[WikiEN-l] Re: Plagiarism

[Daniel P.B.Smith]

> Robert <rkscience100 at 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 at 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
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