While plagiarism is unappreciated everywhere, it may lead to serious consequences in academia. Hence, students should avoid plagiarism at all costs. However, many students end up committing accidental plagiarism. Such students often end up facing penalties like fewer grades, failure, and rustication. These consequences may seriously impact their overall reputation and professional career.
Considering the aforementioned consequences and their aftermath, it is essential to avoid plagiarism. Still, many students fail to avoid it. Teachers play a key role in establishing the path to a promising career for their students. They have multiple responsibilities on their shoulders. In addition to teaching a particular course to their students, they can also play a key role in helping them learn ethics and avoid various malpractices, including plagiarism.
The problem, however, is that many teachers are unaware of techniques to help them ensure that their students avoid unintentional plagiarism and comprehend academic integrity. This article resolves the aforementioned issue for such teachers by discussing highly effective methods to help students avoid unintentional plagiarism. Ultimately, this helping hand will pave the path to a promising career for their students, who will remain grateful to them for their entire lives.
Read on to learn more about these techniques.
Exemplify Proper Citations Per Recommended Method
The biggest reason most students are involved in unintentional plagiarism is their inability to properly cite the source content borrowed from elsewhere through in-text citation and bibliography. It generally occurs because of their unawareness regarding the how-tos of different commonly used and custom citation styles recommended by academic institutes.
Considering this issue, as a teacher, you must help students ensure proper in-text citations and bibliographies per the recommended method. It could be APA, MLA, Chicago, or the one devised by an academic institute specifically for academic submissions.
You can teach them how to cite sources by exemplifying the entire method during a lecture so that students understand it easily.
Encourage Students to Make Notes
Another great way to help students avoid intentional plagiarism is by encouraging them to make notes. Ask them to understand the concepts taught in the lecture with attention and jot down the key takeaways from those lectures in their own words. Tell them that there is no need to copy a lecture word-for-word. The main purpose of a lecture is to help students understand the concepts.
An in-depth understanding of a concept taught in a lecture will help students interpret important learnings and write them in their own way. Such notes can be highly helpful when students are asked to articulate academic submissions, including essays and assignments. They can easily incorporate their own writing, use it to get ideas, or restate it in varied wording to ensure non-plagiarized content.
Suggest the Right Tool to Check Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a nasty crime in education that is fairly easy to commit. The aforementioned statement especially holds when it comes to the academic ecosystem. Hence, teachers should advise their students to keep an eye out for plagiarism and stay vigilant regarding any such shortcomings in their academic submissions.
They should also suggest a method to assess their writing for plagiarism. While manual comparison with research sources is an uphill task, an effortless way to ensure the uniqueness of content is to use an advanced free plagiarism checker. Since teachers have access to a large number of write-ups, they can easily assess the performance of multiple tools capable of checking plagiarism.
This practice will help them find a highly efficient and cost-effective plagiarism detector for their students. Such a plagiarism checker will easily help students check content for any kind of duplication and make modifications accordingly to ensure that their academic submissions feature unique content.
A useful suggestion from the teacher regarding an effective plagiarism detector will help students avoid unintentional plagiarism effectively.
Tell Students How to Paraphrase
It is worth mentioning that an effective plagiarism checker can only help students identify plagiarized patches in their writing. Eradicating plagiarism is a totally different practice, and it certainly requires effort from students. Students should know how to paraphrase content by tweaking and restructuring it and giving it a new shape to remove any chances for plagiarism allegations.
Educators can prove to be a great helping hand. They teach their students the art of paraphrasing content using techniques like sentence restructuring, voice alteration, word replacement, and adding or eradicating slight details. This skill will not only help students avoid the uncalled-for aftermath of unintentional plagiarism but also prove to be a success factor in their professional careers. However, even after teaching, if students are still struggling to efficiently paraphrase their writing, then educators can consider allowing the use of a paraphrase tool. The tool will allow students to quickly & efficiently perform paraphrasing to tackle unintentional plagiarism.
Recommend Proper Use of Quotations
Quotations are seen as a great tool in the content articulation process. They are used whenever a writer tries to incorporate words or ideas from another source in the same wording. Failure to use quotation marks while doing so leads to unintentional plagiarism. This unintentional plagiarism may lead to various problems for students who fail to use quotation marks properly.
Teachers can help students learn where to use quotation marks and their importance. They can also teach them to write borrowed words between quotation marks and cite the exact author or source to avoid plagiarism. Many students end up doing unintentional plagiarism by adding sourced content as common knowledge in their writing and becoming victims of unintentional plagiarism. However, teaching students to properly use quotations in academic submissions can help them avoid it.
In the End
Unintentional plagiarism could be the primary reason behind compromised reputations, fewer grades, rustication, and a low-end career for students. However, teachers can play a key role in helping students avoid unintentional plagiarism in their work. We have discussed a few ways teachers can use to help students avoid unintentional plagiarism. Hopefully, teachers will use them to help students ensure quality academic submissions without plagiarism.
