Plagiarism

This essay examines the reasons that cause student plagiarism, especially unintentional plagiarism. There are basically two methods to exam whether students have grasped the required knowledge of the courses, test and paper. Generally universities evaluate students' performances and give grades based on the job undergraduates and graduates do on tests and paper writing. These grades can determine whether a student can pass a course, whether can get a degree and, even further, whether get employed by satisfactory employers. It is universally accepted that tests and paper are a fair indication of a student's efforts, intelligence and knowledge; whereas plagiarism, including unintentional plagiarism, perturbs the fair order.

Students conduct plagiarism during exams for various reasons. This essay will explain the factors that contribute to plagiarism in tests and in writing paper separately since the reasons for plagiarism are diversified under different situations.

The initial factor that causes plagiarizing can be concluded as future development stress, including learning stress and employment stress (Blum, 2011). As mentioned above, the results of tests may have essential impacts on students' future development. This pressure could become the initial driving force for students to conduct cheating since cheating means to spare less effort and to achieve higher grades than they earn by being honest during tests.

According to Wang (2008, p. 751), as plagiarizing become more common than ever, student do not consider plagiarism as a bad behavior, let alone a violation of other equal rights or even a serious crime. Many fellows' copying answer downloaded from the Internet would affect on what students treat plagiarism as. Under this circumstance, there is a campus environment that endorses cheating acceptable by most of the students, which leaves teachers nearly no way to fix the situation right. In other words, academic culture, somehow, weakens the role that honesty plays and deteriorates plagiarism situation.

In writing a paper, unintentional plagiarism is also an indispensable element of plagiarism, which involves using material without attribution and similar illustration as published paper. As Wang (2008, p. 743) notes, more than half of the students do not regard using sentences without attribution from various sources on the Internet a serious plagiarism. These students believe that if the information is not published by authorities, they can use