Why Plagiarism Is Wrong

I am a student who has first handedly seen many cases of people plagiarizing, some in which they get caught and others where they don’t. When discussing about plagiarism most students fail to understand the meaning of it, most believe that it is simply the act of directly copying someone else’s work. However, I think there is more to it than just that. This is where confusion begins and where students fail to acknowledge the many types of plagiarism.

After taking the class survey, I have come to a conclusion and noticed that mostly everyone seems to think the same about this issue. Out of the 100 people that were surveyed, when asked about the likeliest reason people plagiarize, 28.28% said it was because a lack of interest and 25.25%

said it was due to lack of knowledge to accurately cite sources. I highly agree with these results, I believe that there are students who commit this act not because they are incompetent writers but because they lack self-confidence and motivation.

Most students choose to steal ideas from other students because they think the other ideas are better in terms of explanation and articulation. I say this because anyone is capable to create new ideas but the difficulty rises when you have to format it into a writing style. Even so, this does not make it acceptable behavior and students should not use this as an excuse to continue doing it. We can correlate this with the student merely lacking interest in the material and taking the easy route in order to finish. Anyone who plagiarises is impeding themselves and everyone else around them from thinking outside the box and thus creating new ideas. We can easily point out the short term effects of copying someone else’s work but what about the long term effects of it? The long term effects will eventually affect how we are evolving intellectually, physically, and emotionally. I believe it affects humans in an intellectual way merely because when we copy others’ work

we stop using our creativity and conform to ideas that are already being said and done. Consequently, with a limitation on creativity we are also stopping the invention of new things in departments such as, the NASA, robotics, and most importantly in the writing area. What will happen if we plagiarism remains active? We need to come up with another possible alternative, maybe we have to implement stricter consequences for those who try to commit this crime.
Although my point of view is not enough to provide with a logical and ethical appeal, there is data that shows that lazy people are not the only ones that plagiarise, smart people do it too.

Does the level of intelligence determine who is more inclined to plagiarise? According to Plagiarism Today everyone is tempted to plagiarise, they state that smart people plagiarise because of the “pressure factor”. The writer also mentions a reason that can be applied to everyone, saying that people who do it feel “pressure to excel, pressure to get things done and pressure to pressure to be the best at everything they do, even when it is not practical”(Plagiarism Today). We see an event similar to this that happened in the field of politics where unfortunately plagiarism does exist. Some of the higher-ups who choose to plagiarise lose reliability and trust from the citizens. We take for example the case with Michelle Obama and Melania Trump, millions of people tuned in to watch Melania Trump’s speech, the speech seemed like any other speech but suddenly it came to my realization that it was almost identical to Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech. It’s hard to understand why Melania Trump would even take any chances and even slightly try to imitate Michelle Obama’s speech. However, I think Melania Trump and her advisors believed Michelle’s speech was very well laid and provided intellect, emotion, logic, and most importantly it reached a vast audience. Melania probably felt under

pressure and wanted everyone to like her as much as Michelle Obama was liked. Unfortunately this moment of desperation was underestimated and turned against her and affected her reputation with loss of credibility and trustworthiness.
With this is mind, we have to consider that some people who do it are also oblivious as to what it actually is. Growing up many students may not be taught the consequences of gathering information from different sources and not citing them properly or may not be taught to cite at all. I also think there is a lot of confusion among the students who want to base their evidence and back it up with online sources but simply do not know how to properly give credit. Other students find themselves caught in an act of crime, because they believe their words are known as “static knowledge that belongs to everyone”(Michelle Navarre Cleary 3). Although I am not trying to justify the act of plagiarism, it is true that some students simply don’t know what they are doing. The only way they will know that it is wrong and unacceptable is if someone tells them beforehand or else they will find out when they get caught. Surely, I believe we should teach more about this subject and list the consequences that come with it so we can prevent it from occurring. This will eventually eradicate the act of plagiarism and allow for our unique ideas to flourish among our evolving world.