Plagiarism
Do people plagiarize? To me that's like asking if people lie. Of course they do. I know that student's plagiarize regularly for a variety of reasons. There are the "I just like to cheat" people, but more often, I think plagiarism is a symptom of a larger epidemic of not enough time and ignorance.
Weber State University is made of mostly students who have things going on outside of class and school. Most do not live on campus, hold down at least part-time jobs if not full-time jobs and many have either spouses or family. Sometimes, you get to the end of a semester, you have three papers due, you are working extra hours for holiday money and something’s got to give.
However, I have been in this situation and not cheated. I just did really badly on one of my papers. Dr. Elsley guilted me about it and the next paper I wrote for her was great. So there are consequences even if you do not cheat. I digress, again.
There is also the aspect of maintaining a GPA for a certain program. Sometimes when people are taking a lot of credit hours and have to maintain say a 3.4 or higher or be kicked out of their program, they will resort to plagiarism to keep up their GPA. It seems that the danger of being caught plagiarizing is less than the danger of getting a bad grade and being kicked out of the program. They seem to see the short term "easy" way out over the longer term of actually doing the work.
I also have seen people who have so little faith in their own ability to write that they would rather cheat than fail at something so relatively personal. I also think people have unreasonable assumptions about how much time writing actually takes.
Finally, a big reason I see is ignorance. People do not know how to cite, so they simply don't. Or they have never been taught that they need to give credit to sources. Or finally, if it is a primary text, they assume the professor has read it and thus knows what they are citing. All of these assumptions are false, but ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking the law.
If you couple all of this with a general disregard for intellectual property, people believe that it is okay to just take information without citation. If you don't have to pay for movies and for music, why should you give some dead dude credit for something they said like a million years ago? This leads to plagiarism.
I was lucky and I had the fear of God driven into me by an English teacher in my younger days. Plus, I realized that you can add a bunch to your own words as long as you give credit to someone. That seems totally easy and helps make my lone seven pages of text into fifteen. This is good. I never understood why someone would intentionally steal and pass it off as their own. I do, however, understand the ignorance issue. I also feel for the strapped for time issue. However, most professors would offer an extension. There is a general lack of knowledge of resources that contributes to this phenomenon as well. People might not know about the writing center and turn to copying out of desperation.
All in all, this is not going away. People lie, people cheat. If you watched last week's Community you know--people are evil.
Weber State University is made of mostly students who have things going on outside of class and school. Most do not live on campus, hold down at least part-time jobs if not full-time jobs and many have either spouses or family. Sometimes, you get to the end of a semester, you have three papers due, you are working extra hours for holiday money and something’s got to give.
However, I have been in this situation and not cheated. I just did really badly on one of my papers. Dr. Elsley guilted me about it and the next paper I wrote for her was great. So there are consequences even if you do not cheat. I digress, again.
There is also the aspect of maintaining a GPA for a certain program. Sometimes when people are taking a lot of credit hours and have to maintain say a 3.4 or higher or be kicked out of their program, they will resort to plagiarism to keep up their GPA. It seems that the danger of being caught plagiarizing is less than the danger of getting a bad grade and being kicked out of the program. They seem to see the short term "easy" way out over the longer term of actually doing the work.
I also have seen people who have so little faith in their own ability to write that they would rather cheat than fail at something so relatively personal. I also think people have unreasonable assumptions about how much time writing actually takes.
Finally, a big reason I see is ignorance. People do not know how to cite, so they simply don't. Or they have never been taught that they need to give credit to sources. Or finally, if it is a primary text, they assume the professor has read it and thus knows what they are citing. All of these assumptions are false, but ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking the law.
If you couple all of this with a general disregard for intellectual property, people believe that it is okay to just take information without citation. If you don't have to pay for movies and for music, why should you give some dead dude credit for something they said like a million years ago? This leads to plagiarism.
I was lucky and I had the fear of God driven into me by an English teacher in my younger days. Plus, I realized that you can add a bunch to your own words as long as you give credit to someone. That seems totally easy and helps make my lone seven pages of text into fifteen. This is good. I never understood why someone would intentionally steal and pass it off as their own. I do, however, understand the ignorance issue. I also feel for the strapped for time issue. However, most professors would offer an extension. There is a general lack of knowledge of resources that contributes to this phenomenon as well. People might not know about the writing center and turn to copying out of desperation.
All in all, this is not going away. People lie, people cheat. If you watched last week's Community you know--people are evil.
posted by Unknown at 12:47 PM
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