Why Plagiarism Is Bad

‘’Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from many, it’s research.”- Wilson Mizner. Most students copy during exams and assignments because they want to pass the tests; however, plagiarism is copying students’ work without giving them credit. Plagiarism is not good for students because the students are not putting in the required credit hours therefore it doesn’t benefit them academically. It is unfair when students plagiarize others’ work and don’t give students the credit they deserve for having put all that work and effort in discovering that idea. When doing research, students are supposed to read and paraphrase what they have read, not just copy and paste. Plagiarism was hard in the past because students had to actually go to the library to find the information to copy (Heckler, Rice, and Bryan, 2013). Nowadays, less and less students go to library to search for their topic of interest. Plagiarism is easier than in the past because students copy using …show more content…
Some plagiarism does happen due to the lack of understanding of what plagiarism is. Students are not well informed on what is considered plagiarism. An informative class needs to be in place to help students better understand what is plagiarism and how they can avoid it. During these classes students can also be informed of websites like Turnitin.Com. Turinitin.com is a website that takes in written papers and compares them to other works and gives a percentage of how much plagiarism is in the paper. To use Turinitin.com, students need to create a new account and they can copy and paste or upload their assignments to the program. The program runs and the paper looks for matches among previous papers or writings and gives a percentage of how much text is copied. Teachers can also use plagiarism detection software such as Copyleaks, PlagiarismChecker, PlagScan, and Quetext. Those software programs help teachers detect