On Plagiarism and Academic Honesty

On Plagiarism and Academic Honesty

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March 10, 2013

Plagiarism in the academic environment is an unethical practice that demonstrates the lack of responsibility that the student has and the poor performance that he will achieve since the contents of the academic program are not completely studied and assimilated. The reasons why many times students plagiarize their assignments is because they have little time to complete all their academic duties, in modern times we live with great velocity and soon we are flooded with responsibilities we can not fulfill.

Therefore the causes of plagiarism are not uniquely a desire to skip work and use that time for leisure activities but the need to complete other duties, some of them academic some of the professional. I personally think that despite the fact that modern life provides us with little time to complete our responsibilities, it is not an excuse to use materials that are not original and that are taken from other sources.

Many times the students that practice such behavior at least takes a moment to read the contents he acquired from other sources, however the problem is that is not the same to read the reflections of other people than to force oneself to do a personal effort in the understanding of a concept. It is more important to reflect and personally crystallize the concepts because in that way they are better assimilated and will be useful in the professional life of the student (Staats et. al., 2008) .

In many occasions the contents that are plagiarized are incomplete or are not accurate, therefore the student does not only avoid the generation of original ideas but also acquires information that might be wrong, specially when these contents are taken from the Internet. Sites like Wikipedia are very attractive because they contain explanations for all kind of subjects from all areas of knowledge. However the reader of such pages...