On my honor as a, I pledge that I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this assignment.”

March 29^th,2013

Brenda Keith

 

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

By: Trip Gabriel

New York Times

August 1st, 2010

I. Many students do not understand that using information from the internet, without listing the source is plagiarism.

A. A Rhode Island College freshman cut & pasted information from the internet

regarding homelessness and did not give credit because no author was listed.

B. A student at DePaul University lifted several pages from the web without

giving credit.

3. A student at the University of Maryland did not give credit for information he

used from Wikipedia regarding the Great Depression because he felt the information was deemed as common knowledge.

II. Opinions from some educators regarding why students are less able to distinguish

what plagiarism is.

A. Writing tutors and officials at the three schools mentioned suggest that many

students do not understand that the use of someone else’s words is plagiarism.

2. It is felt that there is a disconnect with the concept of intellectual property,

copyright and originality and is being dismissed because of the growing use of information that is exchanged on the internet.

2. Recent surveys reflect that the number of students who believe that copying

from the web is the same as cheating is declining.

III. Individuality and originality are increasingly less important to the upcoming

generation.

Opinions from some educators regarding why students are less able to distinguish what Plagiarism is.

A. Sara Brookover, a senior at the Rutgers campus in Camden, New Jersey said

many of her classmates blithely cut and paste without attribution.

B. Susan D. Blum, a University of Notre Dame anthropologist, has researched

this phenomenon and contends “undergraduates are less interested in

cultivating a unique and authentic identity – as their 1960 counterparts were –

than in trying on many different personas, which the web enables with social

networking.”

C. Helene Hegeman, a German teenager, wrote a best-selling novel with included

passages lifted from others. She defended her actions saying “there’s no such

thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”

IV. Plagiarism – lack of understanding or lack of incentive

A. Sara Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University contends that “Plagiarism has

nothing to do with trendy academic theories. The main reason it occurs is

because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of

college writing.”

B. David J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office at the University Of

California, Davis, was referencing 196 episodes of plagiarism the year before,

when he said “many times it was students who intentionally copied – knowing

it was wrong – who were unwilling to engage the writing process.”

C. Another case that came through Mr. Dudley’s office had nothing to do with a

younger generation’s view of authorship. The father of a student accused of

plagiarism admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism.