Plagiarism free work?
This writing is not to support or disagree with the norms in Academic writing. Still, it’s my take on the pretext of the use and misuse of term “plagiarism” to harasses the students by some lazy professors, whose definition of student knowledge can be judged by software like Turnitin or any other.
Many times, my students complained to me, sufficiently annoyed, that their work is showing plagiarized even when they did the entire job on their own without referring any source form book or internet. Initially., I was like, “you must have copied it from somewhere, better change the wordings and sentence structure and submit your work.” Luckily, being an obedient student or rather a helpless student, he did that. To my surprise, there was still a significant amount of plagiarism in work, and any scold him of being such a lazy ass.
Sometimes later, I thought that he is a sincere student, and the chances of him telling a lie is something I am not convinced of. I pulled out his previous and the latest work, matched word by word. To my surprise, he wrote these two works entirely in different words stuffing and sentence structure. Then I re-examined the source of plagiarism suggested by Turnitin, and it took me to surprise, that the first writing was showing to be plagiarized from some “X” site, almost 70% and in the second piece of paper was, after the edition, this “X” is now down to 1%, and ten other sources of writing came up.
After this episode, what clicked my mind was that the questions asked by the professor were a general one, which will have the answers of not more than 1 or 2 paragraphs each. I ran my imagination that how many students have answered these questions and in how many different way to avoid plagiarism is difficult to imagine. How can someone write a different answer to the same problem and how many ways to prevent plagiarism.
Well, a short message to those professors, to get unplagiarized work, a student has to re-edit his answer ten times to write in such a way that nobody else has written, so you should also concentrate on giving non-plagiarised question to get a non-plagiarised answer.
For research work, looking for plagiarism free work is evident as the research is trying to generate some new piece of knowledge that will add to the existing knowledge, but how can a student who is answering a question can give non plagiarised work for the problems that are solved by every student in every college and during every year. So, it will be good if professor develop some good yardstick to judge the knowledge of student rather than leaving that part of work too on some software.