Plagiarists are cheats and liars
In an essay titled "Calling It What It Is" that appeared in the August 2004 edition of Education Week, a teacher David Summergard recommended in calling students who are caught cheating as liars. He also mentioned that students are getting habituated to it by saying that ‘Everyone Does It’.
As David Summergard says, "While not a perfect solution, the notion of 'cheating as lying'” and that if one cheats continuously he develops the notion that it is okay and there is no harm in cheating. Once a student is called a liar he she will make an effort to improve and this will lead to destruction of the so called thought that ‘Plagiarism is normal and justifiable’. The impression must be given that it is totally wrong if it has to be stopped.
Since teachers and professors have the authority to do so they must take measures to remove the habit of cheating from their students. And this can be done by reading the points listed at Theplagiarism.com:
- During a test you must make a very strict environment in the classroom and keep an eye on every student so that no one tries to cheat. Make cheating a very difficult job by instructing two teachers in every classroom and such that they are always facing in the opposite directions so that all the cases of cheating are caught and none of them is allowed to pass off with ease.
- Catch any suspicious movement and issue frequent warnings to the whole class. Make the students sit away from each other, try to spread them out, make them sit in serial order. Do anything but do not make it easy for them to cheat or copy work from others. You can also change the question papers so as to avoid any repetitions from papers in other sections. The more stringent you are, the more successful you will be.
- If any of your students presents you an assignment that matches with any source on the internet then and you are able to identify the source of plagiarism then you must punish him/ her by giving a big zero for him/her in that assignment.
- You must also generate a spirit of enquiry within your students so that they are able to clarify any of their doubts in the beginning only and do not resort to cheating or plagiarism later on. If the base is strong then plagiarism will itself get pushed in the background. So take help from Theplagiarism.com and stop plagiarism immediately.
