The Impact of Poor Time Management Skills on Academic Dishonesty

Poor time management is a common problem among most of the students. One of the negative impacts of poor time management skills is the late completion of assignments which results in academic dishonesty through plagiarism, self-plagiarism, patch writing, and collusion. Students with poor time management skills tend to complete the assignment at night before it is due where they end up copy-pasting other people’s work and ideas which is known as plagiarism. Plagiarism is prohibited in academic writing as it is a form of academic fraud considering that the student is supposed to read different academic materials, paraphrase, and use them to support his or her claims. A student who complete the assignments in the last minute when it is almost due is tempted to rush whereby he end up presenting other people’s ideas as theirs due to time limitation.

Poor time management skills lead to instances of cheating in completing the assignments through self-plagiarism, where student use their previous work in the new essay without indicating that it was previously used. The student is supposed to provide original work and cite in case the ideas or the work has been already used or is someone else idea. Patch-writing is as a result of completing assignments when almost due where the student has no adequate time to do the assignment thoroughly. In patch-writing, the student tends to rearrange phrases, and changing the tenses to avoid plagiarism an aspect known as careless paraphrasing. Patch-writing is considered as cheating in writing of academic work as it does not present the student thoughtful analysis and understanding of the concept. To some extent, students tend to collaborate with other people in doing the assignment that is supposed to be an individual effort leading to collusion. Collusion is an academic fraud as the student presents the work as wholly his own whereas in actual sense it was a combined effort with someone else.