In academic circles, plagiarism is one of the most serious offenses that results in serious consequences. Plagiarism means using other people’s works without proper referencing. Combat measures against plagiarism, applied by colleges and universities in the USA, are extremely strict and severe. Because of proven cases of plagiarism students are forced to leave college or university, while professors lose their jobs.
American students are forced to live under constant pressure, dealing with incessant exams, tests and other forms of assessment. If they want to find a good job after graduation, they need good grades. If they want to have good grades, they need to complete their assignments successfully. Of course, since they have too much work to do and assignments to complete, they prioritize in favor of some classes and not in favor of the others.
In most cases, students choose to distribute their efforts and energy reasonably, for example spending less time on some assignments and, owing to such measures, to be able to manage all of tasks.
As many teachers and tutors notice, because of high pressure and lack of time, many students complete assignments without striving for the best results and, thus giving less effort to one assignment and saving precious time for the others. That’s where student fail to provide proper citations and references. In most cases, they are well aware that copying someone else’s work without providing proper references is a serious and punishable crime in academic circles, and that taking long quotes from other author’s work is not the best thing to do in academic writing. However, a student is pressed for time and has many other assignments, so he might forget to provide some reference, or to think of it as something that must be done but that is not very important or meaningful.
Another serious issue with plagiarism is its ambiguity and very confusing nature. A student may not always understand if what other author wrote was a fact or author’s opinion, while for college professors it may be simple, something clearly right or clearly wrong. This is another reason why plagiarism causes so much trouble for students and professors. Also, it explains why plagiarism sites such as noplag.com plagiarism checker are so popular and much-in-demand.
Plagiarism is a problem not only in academic circles but also in the publishing world. There is a well-known case of American author and blogger Jonah Lehrer, who was writing about neuroscience. He published books, had a successful blog and worker for The New Yorker magazine. Then, suddenly, this all came to an end because of plagiarism accusations. Another famous case of plagiarism in the publishing world is Fareed Zakaria’s who had to apologize for his mistake but could keep his jobs at Time and CNN. What is the difference between these two cases? The thing is that Jonah Lehrer was found guilty of many cases of plagiarism while Fareed Zakaria’s case of plagiarism was recognized as unintentional mistake.
Anyway, whatever this means for publishers, for most students plagiarism rules are still blurry, which leads to many unintentional mistakes. That’s why the best possible alternative is to use website to check plagiarism or website for plagiarism such as Noplag.com.