Academic integrity is an ethical code that governs educational establishments. In other words, it is following rules that govern when and how you can use other people’s work and ideas in your own work. Every student at the college or even high school level should be able to submit work that they did themselves and not plagiarize one another’s work. What influences students to commit acts of plagiarism? Well students faced with the high expectations from parents, levels of flexibility, schoolwork, term papers, presentations, etc. Most times these students feel like they can’t handle it and succumb to pressure and perpetrate acts of plagiarism. Plagiarism should, therefore, be avoided at all costs useless giving due credit and recognition where it is due.
Recent cases have indicated that as many as 65% to 82% of students have cheated, based on a review of surveys conducted on the extent of cheating, showing there is an urgent need for action. There are some solutions to battle plagiarism in educational establishments, firstly students shouldn’t copy an individual’s work or copy from the internet and claim it as yours. Although there is a way around that, which is called quoting. Most students don’t realize that quoting is essential in writing as it gives your paper more meaning as well as helps the reader. It also should be said that references should be made to the statement that has quoted, in turn, it makes the more original.
Secondly, a citation is one of the most important aspects of writing, students aren’t always sure if to cite or not, unfortunately, that is a big problem and encourage to cite even when in doubt. If you discover you are unnecessarily citing this shows that not enough you are writing is your own words. Common words and phrases do not need to be cited or put into quotation marks, but any dialogue of commonly understood notions must be correctly cited.
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Thirdly, students should try as much as possible to write in their own words basically how they understand it. This means paraphrasing should be done nominally in the text and the author of the paragraph should be cited at the end of the paragraph. In other words, the best way of avoiding plagiarism here is to write your ideas down and use words you are most accustomed to, and you shouldn’t mix borrowed text with yours without citing the appropriate sources.
Fourthly, most students don’t realize that self-plagiarism is a thing. They think when you coping something from an old paper into new paper it is legitimate but actually, they must cite themselves. When writing a new paper using old material, the text should be treated like it was written by someone else, which means proper citation where due. You also should try to make new research and formulate new ideas.
Lastly, referencing, this is one of the best ways of avoiding plagiarism. It can be done by simply adding a work cited page or a reference page and must follow the specific format for citation (i.e MLA, APA, Chicago, etc). This information contains the author(s), date of publication, source, and title.
