrity: trust, honesty, fairness, respect and responsibility.
Many universities use specially developed software programs that allow finding plagiarism in student works. More and more publishers use anti-plagiarism software in their everyday work in order to analyze huge volumes of text information and find identical blogs of information. Trudy Abramson in his article Pipe Dreams dwells on academic expectations and standards in higher education. Abramson claims that academic expectations are often inflated, and both grades earned in distance-learning degrees and traditional programs are of dubious quality (Abramson, 4). Abramson is concerned with a simple fact that some faculties and institutions certify for graduation too many students who cannot read and write very well, too many whose intellectual depth and breadth are unimpressive, and too many whose skills are inadequate in the face of the demands of contemporary life (Abramson, 4). No wonder that many students plagiarize because they simply do now know how to express their own ideas clearly.
Trudy Abramson teaches his students to research and write. Abramson claims that academic standards used to evaluate student written work are too elementary. According to the authors opinion, the papers need to be grammatical, spell-checked, meaningfully organized, and content-rich. In addition, judgment needs to be exercised in the selection of resources and style guidelines must be observed (Abramson, 5). In case all these standards are obeyed, the problem of authorship and plagiarism will be almost solved. Oyaziwo Aluede in the article Academic Dishonesty as a Contemporary Problem in Higher Education: How Academic Advisers Can Help claims that academic dishonesty among college and university students is a great problem in higher education.
He support Abramson's idea that efforts to prevent cheating in colleges and universities should primarily begin at the institutional level (Aluede, 97). Educational institutions should stress the importance of academic integrity, problem of examination cheating and explain why plagiarism should be avoided in student works. Unfortunately, student conscience is not perfect. As Daily Mail claims, scans of essays against billions of web pages have shown the vast majority of students are submitting some 'non- original' work. And more than one in eight are handing in assignments which take more than three-quarters of their material from the Internet (90 pc of University Students Copy Work from the Internet). In order to struggle with plagiarism, many universities use specially created internet-services that allows finding plagiarized phrases in student works.
One of such popular internet services was created by company i Paradigms LLC (Oakland, California). Specially developed program was used by professors from California University in 1996. As distinct from search engines like Google and others, the system conducts search using special key words. I Paradigms software creates digital image of the document and compares it to various sources of information (i. e.
internet, specialized databases, academic resources, and mass media databases). Popularity of this service is very high. Even UNO uses it in order to check authenticity of pieces of work. Nowadays Turnitin plagiarism detector is used in more than 2, 500 educational institutions in the United States.
Commercial versions of this program (such as iThenticate and others) are constantly updated. Turnitin plagiarism detector is not the only service proposed by software developers. There are many others like Glass Plagiarism Services, My DropBox, and CFL Software Development, to mention a few. The companies producing educational materials, legal firms, internet companies, state authorities use various kinds of plagiarism software products. How does Turnitin work? According to information taken from The Turnitin Cycle, it has several stages.
First of all, Turnitin's robot compares submitted paper against numerous databases that contain more than 10 million student papers, more than 6 billion pages of the current and archived internet and millions of journals and book pages. Turnitin's server uses advanced pattern-matching technology (The Turnitin's Cycle). Turnitin's database updates and adds to the internet archive at a rate of 40 million pages per day (The Turnitin's Cycle). The results are given in a form of customized Originality Reports. In case submitted information was plagiarized, the text matches are highlighted and the original link is provided. In conclusion we need to underline that anti-plagiarism software is not an absolute remedy for improving student conscience.
Solution of plagiarism problem depends not only on the use of constantly updated anti-plagiarism software services, but also from understanding of core values of academic integrity: trust, honesty, fairness, respect and responsibility. Bibliography " 90 pc of University Students Copy Work from the Internet. " The Daily Mail 20 June 2006: 8. Abramson, T. "From the Desk of the Executive Editor: Pipe Dreams. " Journal of Instruction Delivery Systems 15. 4 (2001): 4 - 5. Oyaziwo Aluede, Eunice O.
Omoregie, Gloria I. Osa-Each. "Academic Dishonesty as a Contemporary Problem in Higher Education: How Academic Advisers Can Help. " Reading Improvement 43 (2006): 97. "The Turnitin's Cycle. " 2007. Turnitin. Com. 18 January 2007 < web >.
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Research essay sample on Plagiarism Original Works And Academic Integrity
