Someone Else Wrote This

               Plagiarism is where you use anyone else's work without referencing it and acknowledging that you've used someone else's work and pass it off as your own. So that might be writing a sentence that you've read from a book or it might be cutting and pasting something from a website and not referencing either of those things.

               Plagiarism can come in many forms, certainly over the past decade or so, we've had a shift from the old style of typing up a book, or writing out a book to just cutting and pasting off websites. Now this is the most common form of plagiarism we can find, that there will be a tendency to pull paragraphs out, kind of integrate them a little bit, move some words around and pass that off as a work of the student. Sometimes it's just smaller instances where a couple of lines will drop in or it'll be quote that's not attributed or references that are missing, paraphrasing, or the knowledge simply of having thought a module, that those ideas don't belong to the student.

               I think a lot of the time, students don't realize that they are plagiarizing because of bad time management and the processes of developing effective written work. 

               The main reason students plagiarize is because for some of us, the amount of work that you get in comparison to your college work or wherever background you come from can be slightly overwhelming so then, if you leave your assignments to the last night, you just get so stressed and you just don't know what to do and feel like you can't do it. Then you realize that the easiest way is to hope for the best and copy something from the internet.

               Students can avoid plagiarizing in a number of ways. Firstly, is to make sure we reference properly so that it's very clear to know that is the source of idea and students can block off any perceived or potential plagiarism by very clearly citing. One other important way to avoid plagiarizing is through good time management and having a good plan ahead. With this, we can avoid procrastinating that leads us to plagiarize due to panic and stress.

We all know that plagiarizing is very hard to contain, because most of the time we don't even know that we're already plagiarizing. Make sure to cite references so that we don't validate somebody else's work as our own.