In Amanda’s case, she was
accused of plagiarizing because of the report from Turnitin, a prevailing
software used for finding plagiarism. Everyone that included the professor,
Amanda and those outsiders did something wrong. First of all, although Turnitin
simplified the process of finding instances of Plagiarism, the professor who made
the decision that Amanda plagiarized others’ work should not simply trust the
report from software instead of spending time tracking back those resources of the
paper. As for Amanda, she really made her situation worse because of those aggressive
comments online. Besides, those spectators have not even read Amanda’s paper,
but they criticized Amanda for plagiarizing others’ work sightlessly.
Amanda’s tragedy revealed how
severe Plagiarism is in the academic field, in which everyone tries to protect
their ownership of ideas. The punishment for plagiarism does encourage some
scholars to generate new ideas because anyone who uses their idea is supposed
to honor the scholar in their paper. However, are those harsh punishments for
plagiarism really good for the academic development? People know nothing when
they are born, but they acquire knowledge from numerous resources and generate
new ideas eventually. Plagiarism is a burden because people cannot gather
information freely without considering where they got their resources from. In
other words, scholars who come up with new ideas can’t pay one hundred percent
of their attention on collaborating information and forming new ideas, but have
to constantly worry about what severe punishment they are going to receive if
they plagiarize accidentally. Therefore, punishments for plagiarism are too
strict because those punishments are not supposed to be “Death Sentences” but
guidelines for scholars who are longing for inspiration.
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