Alecia Moore

Why do university students plagiarize in English speaking countries?

Introduction
The phenomenon of plagiarism by students in higher education is not forbidden entirely. In the Collins dictionary of the English language, plagiarism is defined by Hanks (1979) as “the act of plagiarizing” which is explained as the behavior of coping or snitching other author’s work and treating it as one’s own achievement without proper and appropriate citation. The forms of student’s plagiarism generally are summarized into three main ways: coping other author’s material and declaring it as their own, referring to other’s argument without correct citations or with high proportion of copied original words, paraphrasing academic articles from different sources without providing with accurate references (Park, 2003). According to the theory of Payne and Nantz (1994), many students don not consider academic plagiarism as serious as cheating on examinations, which means that most of them view academic cheating not as a real plagiarism with strong offence. Generally, numerous students chose to ignore academic cheating behaviors of their classmates and friends rather than scorn it. This essay examines four main reasons for plagiarism in terms of limited academic skills, pressure and competition, student attitude and culture differently.

Main body
Limited academic skills
Limited academic skills including lack of understanding, poor academic writing and researching skill, as a common cause of plagiarism, applies to all students. One difficulty for students avoiding plagiarism is distinguishing the ambiguous and murky borderland between borrowing and stealing. Park (2003) argued that many students are lack of the ability to clarify the degree of plagiarism, which means they do not clearly acknowledge how much original words need to be altered to avoid the charge of plagiarism. On the other hand, the poor academic writing ability of student forces them choose the method of patchwork writing which is similar with plagiarism via copying a whole paragraph from the material, replacing words with synonyms, changing the sentence order and grammatical structure (Howard, 1993). Moreover, students are easy to plagiarize because of deficient correct in-text citation for common knowledge in their essay. According to Sureda-Negre’s (2010) survey, a considerable proportion about 52% of students think there is high relevance between plagiarism and sources on the Internet. The easy accessibility of material on the Internet provides students who are lack of researching skills chance to copy the sources they need without distinguishing whether the material is academic or not.

Personal organization and attitude
Arranging moderate and proper time to individual assignment is always a hardship for many students. They are not clearly acknowledge how much time should be assigned into their homework and overestimate their ability to finish one assignment. Students surveyed by Sureda-Negre (2010) demonstrate that one factor relevant with their plagiarism is the limited time to accomplish their academic assignments. Many students generally list social activities, college society and sports ahead of homework their schedule, and start it until deadline coming. Facing the pressure of deadline, copying from other’s work is regarded as an efficient method to accomplish numerous and complicated assignments in their views. Moreover, there exists a group of students who view copying online information is not considered as an act of plagiarizing because those sources is open to all people (Sureda-Negre, 2010). Many students hold such opinion that they just use the public information rather than stealing that. From the perspective of personal attitude, many students imagine to be fortunate sons who are lucky enough not be found out their plagiarizing behavior by tutor.
In sum, poor time management and incorrect personal attitude towards copying account for high percentage in the cause of student’s plagiarism.

Pressure and competition
The pressure from family and prospective competition in career are also drivers of plagiarism for students. In Neville’s view (2010), students cannot afford for the failure in their education with accepting huge financial support from family. High grade in their academic education is the promise of high salary in future and easy entrance to extensive enterprise in student’s perspectives especially international students. The stress from family and career sometimes drives students to plagiarize even they are warned not to copy other’s work and not to pass other’s idea off as them own. Because, paraphrasing is really tough for the students who use English as a second language with partial understanding of original text. There is no wonder that these students copy other’s ideas and materials at risk of being judged as plagiarism in order to gain high scores to relieve their stress from family and enhance their prospective competition in career (Neville, 2010).

Culture
Plagiarism occurs in international students frequently because it is difficult for them to adapt to the different cultural citation styles in a short period. The example presenting in Neville’s (2010) book showed that a high proportion that Chinese students do not use in-text reference when they write essay in their homeland university before coming to Britain. The lack of referencing experience and unfamiliar with Britain writing habit improve the rate of plagiarism by Chines students in the process of studying in UK. This phenomenon does not only happen to Chinese students. And the various standard of plagiarism in different cultures is also considered into a cause of plagiarizing. For instance, in Vietnam, the behavior of simply copying other’s material is usually regarded as stealing. However, students in Vietnam do not provide the in-text citation in their essay only listing the bibliography. And this behavior is not considered as plagiarism in their university culture because all references are listed in the bibliography at the end of essay (Ha, 2006 cited in Neville, 2010). Therefore, deficient referencing practice and various cultural standard of plagiarism is the two main culture factors leading to the high rate of plagiarizing by international students.

Conclusion
To be concluded, it is impossible to exterminate the act of plagiarizing by student in university. As mentioned in the main body, limited academic skills, poor personal time management and attitude lead to many students to regard plagiarism as an efficient expedient to complete their assignments before deadline and get high grade. Moreover, copying other’s work is considered by international students as an easy way to out of the situation where are full of stress from parents and future competition and different cultural academic convention (Comas-Forgas, 2010). But, in personal view, there exists the possibility of reducing the rate of plagiarism through taking actions by tutor and university.

References:
Comas-Forgas,R. & Sureda-Negre,J.(2010). Academic Plagiarism: Explanatory Factors from Students’ Perspective, Journal of Academic Ethics, Vol. 8(3), pp. 217-232 Retrieved December 1, 2013
From http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10805-010-9121-0

Howard,R.M.,(1993). A plagiarism pentimento Journal of Teaching Writing Vol. 11, pp.233–246

Neville, C. (2010) Plagiarism, The complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism. pp.29-43, Berkshire: Open University Press

Park, C.(2003). In Other (People’s) Words: plagiarism by university students—literature and lessons, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Vol. 28, pp.472-479

Payne, S. L. & Nantz, K. S. (1994) Social accounts and metaphors about cheating, College Teaching, 42/3, pp.90–96