I legitimately couldn’t come up with a better title, so I stole this one…
(I mean, it was either this or ‘Plagiarism’ as my title…)
Plagiarism has always been a relevant topic during my school days. I’ve continuously heard the same repetitive words: ‘Don’t copy other people’s work’ or ‘Don’t copy-paste stuff from the internet’ along with many, MANY other variations of these phrases. After a while, these words tend to get meaningless and become a blur. In the end though, the main message still got through, don’t plagiarise.
Personally, I’ve never viewed plagiarism as a problem within this school, predominately because I’ve only been here for some 90 days, but also because I haven’t heard any reports (or rumours) of plagiarism within this school *yet*. But that may just be due to ignorance. I also don’t view plagiarism as a problem in other schools. In the few I’ve have went to, people didn’t really see plagiarism as a route as no one really cared about getting straight A’s on their assignments. Additionally, there wasn’t much pressure for them to do extremely well so they were content with obtaining average marks. However, look at a survey, I was surprised that one in three high school students have plagiarised; and that’s just the honest ones.
I haven’t considered the option of plagiarism myself mainly due to the overwhelming fear of being caught. I imagine I would be panicking day in, day out, (as I have over many smaller things) not allowing my mind to be at ease until a result or verdict arrived on that piece of work. So I thought, the stress and anxiety that comes with worrying about it outweighs the supposed benefit of a B+ I would get from copying someone else’s work, not to mention the chance of failing the person I got the work from due to my own actions.
I don’t have much knowledge about plagiarism within the outside world however, I would think it’d be detrimental to the person’s reputation if caught. Journalists would be fired in an instant, musicians would have their career ruined and politicians would be jeered off stage.
Overall, plagiarism is not a good or a moral thing to do. There are many factors that could go wrong and you could be exposed in an instant. In my opinion, it’s a highly ineffective, risky and immoral way of doing an assignment or any other piece of work.
(I did plagiarise the title though)
