Many students in the University of New England in New South Wales were found to have plagarised material on the internet. Among them, there were some who simply pasted work from the Internet. The plagiarism was discovered last November when an academic alerted the university after suspecting the work of a student. Most of them were believed to have come from Asian countries, but surprisingly, no Singaporeans were involved. Completion of the course usually guarantees a student permanent Austalian residency in addition to the degree. This could be the main motivation behind the eagerness to succeed. However, although I understand that success is important, I strongly believe that plagiarism is not the right way to achieve success. Firstly, plagiarism makes it unfair to those who had diligently and painstakingly brainstormed for ideas and completed the work by themselves. Furthermore, as plagiarism is the copying of ideas or work of other people, the students would have lost this opportunity to improve themselves, whether in terms of character, knowing themselves better, or knowledge, which is what I feel is the main purpose of school work. When the students plagiarize, they do not work their brains, thus do not benefit from the work.
Plagiarism would also encourage actions without integrity, and might cause the students to lose their sense of integrity. Plagiarism creates an environment of mistrust, where teachers are always suspicious of the integrity of the students, and students who do not trust each other.
I believe this incident has also showed us how successful the Singapore education system is. Many people coming from our neighbouring countries, like Malaysia and China, were found out to have plagarised, but no Singaporean was involved. I believe the success in the education system in Singapore is because of its emphasis on character development and its dedicated, professionally trained and constantly improving teachers.
We can see the emphasis of Singapore’s education system on character development as in primary schools, children are taught during curriculum time on how to be good citizens. Even in some secondary schools, activities are planned and curriculum time spent on helping students develop their character. Therefore, I believe these are very effective in instilling the right values into our young.
Singapore’s education system also educates our young on the consequences of plagiarism. Therefore, our young have grown up in an environment where they know that plagiarism is wrong. With the help of strict laws to act as deterrents, our young know that success cannot be obtained by underhand means, like plagiarism.
As Singapore has already succeeded in developing our country and our people well, I feel that we should go further to help our neighbouring countries, especially in teaching them about our education systems. Our help might be able to help them improve their education systems, so that many more people would benefit from these systems. Furthermore, this might help boost political ties and maintain the friendly relationship with our neighbouring countries.
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