Plagiarism - Causes and Effects

Plagiarism, defined as the action of copying of the other work without citation and the author’s knowledge, is considered a huge crime in educational area. According to Nancy J. Girard, she defined plagiarism as stealing. She also claimed that stealing one’s works is harder to probe rather than that of money or tangible items. (Girard, 2004). Plagiarism is rampant to university or college students when dealing with tons of assignments. Despite the fact that they all know it is morally and ethically wrong, the act of plagiarism still, is an action they profusely commit. There are several causes and effect of plagiarism that all people should know. The first cause that contributes to plagiarism is due to poor time managements. This does ring a bell to university students mostly. When students fail to have their time managed properly, they tend to do last minute works and the easiest way to choose to cope with that is by plagiarizing. Few students from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia have come out with their survey on the causes of plagiarism out to 100 students in their campus and 80 per cent students agreed that poor time management caused them to plagiarize. (Azman, 2009). Sometimes assignments are to be submitted quite early, so students do not have enough time to study them thoroughly, so they commit plagiarism. Few lecturers or employers are unexpected. They will sometimes ask their students or employees to submit the assignments earlier than its due date. Those with poor time management must rush to run the assignments done, so the only thing comes to their mind is to plagiarize. The second cause why people tend to plagiarize is due to the ease of use of Internet. With much easier accesses to the Internet such as wireless and broadband connections, dependency to the sources from Internet makes people indolent to go searching sources at the university or public library which are more trustable. It will also be easy to find many sources from the Internet