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Plagiarism And Academic Integrity : Plagiarism

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Plagiarism is a topic that is consistently brought up in many areas of education.1 In every syllabus presented to students, there is a section that refers to plagiarism and academic integrity. Plagiarism can be defined as “the act or instance of stealing or passing off ideas or words of another as one’s own.”2 Despite this being an important piece of information; students may overlook this material and still plagiarize. In a study from the University of Toronto, 90% of senior pharmacy students admitted to performing at least 1 form of academic dishonesty over the course of their program.3 Recent literature also states that plagiarism has begun to show up more frequently in academic institutions.2-6 This can be a result of increasing access to the internet, databases, and websites.4 In professional literature, plagiarism can still be found in medical publications.2 This is an issue because development of proper professional and ethical behaviors relies on honest academic integrity.3 The purpose of this paper is to examine the current research on the reasons for plagiarism, how plagiarism affects professionalism and proper ways to prevent this issue from happening for graduate students.
The major reason for why these academic dishonest acts can happen is related to students not understanding what is considered “cheating” or plagiarism.3,4 There are different levels of plagiarism which students perceive differently regarding the seriousness of the act.2 In a survey of

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