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Plagiarism

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On the very first day of class (usually on the syllabus) plagiarism is mentioned as illegal, against the rules, and highly forbidden, punishable usually by giving the student a 0% on the paper or essay in question.

Sometimes, somehow a phrase or paragraph can be practically plagiarized without the student having had any intention to plagiarize material.

On the other hand, when plagiarism occurs, it is almost always deliberate. It is the easy way out.

There are two primary concerns about children who use plagiarism to produce his or her class work.

It is illegal:

A child must learn early exactly what “against the law means”. They should know that there are consequences, and that the older they get the more severe the consequences of breaking the law will become.

This may be a hard concept for some students to grasp—especially during those particular years when adolescents want nothing to do with what any authority figure says or instructs him or her to do.

It defeats the purpose of learning:

No matter what the subject, when a student plagiarizes something he or she obviously has no intent on learning the material or improving the skills that are being worked on in his or her class. This will prevent them from receiving the education they need to move on to the next level of school and therefore encourage them to keep breaking the law in order to do better in school.

When a person is trying to summarize the information that he or she has obtained from a certain class—it does the neither teacher nor the student any good to see a plagiarized paper.

If the student is caught—the teacher can not be sure what his or her understanding of the material really is, and in order to find that out, special arrangements must be made for the child to re-write the paper in the classroom after school or quizzed on the information that the paper or essay was to include.

This situation takes time away from both the student and the teacher, and also leaves the teacher unable to trust his or her student.

If the student is not caught, this is even worse. First, they see and interpret the situation as being able to get away with something, that something being something they are almost always going to try to get by with in the future.

Another problem with a student not getting caught in plagiarism is that the teacher has a completely different idea of how the student is learning and understanding the material. If he or she always gets A’s and writes great papers—he or she must have a great grasp of the subject matter.

Putting the above aside, plagiarism is—as previously defined—a form of dishonesty, stealing and deceiving. These are traits that should be discouraged in our children and our students. To perpetuate such tendencies is never a good idea. Children should be taught to be creative on their own, to learn on their own, and take credit for their own writing—not that of someone else.

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