Robert rkscience100@yahoo.com

mentioned having seen his first example of plagiarism and says "Sadly, a huge amount of NYC inner-city high school student are literally writing at a fourth or fifth grade level, and show zero awareness of issues such as plagiarism and copyright infringement."

This isn't particularly new and is not limited to inner-city students. In the 1970s I knew someone who taught a junior high-school class in a middle-class neighborhood of a Wisconsin town of about 100,000. The story is long, but the punchline is: "Well, you shouldn't have copied his lab notes. But if you're going to copy something and you don't want to be caught, don't make a _carbon_ copy. But if you do make a carbon copy, at least be sure you erase the other student's name _completely_. And don't put it in my in-basket _directly underneath the original._"

When I was a teaching assistant in a lab course, I frequently received lab notes containing illustrations which students had copied or traced out of textbooks. I made a big point of saying "If you do copy something you _must_ say that it's a copy and you _must_ credit it." I showed them some examples in their textbook that said "after so-and-so" and "from so-and-so." Interestingly enough, from that point on they continued to copy illustrations but gave proper credit lines. (They didn't seem to regard illustrations in lab papers as part of the factual record, but as some kind of decoration or enhancement).

When I was in high school--and in the eyes of the locals, the only scope for debate was whether our town, or New Trier, or Newton, Massachusetts had the very best high school in the entire world--I was once was in a health class where we all had to write up papers about something. One fellow-student was very annoyed that he had received a C+, after he had gotten his father's secretary type it up, neatly, straight out of the _Scientific American._ (By the way, this was not an act of arrogance; this was a really nice guy who wasn't fantastically bright and completely sincere in his puzzlement over his grade).

-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/