Would Relaxing Plagiarism Standards Lower a University’s Quality and Reputation

Today’s era of cyber technology is very advanced and is equipped with digital technologies providing students with facilities to just copy and paste others’ ideas in a few seconds. Online research articles, books and other social networks are easily accessible sources of information, but they have made the plagiarism easier than ever before. Universities’ are considered to provide top quality students having critical and inventive approach; those must not be plagiarist.

Actually relaxing plagiarism standards in a university will discourage creativity, foster laziness and lead to the production of under achievers, due to this university would not be able to maintain its reputation. Relaxing of plagiarism standards will negate student’s motivation for development of new ideas. A plagiarized work can’t be considered a new one, as said by Ms. Wilensky (cited from Garibel T, 2010), that “you’re not coming up with new idea if you’re grabbing and mixing and matching”.

Young generation is generally being considered the future of a nation, and standard schooling system acts as a nursery to prepare them for coming challenges. By relaxing plagiarism standards our universities can increase the number of degree holders, but they would not be able to produce creative, motivated and well skilled professionals. Furthermore relaxing plagiarism standards will affect the progress and moral values of our society.

The exact causes that enforce a student to plagiarise are complex, but worth examining. Many students do not know how to critically evaluate internet sources, but they just think these are for anyone to use (Teresa Fishman, cited from Garibel T, 2010), and up to 60% of students cannot distinguish between paraphrased and plagiarized text (Roig, 1999). An important reason mentioned by Ms. Wilensky (cited from Garibel T, 2010), that plagiarism occurs because students didn’t prepare well for college writing during high chool studies.

Lack of research skills is another reason to impel students towards plagiarism, because they do not know how to search the relevant research articles, databases for journal articles, or use other reference sources. Another important thing that I should mention here is that students often do not have the time management or organizational skills necessary to complete a large writing task. No one can excuse plagiarism, but the point is how to control it.

In my opinion the first and most important thing is to educate students about the negative aspects of plagiarism even at high school levels. This will improve their critical thinking and writing skills for a new idea development from the studied materials. According to Ms. Wilensky (cited from Garibel T, 2010), that if a student improves his skills about how to read sources, synthesize these in his own way, then he /she will never go for plagiarism. Furthermore student can use various online programs to check plagiarism before submitting his/her writing.

The discussion above clearly shows that relaxing plagiarism standards will affect universities’ standard and reputation as well as quality of students they are producing. It will also affect the progress and moral values of our society. Students need to be motivated to understand the actual theme and concept during schooling in order to avoid plagiarism. At last a university having a standard plagiarism policy can produce valuable and creative scientists and writers for a society.