Students Caught Cheating or Plagiarizing Should Be Dismissed From Essay - 7

Students Caught Cheating or Plagiarizing Should Be Dismissed From College - Essay Example The present research has identified that plagiarism is an academic offense, which occurs when students copy information from materials written by other people and fail to acknowledge by citing and referencing sources of the information. This may be for example lifting texts from the internet and handing it over for marking, or purchasing papers from writers, with the intent of earning higher marks or beating deadlines for handing in their assignments (Harris 2007). Lecturers, who do not take an effort to verify the integrity of the assignments, end up awarding the high marks and believing that their students are bright while in the real sense, the opposite is true. The real essence of writing exams is to establish the capacity of the students and to take stock of the progress made in the course of learning. As such, results based on plagiarized assignments can never offer the right quality of graduates and this may have a negative effect on the kind of workforce a country depends on economic growth. It is therefore imperative to punish students caught cheating or plagiarizing in order to deter others who may be tempted to do the same. Dismissing such students from college is a viable punishment, which should be adopted by all institutions. On the other hand, there are people who feel that dismissing students from college for cheating and plagiarism is an inhumane punishment, especially for first-time offenders. They argue that there are better ways of dealing with such cases, for example failing a student in the affected subject. It is important to understand that not all plagiarism cases are intentional. According to them, students may lack the skills to cite and reference borrowed ideas while conducting research and writing assignments. Such students should not be made to suffer the consequences but should instead be given another chance to do the papers again or revise the mistakes on the marked assignments for a limited number of times after which the decis ion to fail them is reached.