Intentional and Unintentional Plagiarism

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Intentional and Unintentional Plagiarism

There are many problems in the college scene these days but one of the most overlooked and difficult to detect is Plagiarism. To get an idea of what plagiarism is you first have to know the definition. Webster’s Dictionary says it’s “to steal and pass off (the words or ideas of another) as one’s own: use (another’s production) without crediting the source.”[1] Which basically means you give an exact quote of someone else’s without saying it was that other persons. A lot of people do it and don’t really know that has such harsh percussions, such as being kicked out of a course and in severe cases kicked out of school. Maybe if people where more educated about the subject it would happen less.

Personally I never heard a teacher talk about Plagiarism in school until I came to college, let alone be taught the proper way avoid it. How am I supposed to be expected to not plagiarize in a paper when I don’t even know what the heck it really is? Is being kicked out of school a proper punishment for someone who is completely blind of the fact that they are plagiarizing? Well, I don’t really know how a board can decipher between innocence and a liar, but maybe a class should be demanded of every college freshman, then innocence can be taken out of the equation.

Then there is grade school. Sherman Dorn, a teacher, has an article on the Internet called “Copying is necessary to survival in school”[2], and it talks about how students at a young age are taught that only the completely correct answer will work on a test, when the right answer is exactly what the teacher is telling them in class. Hmmm, is that an early start to plagiarism? Who’s to say they don’t go to college and wr...

... middle of paper ...

...here many interesting opinions as well as ludicrous ones that helped to educate me about the many sides of plagiarizing a paper. I now know that professors have a lot greater power to find you out than the common student knows, but for every educated professor there is an Internet junkie making a newer better site with false information and plagiarized documents for sale. I really think that a class should be offered about how to better prepare yourself to avoid plagiarism, because I would hate to see an honest person get kicked out of school for lack of knowledge.

[1] Webster’s New World Dictionary, 1999 Fourth Edition (1100)

[2] (http://www.coedu.usf.edu/~dorn/Tutorials/plagiarism/whocares11.htm)

[3] (http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/wts/plagiarism.html)

[4] Jamie McKenzie “From Now On” (http://fno.org)

[5] (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html)

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