Plagiarism is when someone copies another person’s work and tries to pass it as their own. Though it is not a crime, plagiarism is still a serious, immoral offense that can get you expelled from academic institutions or fired from a job. Such example of plagiarism is shown with the book, “Assassin of Secrets”, where the author plagiarized ideas, texts, or concepts from multiple James Bond novels. Needless to say, it was obvious the author would suffer the consequences of plagiarism after he was discovered guilty. People have many reasons for doing plagiarism ranging to being lazy, didn’t know they were doing it, or being in a rush to complete a work. With the Internet and the WWW, plagiarism just became easier for people to commit. However, it also makes it easier to track with methods such as Safe Assign or Google Search. Plagiarism can be avoided easily as long you create citations and give credit to the original author for using their work.
Now that being said, here are 5 questions to think about regarding plagiarism
1. Plagiarism is prohibited, but a question that can be raised is why people continue to plagiarize. Is it because they are lazy or the fact that they crave the much valuable information online, that they tend to simply ‘copy and paste’?
2. None of us desire that any other person just takes our work and makes it theirs. But, with the mutual consent of it, it should not be a problem. Is this an assertion as to where this is okay as long as we both agree?
3. Should people who plagiarize to a certain extent pay heavy fines or face prison charges, eventually? If this does occur, maybe the sudden news may intimidate people, thus decline the presence of plagiarism?
4. In my opinion, the prohibition of plagiarism is not widespread enough. It should be said every now and then, maybe every 3 weeks during school? It may alter and change the minds of students who think of committing the wrongdoing during that time, who knows?
5. I am dubious of the conceivability that plagiarism will not be fully depleted; on the contrary, due to the complexity of school work nowadays, people may start to do it more and hope to somehow get away with it. Do you guys think that plagiarism will be 98% gone one day? If so, why? If not, do you think it may even skyrocket one day?
