Plagiarism : Reasons and How to Curb It

Plagiarism : Reasons and How To Curb It Recent studies suggest that plagiarism had been exaggerated especially among university students nowadays. The students often procrastinate their homework or assignments until last minute. At the end, they try to finish up their assignments by copying directly from their friends or other medias without giving any credit to the original authors. The unaware of this problem causes students practicing plagiarism. Plagiarism is a word from Latin, plagiarius which means stealing other ideas or works without attributing them. Ellery (2008) has mentioned that the most common explanation for plagiarism from electronic sources was that the students were unaware of the requirement to acknowledge such sources, specifically in an in-text format. Ellery (2008) gave an example of a study conducted by geography students at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal at South Africa where it found that 26% students plagiarized their text in the assignment due to influencing by electronic sources of information. The main reasons given to plagiarism are ignorance or misunderstanding of good referencing practices or poor engagement with the issues at hand. Based from the study, it is totally concluded that most of the students are not realise on how important to acknowledge the sources and reference the authors. This shows lack of respect to the authors and ideas. Besides that, VAIL (1996) emphasized that plagiarism is ultimately short-circuits of learning process. Plagiarism discouraged students to attract their mind with the subject matter they are being tested on, thus, standoff their intellectual growth. VAIL (1996) also stated that plagiarism has been practiced since ancient time and the concept of copyright has risen intensely in the modern era due to commercialization of writing. Once can avoid plagiarism by proper attribution which copying the information and compile them without discriminate the original source and authors. Moreover,