Plagiarism Among International Students

For many international students coming from Asian countries, adapting to the United States education is a challenge. Growing up in a system where rote learning is at the core without ever understanding the rationale behind the concepts and lessons, many of them find it hard to excel in the US. When they learn history, they often learn the events by heart without knowing the cause-and-effect relationships. As a result, they started to tremble over hypothetical questions on the tests and homework. Typically, when they write essay, they have a hard time finding ideas because they have been accustomed to what they used to do at their home country--memorizing the templates based on others’ ideas. Eventually, with a habit of copying others’ ideas, they start to plagiarize. Plagiarism is relatively common not only to international students but also the American students. Plagiarism

It does not necessarily limit to schools and academic institutions, and it is a serious problem nowadays. Others’ properties are taken blatantly without any acknowledgement and credit. The first and most recognized type of plagiarism is academic plagiarism, in which students used the contents invented by others and the intellectual properties with none of any acknowledgement of the credits, or citing the works properly. According to a research by professor Donald McCabe of Rutgers University in 2005, thirty-six percent of undergraduates were reported to admit that they paraphrased and copied a few sentences from internet sources without footnoting it. In academic plagiarism, there is a direct plagiarism in which students copy the section of someone else’s work words by words with none of attributions and quotation marks. This direct plagiarism is not ethical even with footnoting; thus, students should either quote the whole thing