Honesty is the best policy

I was flipping through Dad's students' assignments. Some of their works are good. As in really good. They were supposed to write a 15 pages essay on a quote of their choice, related to volunteerism. The medium of instruction is in Bahasa, but Dad encourages them to use English if they were to have any class presentation. So they were given the freedom to write the paper using the language they prefer, or feel more comfortable with.

Some papers were good. As in real good. And that surprised me. Not being sceptical or anything, but what's written in some of the essays were exceptionally flawless. I was like 'Dayumm! This student is really good'. But being a critical person (NOT), I noticed that (in this particular [unlucky] paper), the font colors in some paragraphs are not the same with the rest. Some parts are black (the automatic font color in MSWord) but some others are greyish black. Dan ada macam bintik2 (on the letters with the grey fonts) as compared to the black ones which are solid lah kan, without the tiny dots. Tak guna magnifying glass pun boleh nampak kot. -_-" So there you go. Apparently not everything in the paper is genuine.

Personally, it upsets me that uni students are very prone to 'copy and paste'. It's like they're taking the easy way to complete the assignments when other people are going through the hassle of doing it (honestly). I'd appreciate a genuine work,with acceptable grammatical errors rather than a 'flawless' paper (done with zero effort, of course!). If you don't feel comfortable writing in English you can resort to writing in Bahasa. And there's a writing technique called paraphrasing. Always, always paraphrase when you want to report someone else's works. And there's a proper way of citing or quoting information obtained from other people. And logically you need to have a page with the heading Reference at the end, right? Because in order to come up with a good piece of work, you'll have to do some readings. Unless if you're really smart to the extent that you can become a theorizer.

This is a serious problem I would say. And again, I'm upset. First is that they're not even doing it right. You want to cheat, please do it the right way. C'mon, takkan lah font color tak sama boleh tak perasan? Second, if they do not feel guilty about it, it'll create problem in the long run. Not being honest, get away with it and get good grades, and feeling good about it. Yes, that kind of problem. And what if they're the kind of person who hold on to the quote 'Buat jahat jangan sekali, buatlah berkali2'. Then what happens to keberkatan dalam menuntut ilmu? :( Kecewa.