blog#7

  According to the research, there are many different reasons resulting in students willingness to take the risk to plagiarize or cheating during their exams. For example, Karan, as cited by James Bradshaw and Tamara Baluja in the article “why many international students get a failing grade in Academic integrity”, mentions that the high pressure from the parents and tuition fee is one of the reasons causing students plan on cheating. We have to say, nowadays, parents spend a lot of money on children’s education, especially for studying abroad. They want their children can get a degree then find a better job to sponsor them when they become old. (Bradshaw and Baluja, 2009) Actually, a certain amount of stress is vital to provide motivation and energies when we face difficulties. But some students afraid of the stress, and lose control of it, then the stress rob them of joy and happiness and do them harm both physically and mentally. As the result, some students fear to get bad grade so they decide to plagiarize or cheating.  On the other hand, Internet plays an important role in plagiarism. With the advent of Internet, plagiarism has become quite easy. Students can get large number of information with the help of Internet search engines within few seconds. Some students developed a false belief that the sprit of the Internet is sharing, so the articles or ideas on the Internet can be downloaded and used for any purpose without permission and citation. They don’t realize that they have stolen other’s intellectual property and involved in plagiarism or copy infringement. In the article “Has the internet encouraged plagiarism”, the author mentions that when the deadline coming, the journalists know the editors have no time to check up whether each word of a journalist’s work is their own, so they gather information and data from the internet and combine them into a news. In fact, the similar situation also happen among campus, when students face the deadline of homework, they don’t choose to work hard or to get help from writing center and their professors, instead, they search the same topic articles on the Internet and copy them as their own work. They think there are millions of article on the Internet, it is impossible that the professor can find their articles.  Unfortunately, their wishes always burst and get an F finally.

  However, when the students are committed to plagiarism, the punishments are necessary. But the same treatments for both domestic students and international are unfair. In many cases, some international students don’t plagiarize or cheat on purpose; they just don’t adapt themselves to new environment. As mentioned in the article “Cheating Across Culture”, the Western style of citing sources isn’t universal. The professor Greenblatt, as cited by Elizabeth Redden, explains that “many Asian students come from educational systems in which the norm is to repeat back a textbook or a professor verbatim (without a citation), as a sign of respect to the source of knowledge.” (P.1) So if the international students don’t be provided the specific lessons for the West style of citing, they may make some citing mistakes on their homework or exams and result in plagiarism. Thus He states that the schools and professors have the responsibilities to educate the international students through orientations or lessons or brochures in order to help them cover this problem. Moreover, the different teaching and learning styles also are barriers.  Karan as an international student from India was involved in plagiarism after he copy text from his professor’s lecture slides without permission. Actually, he didn’t realize this action could result in plagiarism, because in India, reproducing the word of teachers is encouraged and is a good way to get high grade. (Bradshaw and Baluja, 2009)