We have heard a lot about cheating in exams
and we all know well what cheating is. Cheating is often referred as bringing
an illegal material in the examination hall. We cannot simply ignore the work
that is not done under exams conditions. We can call it cheating in academic
assignments.
The students are to prepare many pieces of academic work like presentations, scholarly articles, thesis, and essays and so on.
The students are to prepare many pieces of academic work like presentations, scholarly articles, thesis, and essays and so on.
We all know well the principles of preparing
piece of academic work. We are not allowed to copy the content of other authors
as it to our academic assignments and presenting this content as our own. All
assessed and non-assessed work must be aligned with these rules and principles.
The students, as part of their academic
assignment preparation, play on these rules and their teachers as well. The use
many unfair mean but I have listed the most common five means below.
1. Plagiarism
Plagiarism means to steal the ideas or work
of other person and present is as your own in academic assignment. It is the
most common and widely used dirty method that students use to get their assignments
passed. Plagiarism may be intentional or unintentional.
The students often cut-paste
and copy-paste the content from other books, articles, websites, magazines and journals
etc. They sometimes rephrase the content but it is still plagiarism even you acknowledge
the source. The spirit of academic assignments is that you prepare them in your
own words with your own ideas.
2. Submitting purchased or custom-built work
This is very serious academic offence that
students frequently make. It is also a form of plagiarism. It means the
students pay some money to others to make them their assignments or part of
assignments.
There are many ‘shining’ students who offer
their services for writing others’ assignment in return of money. Sometimes,
all for getting money or for friendship, mere they even their own assignments
to other students. This is the dirty politics that students play with the
examiners.
3. Double Submission
As the heading suggests, double submission
means submitting an assignment that was already submitted to any other
professor or other department. It is also called self plagiarism. It is dirty
way to get double credit for single assignment.
4. Collusion
It means
where two or more people work together to produce a piece of work, all or part
of which is then submitted by each of them as their own individual work. This
includes passing on work in any format to another student. It is also an ugly
way to get the fake credit and grades. Anyhow the collusion does not occur
where students involved in group work are encouraged to work together to
produce a single piece of work as part of the assessment process.
Fallacious Practical Work
It means the
practical work or any assignment that requires the production of something new
or involves experiment. The students may get ready made things presenting as
their own creations.
I think there should be many other ways that
students employ to cheat on their teachers. What you say?