How not to cheat yourself in the MBA programme, the university and life

When I was working at the University of Manitoba, we used to get a number of papers where plagiarism or poor scholarship was a serious problem.  This was something that my department, which taught an introductory course to first year university students, was extremely active in combating.  One of the things I learned at that point was that plagiarism/poor scholarship most frequently happened when students had not learned good scholarly practices at the beginning of their academic career.  In other words, although they were responsible for cheating, we needed to become very proactive in showing how not to cheat.  In other words, online advice such as this:
http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/careers/ld/resources/study/avoiding-plagiarism
or this advice from the Indiana University in the US:
http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml
helps students to understand university policies with regard to academic dishonesty.

However, students need to learn to find resources that give them the best information on their subject.  For example, at the University of Leicester students can use the Digital Library here:
http://www2.le.ac.uk/library
Many students have the idea that an essay or an assignment is based solely on information gathered from publications or online resources.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Assignments rely mainly on the student's interpretation of a source or evidence that is found in these journals.  An instructor wants to see how a student critically interprets the source material they gather.  If a student gathers data from, for example, online sources on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, they have no way of knowing where the person who made this web page gathered their material.  In other words, this material could very well be plagiarized before the student has written a word of their essay.

In my opinion, students fail and plagiarize because they don't realize that their opinion is the most important component of their programme.  Their second problem is a failure to use the correct source materials and use them sparingly as evidence, not as the main body of the text.

KB