Disadvantages of plagiarising.
According to the Collins Dictionary of the English language (Hanks, 1979), plagiarism is ‘the act of plagiarising’, which is ‘to steal ideas or passages from another’s work and present them as one’s own’. In other words plagiarism is the act of presenting another person’s work through essay, speech, write up or electronically. Intentionally or unintentionally reproducing merely copying, rewording, paraphrasing, adapting, work that was produced by another person(s) without proper acknowledgement in an attempt to gain academic benefit, merit or reward. Intentionally or nonchalantly allowing such reproduction to happen may also complement plagiarism.
This core ethical issue needs addressing immediately. Educators will need to consider how students are interacting with information technology and how ethical these interactions are. Unprecedented and unparalleled access to information without consideration to its ownership or authenticity provides ongoing concerns for society. Conger and Loch put it very succinctly. "For every new technology, new situations arise." (Conger, Loch, 1996). Plagiarism is not only copying the words of another person, which can be avoided summarising the sentences, but also the use of words, ideas, data, organization and original thoughts of another person without acknowledging the individual and the most commonly used platform is the internet, Such activities can allow room to serious consequences, sometimes, attracting legal punishments. Copying someone else's work without acknowledging is actually a violation of that person right over his intellectual property. Legally, plagiarism is a subject matter of copyright violation law, and can bring legal and monetary retribution for the violators sometimes, penalties for plagiarism can comprise criminal punishments and imprisonment, the offender may be penalised to compensate for the loss of profit of the original writer.
Plagiarism can have undesirable consequence for the wrongdoing e.g. poor grades, termination, degrees may be renounced, jobs may be lost and careers may be impaired because of plagiarism. As well as causing considerable wastage of time, money and effort, such penalties can have adverse effect on the future of a student. Consequence of plagiarism in academics may be the harm that students do to themselves ignorantly. Plagiarizing another's writing actually weakens the ability of the students to attain the important skills required for researching and writing.
Honesty declarations and written regulations on the penalties of plagiarism are useful deterrents but real solutions lie in the nature of our assessments. Assessments which remain unchanged from one year to the next or follow the same formula can encourage online plagiarism. Vigue examines several solutions proposed by Taine Donohue. An English Department lecturer at North-eastern University , Donohue suggests that "the best way to eliminate even the temptation to plagiarize is for professors to be more creative, assigning papers and essays that call on a student to relay personal experiences or that draw from classroom discussions." (Vigue, 1997) Although the risks, it is nowadays prevailing catalysed by the magnitude of generally available information on the web, the rapid growth of plagiarism can be hindered if preventive measures are taken seriously.

Bibliography.

1. Conger, Sue; Loch, Karen D. (1995)' Ethics and computer use', in Communications of the ACM 38(12) p.31-32.

2. Hanks(Ed.)(1977) Collins Dictionary of the English language(Glasgow William colling).

3. Iparagigms.LLc (2011), Facts about plagiarism, available from http:// www.plagiarism.org/plag_facts.html (23/02/11) .