Plagiarism in College & How to Avoid It

Plagiarism in college is the Achilles’ heel of all educators. They struggle hard with it, trying to grow students’ critical thinking, writing skills, and academic integrity, but things are still where they started:

Students continue to copy ideas and texts from others, claiming those works as their own. The rise of ChatGPT and other AI text generators makes it even easier to do: These tools are smart enough to craft original content that plagiarism checkers won’t see as duplicated.

It’s like a slap in the face to the entire education system, huh?

Despite the devastating consequences of academic integrity violations and strong policies against them in most educational institutions, students don’t realize the problem. Or, they do but decide to plagiarize intentionally.

Why do they do it? What do we consider plagiarism in academia? How can students avoid it in the era of AI writers and craft original college essays?

What is Plagiarism in College?

Plagiarism refers to using someone else’s words or ideas and passing them off as your own without crediting the original author.

There are different types of plagiarism, and the most common ones among college students are self-plagiarism and direct plagiarism with no reference. Let’s see how they look in practice and reveal more details on other types of plagiarism students commit — intentionally or not — when writing their academic papers.

Here are the examples of plagiarism in college:

• Taking someone’s work and saying it’s yours
• Copying abstracts or full texts of others’ essays without citing
• Copying text from a source but changing some words and phrases from there to disguise plagiarism
• Taking abstracts from several sources and piecing them together, thus creating a “new” work
• Paraphrasing from different sources without citing them
• Taking an essay you wrote for another class and submitting it to a new place without a professor’s prior permission
• Asking others to write essays for you or buying texts from third-party writing services, presenting those essays as your original work

Plagiarism in college is about academic integrity violation.

Academic integrity is the ethical code and moral principles that guide students, educators, and researchers in the community. It involves honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility.

1. Honesty: Present your original work and give proper credit to others’ contributions.
2. Trust: Establish a reliable and trustworthy academic environment where scholars can exchange ideas.
3. Fairness: Ensure you evaluate all academic work impartially and equitably.
4. Respect: Value the work of others and acknowledge their intellectual property.
5. Responsibility: Uphold and promote these values to maintain the integrity of the academic process.

Academic integrity violations include plagiarism, cheating, fabrication, falsification, and other forms of academic misconduct.

Universities’ plagiarism policies define this practice as cheating and an academic offense. They prescribe a student’s responsibilities for copyright infringement, reveal policies regarding “accidental” plagiarism, and highlight the use of plagiarism-detecting software to deal with this problem.

As a rule, dealing with plagiarism in college is a complex process that involves several stages:

1. If an educator suspects plagiarism, they undertake an investigation considering any evidence.
2. If, after the investigation, the educator sees that plagiarism happened, they invite a student to respond.
3. Following that meeting, a college committee determines the level of plagiarism and decides on punishment.

Why Students Plagiarize

Modern students are tech-savvy and understand the issue of authorship and the devastating consequences of plagiarism in academia. If so, why do 55% of college and university committees say student plagiarism has increased over the past ten years?

Numbers speak volumes indeed:

The survey of 70,000+ students in the United States demonstrated that 95% participated in some form of cheating!

Why do college students plagiarize? Why are they ready to violate academic integrity and cheat?

The reasons vary, and most of them are psychological rather than material.

The number one reason is the pressure to succeed. Dread to disappoint expectations of parents, educators, and society, students experience the fear of failure that affects their learning motivations and strategies.

Academic overload is another core reason college students cheat. They feel stressed and anxious and cannot physically handle all the tasks, so they choose plagiarism to beat all those tight deadlines.

Another reason for cheating is panic due to poor time management skills, lack of knowledge, etc. Sometimes, plagiarism results from desperation: A student doesn’t understand the assignment or is new to the work type assigned, and they’d plagiarize rather than receive a low grade for it. (Because the education system emphasizes grades as a measure of success.)

Students can also plagiarize because of social comparison. They consider it OK or even necessary to cheat to stay competitive. Seeing peers cheating, not getting caught, and achieving high results while spending less effort, students lose motivation to learn. They decide to follow the lead of their classmates.

Other motivations behind plagiarism in college include laziness, sloppiness, lack of interest in a subject, and competition (especially in those educational institutions that continue practicing curve grading).

How to Write Original College Essays and Avoid Plagiarism

There are a bunch of methods to avoid plagiarism for college students. Here’s how to write original college essays to avoid accusations of plagiarism and copyright infringement:

• Cite every source you use for research and evidence in an essay. Mention an author within a text and provide a full citation in your reference list.
• Use quotation marks when quoting your source directly. Again, remember to cite it in your bibliography.
• Paraphrasing is OK if you add your ideas to the text, but cite your sources anyway.
• Use reliable plagiarism checkers to double-check your drafts before submitting them to a professor’s review. It will help you avoid accidental duplications, poor paraphrases, and wrong synonymizations.
• Use AI tools responsibly. Don’t prompt ChatGPT or other AI writers with essay drafts. Consider them a helpful hand that may assist you with research, topic choice, or outlining your paper, but do your best to write a text yourself.
• Talk to your professor if in doubt. When you write an essay and are unsure whether you plagiarize, contact your educator to clarify. They’ll happily answer your questions and help with proper referencing rather than report you for plagiarism.

Takeaways

Plagiarism in college refers to using someone else’s words or ideas without proper credit. It takes many forms: wrong paraphrasing, direct plagiarism with/without reference, the plagiarism of the complete work, patchwork plagiarism, and even self-plagiarism. Regardless of the form, plagiarism is always about academic integrity violations: Colleges define it as cheating and prescribe responsibilities for it.

College students can avoid plagiarism in their academic papers. Keeping track of the sources and crediting the original author would be a great start.