Week 3 - Cyber Ethics, Plagiarism and Copyright

Plagiarism is gradually becoming a common issue among the students of the higher education. Cambridge Advanced Learner Dictionary 3rd Edition defined plagiarism as to use another person's idea or a part of their work and pretend that it is your own. There are many motive that lead to this act of plagiarism such as laziness, lack of cyber ethics, peer pressure, difficulties in completing their assignment, high benchmark set up by the lecturer and so on. With all the factors begin to accumulate, the student will start to feel overwhelmed and thus going for an easy way out which is to plagiarise. Even though it is an act of stealing, plagiarism however is not a crime per se plus that there is also no law or punishment tied to it, lead the student to think that it is okay to act on it. However in education, the student should know that this act can be considered as a serious moral offense and a breach of cyber ethics which might lead them to an expulsion.

Social Cognitive theory that has been proposed by Bandura derived from the notion that learner used the social influence in constructing the meaning and knowledge. This theory evaluates the relationship between the behavior, personal factor and the environmental factor. It also explains on how people acquire and maintain certain behavior. These three factors are constantly influence each other with environment provides the model for the behavior. Bandura (1989) states that "Learning from the effects of actions is a special case of observational learning. In learning by direct experience, people construct conceptions of behavior from observing the effects of their actions.” (Koch, n.d., p. 2) In other word, the effect of action from others does influence one's choice. That being said, students usually mirrored their action with their peer. If many of them condone to the act of plagiarism, they will also act on it since they assumed that it is accepted as a social norm since many of them plagiarize other work without getting any punishment. Furthermore this is also a plus for them since it give them an easy way out to complete their thesis or writing assignment without having to ponder or take their time in analyzing the content and reading articles, books or journal. With no enforcement regarding to that matter as well as an easy access to the material, it is not wrong to say that, it might be difficult to curb or eliminate the act of plagiarism from our student.

The statement above can be proved from the research done by Tshepo Batane from University of Botswana which is "Turning to Turnitin to Fight Plagiarism among University Students". In this the researcher conduct the first test by screening the student assignment with the software Turitin without informing the student in order to gauge the level of plagiarism and it shows that the average level of plagiarism among the University of Botswanas' students is 20.5%. During the second test, the researcher told the student that their assignment are going to be screened for plagiarism, however there are only 4.3% decrease in the level of plagiarism among student. From this we can conclude that, even though there are some drop in the number of plagiarism, however it did prove the Social Cognitive Theory where the effect of one action do influence one choice. However, it also proves that, the use of the software itself is not enough to hold the student from plagiarizing. And I believe this is due to the fact that there is no certain punishment for that action. What's more, the student also admitted that the main reason that plagiarise is due to laziness and the temptation of having a complete assignment in no time with just a click away without having to face any huge implication upon them.

Since there is no law regarding to this matter, it is easy to say that this matter is quite hard to be solved. However, the researcher believed that in order to truly eradicate the problem, punishing the students is not the right moves. Instead of punishment, we should tackle student perception or view of learning itself. He believe that it is important for the student to learn on how to be self - efficacy. The researcher also mentioned that, the students who are plagiarised are those who did not have confidence in their own skills in doing their writing assignment. That being said, by instilling self- efficacy which is one of major element in Social Cognitive Theory in our student, we can help them to understand the important of learning and appreciating the work of others. This will not only help us to curb the issues of plagiarism but also shaping the student into lifelong learners in the future.
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Source for Article review :
Batane. T (2010), Turning to Turitin to Fight Plagiarism among University Students [pdf]. Retrieved from www.ifets.info/journals/13_2/1.pdf
Source for Web citation :
Koch. C, (n.d) Social Cognition and Social Learning Theories in Education and Technology. Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/a/boisestate.edu/edtechtheories/social-cognition-and-social-learning-theories-of-education-and-technology