completing an essay

According to Park (2003), plagiarism is defined the theft of words or ideas, beyond what would normally be regarded as general knowledge. On the other hand, Pennybook (1996) writes, “understanding reasons for appreciation of ones work should be taken into consideration.” He found that in China, though the students did the work to completion, there was much difference between what the students presented and what he expected. He further explains that plagiarism needs to be particularized in other ways; in terms of particular cultural and educational context in which it is being discussed, in terms of the nature of the institution and the particular language in which it is seen to be occurring. This is understood as shared language or knowledge and particular language or knowledge.

Park soldiered on to explain how plagiarism was being practiced by students. It is clearly noted that, the easy way to uncover some plagiarism is collaboration or cooperation between students working together, unattributed use of other people’s writings by undergraduates, Master’s students and PhD students, copying of graduate students’ work by supervisors or other members of academic staff and taking credit in research grant application for work done by someone else. This expounds more on the various forms of plagiarism can be done. Most of them involve the overlooked incidents by students and thus may fall under plagiarized work without their real intention. This is quite tricky.

In order to pass this plagiarism phase and start on giving some original work, several problems especially those facing students need to be studied. According to Pennybook, one of them is involves the expectation of students in giving original work, but also expected to acquire a fixed canon of knowledge and a fixed canon terminology to go with it.

Another problem addressed is related to the power relations between different academics and between academics and their students or research assistants. This involves the senior academics or those in with the highest echelon to put their names at the head of the papers yet they had little if any effort added to it. This problem is evident in both those who are ignorant of plagiarism and those who are not.

Still on Pennybook, he has noted some difficulty in differentiating plagiarizing ideas and plagiarizing language. For the ideas it is well understood that it involves ides obtained from an author have to be acknowledged later. The confusion is mainly in the language since some of the students argued that if he only took the ideas, but paraphrased the words then it would not be plagiarizing language. But this is not the case. Plagiarizing language will also include words taken directly from the source. Plagiarism can be fourth in a number of ways.

According to Park, he has thought of ways of reducing the plagiarism by students and was successful in a few ways. This was mainly pushed by the understanding that students do not take it keenly that plagiarism is illegal and hence came up with the idea of honor codes.

Honor codes were introduced in universities and colleges though they were not taken up as fast as expected. The success of the honor codes was pushed by the establishment of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University in North Carolina. The approach used was to advise students on what academic integrity is and give the reasons of its significance as well as encourage students to sign a pledge that will uphold academic integrity and no more plagiarism. It is clearly confirmed that in North America the honor codes work best when student are actively engaged in the process and take part in the process.

From what Pennybook explains, Chinese study has mainly been related to memorizing due to their belief of the education strengthening memory. Thus western teachers who go to teach in China find it hard and respond to their memorization with ‘derision and scorn.’ This is more of what contributes and encourages plagiarism though the students may be consciously aware about it. This needs to be fought.

The author goes ahead to compare cultures of memory and text. Since the Chinese are more used to memory, the Western are viewed to have a more positive attitude to text and with this then it will be easier to reduce plagiarism in the Western as compared to Chinese. But before one goes about the memory and text, language has to be understood. He explains that the memorization may be pointless since the issue is not understanding the world and then mapping language onto it but rather of acquiring language as texts as a precursor to mapping out textual realities.

But from the understanding of Chinese learners, there is a paradox that comes up. On one hand, they are held up as paragons of educational excellence while on the other hand they are held as rote learners. As Marton and Tse Lai explain it, memorization has been distinctly been shown to serve different purposes. These purposes are associated with mechanical rote learning and also used to deepen and develop understanding.

The North American students seem to be fast in the consideration of texts since they accepted it a long time ago. There is also digital plagiarism that involves the digital sources being used. Digital plagiarism is rather a new concept in play. It has become more evident in the twenty first century where there is wide usage of electronics and computers. This type of plagiarism is easily practiced since it involves only the click of a key. According to Park, there are two digital sources taken into account: the internet and term paper mills. Internet is well understood by everyone that so long as there is Google one can find anything you would want to search. Term paper mills involve logging onto the internet and buy a paper with a click and a credit card.

In the institutions of higher learning that deal with international students, students have different cultural backgrounds with different understandings of texts and language. Thus more consideration must be given to them such as particular assignment that may require more than “the regurgitation of a set curriculum” (Pennybook, 1996). A lot of assignments seem to strain them as they may be having good reading habits but overuse of highlighted sections in the writing. This can be positively changed by effective practice.

In conclusion, plagiarism is felt in most of the writing especially if the student involved in the writing does not understand fully the meaning of the word plagiarism. Students need to be taught early about plagiarism since they will take it up all through their years in the given course and it will be easier if they understand it early. Memorization has been seen to be easy mostly for the Chinese students but they still suffer from the plagiarism and thus should be exposed to text. The exposure to text will improve them being accustomed to acknowledging the authors of their works. Thus the importance of teaching more on plagiarism preferably detailed to fully understand the word. All in all, plagiarism kills the morale of an academician and should be fought by all means.

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