CRIMINAL JUSTICE 1

Criminal Justice

Student Name

Institution Affiliation
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Technological advancement leading to innovation of website such as google as made

the academics easy since one doesn’t necessarily need to attend physical classes. With this

inventions, one can learn at a comfort of his/her compute. Through such website one can get

answers to various life challenges, exam questions including essays and researches in

different part of the world. However, this as lead to increased crime rate such as exam

cheating regarded as plagiarism whereby one uses someone’s ideas, words or pictures and

present them as your own without giving a credit to the person maybe even through citing the

author. Over the years plagiarism in the higher institutions has risen resulting to a breach of

the academic honor code resulting to offering of face degrees which not only tarnishes the

reputations of not only the individual student but also the tertiary institutions. Due to these

consequences, has been considered as a crime offence which is highly punishable by the

court of law. My research will focus on the type of plagiarism associated with the college

student, consequence and largely how one can avoid them.

There are different types of plagiarism, that is, direct plagiarism, self-plagiarism,

mosaic plagiarism and accidental plagiarism. Direct plagiarism is a word-to-word

transcription of someone’s written material without recognizing the person through citing it

or by use of quotation marks. Self-plagiarism is a situation whereby the student submits a

word to word or part wise transcriptions of the previous works without the prior permission

of both of the lectures of professors involved. Accidental plagiarism occurs when an

individual unintentionally phrases a source using the same words or the same sentence

without attribution. Mosaic plagiarism occurs in a situation whereby an individual uses a

phrase from a certain source without recognizing the author by using quotation marks. Both

of the types of plagiarism are seriously considered as crimes and subject to the same

consequences or punishment.
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There are various reasons why student do plagiarize, among them being ignorance

whereby they aren’t aware that what they are doing is plagiarism, failure to understand the

content in the written material hence they end up directly copy pasting it word by word, poor

time management hence the student ends up copy pasting the written material since they have

no time to understand and finally due to lack of good morals among the student whereby,

they don’t see it being wrong to plagiarize. The student should learn always to avoid all this

reasons through early preparation and always having confident of facing the exam papers

without a cheating thought. In situation whereby one has to research, one should first

understand the material and the paraphrase using his/her own words.

However, one can avoid the consequences associated by completely avoiding any

kind of plagiarism by following or adhering to some of the plagiarism avoidance rules which

are very straightforward and simple to follow. The general rule is to paraphrase or simply

write the source material in your own works and then cite it by quoting the author’s name

(Fazilatfar, 2018). There are several other rules which includes; firstly, always cite any

information which appears to be uncommon to any individual since if the information is not

general, the reader should always try to find the source. Secondly, always find the sources

that supports the information written out of your own thought given that the information is

not general to the public hence all the written must come from the source the individual reads

and one should cite them for reference. Thirdly, you should read the article and then

completely paraphrase it into your own words. Complete paraphrasing can easily be achieved

by reading the material into small pieces or portions, write down some of the key point and

then explain them according to your own understanding. Lastly, in a situation where you have

to use a direct quotation of the source of not more than forty words, always remember to use

a quotation, to use a citation after the quote and to provide a page number.
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For better paraphrasing to avoid plagiarism one can follow the following guidelines;

firstly, when paraphrasing the statistical information, you can present or write them in

different ways to avoid plagiarism and also to avoid using a quote. Statistics like decimals,

percentages and fractions are interchangeable hence in the situation of paraphrasing one can

interchange them. For instance, you can change a fraction to decimal or percentage, decimal

to fraction or percentage and percentage to decimals or fractions. Secondly, learn to

accurately paraphrase the information through note taking. This can be easily achieved by

reading the source material and make sure you understand the content, write down the key

point and then without looking to the original article, write down what you have entirely

understood using the noted key point as your guidelines.

In conclusion, plagiarism has got many consequences professional reputations

whereby a student fails to execute or apply the learned class work to the field of work hence

rendering to poor performance of the employers’ organizations despite having employed the

best professionalism in the field. Plagiarism being considered a crime like any other crimes

such as killing can attract a huge court penalty such as copyright laws which binds anybody

from directly quoting someone work without citing or referencing it. However, one can avoid

such penalties or consequences by following the correct rules to avoid plagiarism as

discussed above.
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Referencing

Fazilatfar, A. M., Elhambakhsh, S. E., & Allami, H. (2018). An investigation of the effects of

citation instruction to avoid plagiarism in EFL academic writing assignments. Sage

open, 8(2), 2158244018769958.