Blog

Plagiarism
Plagiarism is when you claim that ideas from other sources are your own. Be very cautious as you write your paper not to commit an act of plagiarism. Whether it is intentional or not, the consequences will be severe. To be safe, cite sources even when you don’t directly quote from the source. If an idea is NOT your own, give credit where credit is due. Even if you use ONE SENTENCE that is not your own, it is still classified as plagiarism. Plagiarism will result in a ZERO for this entire assignment. I am interested in your own ideas, not the ideas of other people or ideas posted on websites.
Remember that your research is supporting material for your own ideas. Your research should not create your ideas for you. Complete the attached plagiarism workshop.
‘Generation Plagiarism’?
Copying and pasting from the Web is just like copying from a book. But too many students either don’t know that it’s cheating—or don’t care.
By Trip Gabriel
A freshman at Rhode Island College copied and pasted from a website about homelessness—and didn’t think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the site didn’t list an author.
At DePaul University in Chicago, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web: When confronted by a writing tutor, he was not defensive—he just wanted to know how to change the purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student said he thought Wikipedia’s entries on the Great Depression—unsigned and collectively written—did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as “common knowledge.”
The problem with those examples, and countless others at high schools and colleges across the country, is that using someone else’s words without attribution—even when it’s as easy as clicking “copy and paste”—is plagiarism. But many students, so used to the free flow of information online, simply don’t grasp that it’s a serious misdeed—one that can lead to suspension, expulsion, and a permanent blemish on their academic record.
“In a sense, they don’t see what the big deal is,” says Donald L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “The information is available,” he says, so their feeling is “why should I have to recreate it when I can just get it?”
In surveys conducted by McCabe that tracked thousands of college students, 40 percent admitted to plagiarizing a few sentences in written assignments, and 61 percent admitted to cheating on assignments and exams. In a separate survey, 47 percent of high school students admitted to copying and pasting from the Web, with nearly one third saying they didn’t consider it cheating.
Alarmed at the rise of digital cheating, many educators have responded by using sophisticated anti-plagiarism services that, for example, have students submit their work online to be checked against a database of millions of other term papers.
Free for the Taking?
Digital technology makes cheating easier—whether it’s texting exam answers to friends, sharing homework online, or downloading ready-made term papers from the Internet. But it may also be redefining how students, who are used to music file-sharing and Wikipedia, understand the concepts of authorship and plagiarism.
Bryson Cwick, an 18-year-old senior at Ripon High School in Ripon, California, says such confusion is common among his classmates. “I think they view the Internet almost like a second opinion” that doesn’t need to be attributed, he says.
Teresa Fishman, the director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University in South Carolina, has reached the same conclusion. “We have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” she says. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”
Sarah Brookover, a senior at Rutgers, has observed many of her classmates liberally copying and pasting without attribution. She works at the campus library and has pondered the differences between researching in the stacks versus online.
When you research on the Internet, she says, “you’re not walking into a library, you’re not physically holding the article,” so it’s easier to forget that the ideas don’t belong to you. But online, she says, “everything can belong to you really easily.”
‘No Such Thing As Originality’?
The notion that it’s OK to borrow from all this information to mash up a new creative work* was tested earlier this year by Helene Hegemann. The German teenager’s best-selling novel about Berlin club life turned out to include passages lifted from other authors.
Instead of apologizing, Hegemann insisted, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway.”
That theory doesn’t wash with Sarah Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University, who took aim at Hegemann in a column in her student paper headlined “Generation Plagiarism.” She says relaxing plagiarism standards “does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness.”
Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office at the University of California, Davis, would agree. Of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to his office last year, most involved students who intentionally copied—knowing it was wrong.
To address the problem, some colleges are requiring students to complete online tutorials about plagiarism, which at one school cut down plagiarism rates by two thirds. (Click here for an online plagiarism tutorial.) And a majority of U.S. colleges now subscribe to anti-plagiarism services like Turnitin.com, which can instantly search a database of billions of online sources to ferret out plagiarism and cheating.
Andrew Siewert, an English teacher at Chaminade College Preparatory School in St. Louis, Missouri, says the service is useful but won’t solve the problem by itself.
“I think the [real] answer is going to be continuous teaching,” he says. “We just have to keep talking about plagiarism every year till students get it.”
(The New York Times Upfront, Vol. 143, October 25, 2010)
A Look at Appropriation
I. Excerpts from “The Ecstasy of Influence: a plagiarism” By Jonathan Lethem
“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .—John Donne
“all mankind is of one volume” instead of “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.”
“Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time. When I was thirteen I purchased an anthology of Beat writing. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered one William S. Burroughs, author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance. Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing. Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the Forties and Fifties, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.”
“Visual, sound, and text collage — which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there) — became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrète, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first.”
In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show’s hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?
“As Jefferson wrote, “He who receives an idea

from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own — artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children’s classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual poaching. The value of a new toy lies not in its material qualities (not “having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle”), the Skin Horse explains, but rather in how the toy is used.”
“Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work.”
“Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction.”
From Kenneth Goldsmith’s, “It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing.’”
In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s idea, though it might be retooled as: “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”
It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours.
“It’s a great essay. Too bad he didn’t “write” it. The punchline? Nearly every word and idea was borrowed from somewhere else—either appropriated in its entirety or rewritten by Lethem. His essay is an example of “patchwriting,” a way of weaving together various shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole. It’s a trick that students use all the time, rephrasing, say, a Wikipedia entry into their own words. And if they’re caught, it’s trouble: In academia, patchwriting is considered an offense equal to that of plagiarism. If Lethem had submitted this as a senior thesis or dissertation chapter, he’d be shown the door. Yet few would argue that he didn’t construct a brilliant work of art—as well as writing a pointed essay—entirely in the words of others. It’s the way in which he conceptualized and executed his writing machine—surgically choosing what to borrow, arranging those words in a skillful way—that wins us over. Lethem’s piece is a self-reflexive, demonstrative work of unoriginal genius.”
Students Lie, Cheat, Steal, But Say They’re Good | By DAVID CRARY
Posted: 12/31/2008 5:12 am EST Updated: 05/25/2011 12:55 pm EDT
NEW YORK — In the past year, 30 percent of U.S. high school students have stolen from a store and 64 percent have cheated on a test, according to a new, large-scale survey suggesting that Americans are too apathetic about ethical standards.
Educators reacting to the findings questioned any suggestion that today’s young people are less honest than previous generations, but several agreed that intensified pressures are prompting many students to cut corners.
“The competition is greater, the pressures on kids have increased dramatically,” said Mel Riddle of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. “They have opportunities their predecessors didn’t have (to cheat). The temptation is greater.”
The Josephson Institute, a Los Angeles-based ethics institute, surveyed 29,760 students at 100 randomly selected high schools nationwide, both public and private. All students in the selected schools were given the survey in class; their anonymity was assured.
Michael Josephson, the institute’s founder and president, said he was most dismayed by the findings about theft. The survey found that 35 percent of boys and 26 percent of girls _ 30 percent overall _ acknowledged stealing from a store within the past year. One-fifth said they stole something from a friend; 23 percent said they stole something from a parent or other relative.
“What is the social cost of that _ not to mention the implication for the next generation of mortgage brokers?” Josephson remarked in an interview. “In a society drenched with cynicism, young people can look at it and say ‘Why shouldn’t we? Everyone else does it.’”
Other findings from the survey:
_Cheating in school is rampant and getting worse. Sixty-four percent of students cheated on a test in the past year and 38 percent did so two or more times, up from 60 percent and 35 percent in a 2006 survey.
_Thirty-six percent said they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment, up from 33 percent in 2004.
_Forty-two percent said they sometimes lie to save money _ 49 percent of the boys and 36 percent of the girls.
Despite such responses, 93 percent of the students said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character, and 77 percent affirmed that “when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.”
Nijmie Dzurinko, executive director of the Philadelphia Student Union, said the findings were not at all reflective of the inner-city students she works with as an advocate for better curriculum and school funding.
“A lot of people like to blame society’s problems on young people, without recognizing that young people aren’t making the decisions about what’s happening in society,” said Dzurinko, 32. “They’re very easy to scapegoat.”
Peter Anderson, principal of Andover High School in Andover, Mass., said he and his colleagues had detected very little cheating on tests or Internet-based plagiarism. He has, however, noticed an uptick in students sharing homework in unauthorized ways.
“This generation is leading incredibly busy lives _ involved in athletics, clubs, so many with part-time jobs, and _ for seniors _ an incredibly demanding and anxiety-producing college search,” he offered as an explanation.
Riddle, who for four decades was a high school teacher and principal in northern Virginia, agreed that more pressure could lead to more cheating, yet spoke in defense of today’s students.
“I would take these students over other generations,” he said. “I found them to be more responsive, more rewarding to work with, more appreciative of support that adults give them.
“We have to create situations where it’s easy for kids to do the right things,” he added. “We need to create classrooms where learning takes on more importance than having the right answer.”
On Long Island, an alliance of school superintendents and college presidents recently embarked on a campaign to draw attention to academic integrity problems and to crack down on plagiarism and cheating.
Roberta Gerold, superintendent of the Middle Country School District and a leader of the campaign, said parents and school officials need to be more diligent _ for example, emphasizing to students the distinctions between original and borrowed work.
“You can reinforce the character trait of integrity,” she said. “We overload kids these days, and they look for ways to survive. … It’s a flaw in our system that whatever we are doing as educators allows this to continue.”
Josephson contended that most Americans are too blase about ethical shortcomings among young people and in society at large.
“Adults are not taking this very seriously,” he said. “The schools are not doing even the most moderate thing. … They don’t want to know. There’s a pervasive apathy.”
Josephson also addressed the argument that today’s youth are no less honest than their predecessors.
“In the end, the question is not whether things are worse, but whether they are bad enough to mobilize concern and concerted action,” he said.
“What we need to learn from these survey results is that our moral infrastructure is unsound and in serious need of repair. This is not a time to lament and whine but to take thoughtful, positive actions.”