Sanjeev P Sahni
Remember the criticism received on the infamous speech given by Melania Trump in 2016 at the Republican National Convention who used exact wordings from the speech given by Michelle Obama. Many look for the material online to copy and pilfering of such act which is commonly termed as 'plagiarism'. Most of the time, students are not conscious that they are involved in such infringing activity of plagiarising mainly because they are not made aware about the importance of the Intellectual Property Law and the consequences of plagiarism in schools and universities. And they regard such act as innocuous or even trendy.
Recently, University Grants Commission (UGC) of India created a new policy for addressing plagiarism known as 'University Grants Commission (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018' providing stricter punishment for the students as well as their supervisors.
In this light it becomes imperative that awareness be created regarding the meaning of plagiarism at all levels, be it faculty, educational administrators and students. Although there are penalties laid down in the policies of school and university administration, most of them fail to acknowledge the role of the behavioural factors. In such cases, it becomes imperative for the education system to create awareness and to encourage individual creativity in submissions.
Some useful tools to help students avoid plagiarism in schools and colleges:
Schools and colleges, too, in fact, are taking measures to reduce the amount of plagiarised content by students. This is conducted through running workshops and programmes on 'Understanding Piracy and Plagiarism', 'Best Teaching Practices', 'Stress Management and Performance Enhancement'.
Universities and schools can install applications like CollPoll, smallseotools or quetext which will allow students and professors to check plagiarised content.
— The writer is Principal Director, JIBS
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