Plagiarism is an action that taking words or ideas of another person and using them without

proper acknowledgement. Nowadays, students have access of internet to search some ideas from
another person. After having another person works, student possibly modify it and hand it in as
their own unaided work. The intent of student plagiarism is to gain some academic credit and
academic institutions should be concern about this matter since it appears to be on the increase.

Students wanted to gain academic qualifications through exam and coursework. In many
academic institutions, students must have their own, unaided work. Students who committed
plagiarism can be reducing the value of the qualifications awarded by the academic institutions.
The Franklyn-Stokes and Newstead studies in 1995, showed that over half of all students are
willing to confess to having plagiarized at some stage of their academic course. The cause of the
students doing plagiarism is mainly due to time pressure, or they didn’t believe that they could get
high marks as they wanted without aided work.

Internets are rich of information that students tempted to have a news update, social media,
fun content, and download a Web material. Usually, students often search a Web material to fulfill
the assignment. Some assignment can be obtain from internet and the students copying it blindly.
This kind of action called Web Plagiarism. Students assembling a submission by mixing extracts
taken from a number of different sites. Because of the easy access to vast amount of information
that can be copy, students can search the free pre-written essays using search engine to copy
another person’s work.

To prevent plagiarism happen, academic institution are struggling to update their policies
to be seen to be taking plagiarism seriously. There are two policies on plagiarism, there are reactive
policies and proactive policies. Reactive policies on plagiarism is that plagiarism is treated as a
serious academic offence when it is found. Proactive policies on plagiarism is that an effort from
academic institution to find and reduce plagiarism by technical and other means. In this era, many
of the academic institution still having the reactive policies because the academic institution still
don’t know to prove the students doing plagiarism or not.

Thus, the best possible solution would simply see the culture of plagiarism eliminated. Few
people can think this is possible to prevent or to cure the culture of plagiarism, even if a
combination of technical solutions carefully designed on specific test or assignment can reduce it.
Institution that do act proactively, can run from the risk of reducing their student numbers and
income in the short term. Hopefully, publicity of the value of their awards long-term should make
up for it.