By: Edwin M. Grandeza, Teacher I
SDO Laguna, Liliw Sub Office
Liliw National High School
Digital academic tasks indulge students to cheating and plagiarism.
Information caters the mass, and most especially, the students. In the new mode of education, where face-to-face classes and online learning take place simultaneously, the access to internet is enables students to use informative resources that can be a strong reference, aid, or a solution to their academic tasks. As a result, most students fully rely on the information they get from internet and teachers frequently do not consider the authenticity of students’ answers.
The practices of such and the risks that this circumstance brings to the students should strongly be supervised and reprimanded for the essence of autonomy in works, originality, and honesty are not met which are a huge part of their moral development. Teachers, who are the ones that distribute academic tasks, play an indispensable role in assisting the students in navigating the proliferation of available information on the internet. Students should be taught about plagiarism and how reliance to this act affects their morality and productivity. What is also alarming in this situation is that students deliberately own the information which they, in fact, stole from a website that they believe the answer to their assignment. Consequently, they will share this information or website to their classmates as a way of helping them. For instance, an academic task that is supposed to be original such as essay writing, poem, or even reaction paper has countless forms or examples on the internet which the students can claim as theirs in just a second. The act of plagiarism and cheating which students are bound to practice relentlessly grow as they elevate in the academe. There are worst situations that students even copy someone else’s research paper.
Hence, teachers should properly design the academic tasks, especially writing tasks, to be creative and original by constructing unique and stimulating questions that elicit students’ genuine responses. Moreover, teachers should also scrutinize the authenticity of students’ work through a thorough reading and checking on some potential plagiarized information.
