Written by TY
During my country’s late continuous civil wars, many educational institutions were shut down, and the ones still open weren’t taking their responsibilities seriously enough. A mixture of corruption and mere carelessness made education so neglected that you would be admired if you studied honestly from the heart. Plagiarism often had no serious repercussions, except that students don’t learn much.
I didn’t know much about it at first since I never cheated in college, even when I knew I would get a low grade if I didn’t cheat (which was miraculously avoided.) I always have the rule of “don’t put yourself in a situation where you allow others to harm you.” This includes cheating which allows others to humiliate you and cause harm.
When it comes to cheating which can be counted as a form of plagiarism, most of the teachers in my university tried hard to detect cheating, which would almost always cause them to fail the exam and pay a fee to retake it. Usually, teachers would be kind to cheating students when they catch red-handed because it’s traditional not to humiliate others publicly. However, in a classroom, such actions can’t be tolerated for no other reason than because teachers must be feared and always respected.
Regarding writing, things get more interesting because catching students red-handed is challenging. Looking through a dusty archive of older projects with no tools to detect plagiarism doesn’t sound like anyone would do. After all, not many students copy more senior projects; it’s not that common anyways after a couple of groups throughout the years were exposed and suffered severe consequences, including failing the whole semester and having to attend college an extra year. The most common is paying someone else to prepare the entire project and explain it to the group. In this case, professors cannot detect this academic dishonesty. Students would still get exposed when they get asked deep questions about the project that they don’t know the answers to.
I can’t imagine having to pay someone to do work for me or even copy someone’s work from the internet for a final project, rendering all the years spent studying useless to pass and get a certificate. I believe nothing teaches a student skills like working on a project and having it thoroughly observed and reviewed afterward.