It is an OFFENCE -- Plagiarism!

Image taken from : http://sociology.camden.rutgers.edu/jfm/plagiarism/plagiarism-jfm.htm

According to Gary Slapper from the Times Online, the word plagiarism comes from the Latin plagiarius — someone who abducts a child, a kidnapper. Today, a plagiarist can be seen as having snatched the work to which someone else has. Students commit plagiarism if they put into their work the academic ideas of someone else without acknowledgment — commonly by copying from another student, downloading material from the internet or paying for an essay to be written by an essay-writing firm.

There was a study by Duke University (reported in The Star, Oct 2, 2006) found the percentage of students confessing to cheating to be 56% for MBA, 54% for engineering, and 45% for law and about 85% of university students felt they needed to cheat to excel. As stated on Plagiarism.org: "Plagiarism is quickly becoming part of our educational culture".Some students are lazy in conducting the research, what they do is just surf the Internet, copy others works and paste it for the use of their assignments purposes.

For some people, they do not even realized that they have actually use the exact same sentence of others works until they were notified. This is so-called unintentional of plagiarism. One interesting question that you must ask yourself is "Would I know this if I hadn't read it on that website/in that book?" (cited from http://kidshealth.org/kid/feeling/school/plagiarism.html) So, if the answer is "NO". Remember to cite the source, acknowledge the author's work rather than risking yourself into trouble.

Image taken from :http://www.buzzle.com/articles/detecting-plagiarism-on-the-internet.html

There was a hot issue which arise recently,"UPM duo in plagiarism scandal" involving two academicians (a professor and one who recently received her PhD). She produced a reference book entitled, "Writing an Effective Resume" meant for management students on writing impactful resumes that would attract potential employers. However, this book was suspicious of having plagiarised materials have plagiarised materials of several American university websites, including Harvard and Albion College.

Higher Education Ministry director-general Prof Datuk Dr Radin Umar Radin Sohadi stated that plagiarism in higher education environment is certainly can not be accepted. Hence punitive action would be taken under the Universities and University Colleges Act and Statutory Bodies (Discipline and Surcharge) Act (Act 605). Investigations headed by UPM's Legal Department concluded that among the actions to be taken are that they repay royalties to the university, as well as a "severe reprimand on their personal file". One of the author who has just completed her PhD stated that since the source was from Internet, so she thought the source was for public domain and such she did not cite the source. Not citing the source, is the price that she has to pay, it may be unintentional but the printers suffer the biggest loss as the books could not be sold.

Actually, students should treat the writing as part of their enjoyment instead of copy others work. When you have put in effort in completing it, the pride of being honour is even higher, as hard work pays off! Simply copying and paste is easier task, even a kids without education can do so, just by few clicking. However, being an educated person, we must not attempt in doing so, as no one likes their work to be copied and claimed as theirs. If this situation happen, the person who commited in plagiarism will suffer from the effects all by him/herself. Not only reputation of ones will be degraded, even the level of education/certification will be doubtful for others.
Since the technology is evolving around, Internet might be the good source of getting information, which others might use it as a way to plagiarise others work. It also provides the essential tools for us to detect the plagiarism issues as well. According to eHow.com, there are ways for a professor to detect students work.

Step One: Submission

What he needs to do is just inputs the assignent into a plagiarism detector. These software programs perform detailed checks automatically. While there are many different systems available, all operate in the same general way.
Step Two: Search
Once an academic work has been fed into a plagiarism detector, the system goes to work.
Plagiarism detection programs use search algorithms. The algorithms scour the Internet for sources that are similar to the submitted work. It can search for the hundreds or thousands of sentences that make up a paper! Besides from Internet sources, the tools may even detect the sentences which may not be public on the web.
Step Three: Report

Finally, the plagiarism software will create a detail report, listing the textual similarities that have been found. Links of original content are also provided, so professors can view the original articles clearly. Then, the copy percentage is also calculated, ranking the chances of being plagiarized.