Plagiarism

The regulation of the plagiarism in Sweden is very strict and ruthless. Every sentence that you want to reference, you need to both rephrase and cite where you got the information. Teachers check every sentence reference whether it is listed in the final reference list, and if any reference is missing, one need to do assignment all over again or accused to be copied.

For some of culture such as Sweden and US might say that it is obvious and nothing strange about it, but some other cultures are not used to this kind of system. For instance, when author used to write report in Korea, as long as the sentence is rephrased (do not copy and paste), it was not considered as plagiarism. Not only author but many of international friends especially from Asian country had little hard time to adjust to Swedish education system.

The process of penalty of plagiarism in Sweden happens as following;

(1) Student has to send one’s report both to teacher and place called ‘urkund’ where they check all the report.

(2) When the report is accused as plagiarism, person who is involved in the accused report is called by Disciplinary committee and given one more chance defend him/herself. During this period, teachers have no authority to involve in this process.

(3) After meeting with Disciplinary committee, they decide whether report is plagiarized or not.

(4) If it is plagiarized, involved person can not participate in any of school activity during the grounded period or worse get expelled from school.

Once, student get involve with Disciplinary, it affects student’s time, reputation of the student, emotions and other effort that had been made become bubbles. (Sometimes more than month project) Therefore student has to really careful on every single sentence to write and check several times whether there are any mistakes. For example, copying music note is not allowed, using illegally downloaded music in any types of school report, presentation is prohibited and have to make sure every thing is properly cited especially for group reports, where it becomes more complicated when it comes to plagiarism.

Hearing all these plagiarism issues from people, It give good impressed of Swedish education system. Although it was tough period for author and many other people to adjust to Swedish system but personally feel that this process gave me big lesson starting form giving real credit to people who really put effort on their work. Whenever any sentence I use now, I think about how long that person have spent his/her time to come up with the sentence.

I guess many of us learnt not to lie and steal in the young age from parents and teachers. Cleary plagiarism is cheating and stealing It definitely has to be treated seriously across to whole country.

Image source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/869106