"If you steal from one author, it is plagiarism; if you steal from many, it is research," said Wilson Mizner. First of all, plagiarism is defined as "using other people's words or ideas without clearly acknowledging the source of the information." Plagiarism can take many forms like, copying an entire source and presenting it as your own, copying sections from a source without proper acknowledgement, paraphrasing material from a source without proper acknowledgement, presenting another person's work with or without the creator's knowledge, and buying an essay from another student or from an online site. Plagiarism is a temptation that everyone faces with at least once in his or her life. We are all taught in school that it is bad, and that we could get into very big trouble if we do it. Plagiarism has been around probably even longer than the Internet has. It is easier to find out if someone stole something from the Internet rather than having to look through books, scanning for the sentence, quote or anything else you think might be plagiarized. It happens more often among students who are trying to type up a research paper, when they don't really understand the whole concept of the assignment or when they know they don't have the sufficient time to turn in the assignment. Plagiarizing is not a good habit to possess. Not all copying is bad though. It is only plagiarism if you are trying to say someone else's words or work are your own. Quoting certain quotes from famous people is fine, but you have to always acknowledge who wrote it. .
I prepared a survey with a couple of questions about plagiarism and why students choose to do it. One of the reasons these students commit plagiarism is because of their ignorance about what plagiarism is. Sometimes students do not even notice that they plagiarized in the first place, or what they had done was bad. The reason to this, is that many students were not taught about plagiarism properly.
