WHY DO STUDENTS NEED TO CHECK PLAGIARISM IN THEIR THESIS?

Plagiarism in a thesis is bad news. So, how and why should students check it in their thesis?

On average, 80% of students cheat at least once in their academic writing. This fact tells us the importance of avoiding plagiarism and how vastly it can affect the student. Not only does it ruin their grades, but also their chances of advancing in their careers.

So, how and why should they check plagiarism in their thesis? What are the implications? And once a student finds plagiarism, what should they do? Let’s find out:

Defining Academic Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of copying or using someone else’s work without giving them credit. Giving credit to the original author is important because it may be illegal. Academic plagiarism is a severe offense and is considered highly unethical in the literary world. It can lead to:

• Expulsion from college or university.
• A failing grade for the assignment.
• And long-term career implications too.

The punishment can be so severe because it’s not just about stealing someone else’s work; it’s about taking credit for someone else’s ideas.  

Students often make mistakes when they are writing an essay or report, and they might accidentally copy a sentence or paragraph word-for-word from somewhere else without realizing it.

This is called ‘accidental plagiarism. However, accidental nature doesn’t make it any more acceptable than the intentional type. Therefore, avoiding plagiarism in thesis, dissertations, essays, or research papers is necessary.

How Plagiarism Affects Thesis And The Student

The necessity to avoid plagiarism in a thesis is very high because it can cause a lot of trouble for the writer/student. To help you understand, here are four ways plagiarism can affect the student and the thesis:

1. Impact of Plagiarism on The Purpose of a Thesis

The impact of plagiarism on a thesis paper can be severe. It requires us to understand the basic requirements of thesis writing. The keyword here is persuasion. In academic writing, the writer’s goal is to convince the reader of their perspective on an issue.

In this way, academic writers are similar to persuasive writers who make arguments for their points of view. However, there are some differences between persuasive and academic writing:

• Persuasive writing typically focuses on one specific point of view, while academic writing presents multiple perspectives on an issue and argues for one point of view.
• Persuasive writers often use emotional language, while academics tend to use more logical language.

Regardless of how cleverly you use the words or bend the argument in your favor, plagiarism will ruin it all. Not only will it cause the base of the thesis to fall apart, but it’ll also rid the writer of any sort of credibility too.

2. Plagiarism Causes Academic Penalties

the penalties for such an offense are as follows:

• The article will be annulled and might even cause expulsion in some cases.
• The writer may also be reported to higher authorities in a university/college for violating their policies on duplicate content.
• There may also be legal repercussions if the plagiarized content is copyrighted material.

Therefore, to avoid these problems and to ensure there are no penalties by the academy, you must avoid plagiarism.

3. Plagiarism Annuls Any Credibility

The credibility of a writer should be their number one priority. In order to stand out among other students and earn good grades, they must write an original thesis. However, even if the research is original, any sort of plagiarism can annul that credibility.

It’ll pain the student as someone who copies content or ideas from other authors. Therefore, even if the research and the ideas presented in a thesis are original, any percentage of plagiarism, intentional or otherwise, will ruin their credibility.

4. Plagiarism Ruins Your Grades

Besides ruining credibility, plagiarism will cause your grades to plummet. Since a thesis is essential for final grading in many academies, plagiarism of any sort will throw that thesis away. This will cause the grades to plummet significantly.

Therefore, to keep the grade integrity up, it’s imperative that a student finds and removes plagiarism from their thesis before submission.

How To Check Plagiarism In Thesis

Plagiarism is a tough topic to tackle. It can be hard to spot, and it’s not always obvious who the original author is. This section will go over some of the ways that you can avoid plagiarism in your writing. Therefore, we’ll explore some common ways to avoid plagiarizing.

However, first, it requires us to find and analyze the plagiarism in our content. So, this section will explore how to check for plagiarism in any Thesis. Here’s how:

1. Use a Dependable Plagiarism Checker

Nobody wants to find plagiarism the old way when you’d have to manually search sentences or paragraphs in Google. Or, you’d have to pay a hefty amount to buy software that scanned the content for plagiarism.

A plagiarism checker will help to scan your thesis, you can learn how much plagiarism there is in your academic writing. It wasn’t too long ago when tools like these were considered a pipe dream. Nowadays, they are free plagiarism checkers are available and offer to scan up to 1000-words a time.

2. Scan The Content, Analyze Percentage, Note Down the Source

The next step is to scan the content by using the plagiarism checker. Once you scan your content, here’s what you’ll see if it has plagiarism:

As you can see, this text is plagiarized, but what do the numbers in green mean?

1. One marks the content’s plagiarism percentage.
2. Two tells us where plagiarism is, which is all of this particular section.
3. Three are the links to the sources of this plagiarized text.

Therefore, analyze the percentage and note down these sources. Once you do, rewrite the text and cite them as your source to avoid plagiarism effectively.

Conclusion

That’s why students must check their thesis for plagiarism before submitting it. It can not only ensure the highest quality of content but also avoid the impact of plagiarized text on their grades and credibility.