Plagiarism

Nhân hôm trước có bác Ngoay Tai nhắc chuyện này, hôm nay em đọc trên tờ báo trường em thấy cũng có bài viết nên post lên đây để mọi người đọc cho vui, để xem dân Mẽo nó nghĩ sao về chuyện này.
VN mình thì chuyện này cứ gọi là thoải mái, thằng nào làm gì cũng chẳng có thằng nào làm gì lại. Ở Mẽo thì các trường đều có cái gọi là student conduct code để sinh viên biết được các mức phạt cho chuyện này.

Full text from www.kaimin.org Courtesy of Kaimin magazine, U of M.

What to do when even the pros are plagiarizing

You've thought about it. It's 3 a.m. and your five-pager is due in five hours. It really wouldn't be that hard. Your computer is running, your phone line is hooked up to the Internet. Three minutes tops. No one will know. How could your prof ever find that hidden piece from the University of Missouri on the Civil War?

Plagiarism. It's entered all of our minds at one point in our collegiate tenure and sure, we know what kind of trouble we could find ourselves in -- expulsion, failing classes, etc. But have you ever thought about what plagiarism could do to the very value of the degree for which you're working so hard?

Rick Beermen, dean of the college of arts and sciences at the University of Pennsylvania told the Bozeman Associated Press earlier this week that "violations of academic integrity have reached epidemic proportion."

And indeed, everywhere you look, someone is stealing someone else's words. Last week, the AP reported, the chairman of the classics department at New York State University resigned after charges emerged that he copied more than 50 pages of Latin translations from two other scholars.

Legendary historian Stephen Ambrose has recently been flagged with more plagiarism charges in his "The Wild Blue." Passages were virtually identical to Thomas Childers' work, the AP reported.

But here's a news flash: We're not hearing about plagiarism now because it's increasing. We're hearing about it because it's just now being publicized. You gotta know that Ambrose is not in uncharted territory here -- and neither is the kid in your sociology class with the perfectly footnoted mid-term paper. A survey done by the Psychological Record reported that 36 percent of undergraduates admit to plagiarizing written material.

But how do you point out the word-thieves? Does your professor have the time to search the Internet for six hours searching for each paper from her 300 students?

And just as news of these scandals begin piercing the reputation of the history profession, every time someone in your class gets caught with a $3.95 paper on Ghandi from www.realpapers.com, (which boasts more than 25,000 "example" papers on topics from oceanography to culinary science and free bibliographies with a purchase of $9.95 or more) your professor is going to question yours too.

What is your degree worth to you? If you cheat to get it, it's just a piece of paper. Sure, it may get you a job, but when your employer finds out you can't write your way out of a paper bag, you'll be in the trash with your crumpled degree -- plain and simple. If you're going to college for a degree, keep logging on to www.realpapers.com. If you're here to cultivate more than your download time, you better start thinking about the means instead of the ends.

Plagiarism seems minuscule really, but remember the little boy who cried wolf?

Well now it's the little college student who violated the student conduct code, only it's not just him that people won't believe. It's you too.

-- Courtney Lowery


...WISEST IS HE WHO KNOWS HE DOESN'T KNOW...