Plagiarism among KIRKHS Student (Introduction)

Plagiarism among KIRKHS Student
Plagiarism has always been a problem among lecturers and students because students tend to plagiarize their assignments. With the technology of the modern world, plagiarism have never been easier than what have been done in the past before. With just a simple left click and clicking the paste icon a student can complete their assignment or their work within minutes instead of using the proper way of researching and writing on their own. The problem of plagiarism have been around the academic world for a long time until it was known as “the problem that won’t go away” (Paldy, 1996), with the current modern technology the problem is getting bigger and bigger among the academician. There is evidence that student cheats in their academic journey and plagiarism in particular, are becoming more common and more widespread, encouraging Alschuler and Blimling (1995) to speak of “epidemic cheating”. This evidence is multi-dimensional, coming from many countries, including the USA (White,1993), the UK (Ashworth & Bannister, 1997), Southern Africa (Weeks, 2001) and Finland (Seppanen, 2002), embracing both undergraduate and postgraduate students and including public and private higher institutions of education, large and small.

The word Plagiarism was derived from a Latin world that is “Plagiarius” that means “kidnapper” or “plunderer”, it was also defined as the practice of using the ideas of others and text and claiming that it is theirs hence claiming the original authorship without acknowledging the source. Plagiarism is a very serious problem in the academic world. It is a form of academic theft and “is sometimes a moral and ethical offense rather than a legal one since some instances of plagiarism fall outside the scope of copyright infringement, a legal offense” (Gibaldi, 2003: