Internet Blurs Plagiarism Lines

There has been recent media attention about students' ignorance of what constitutes plagiarism. An article featured in this week's Cap Times, a local newspaper, discusses a recent situation on the UW-Madison campus in which 42 students were accused of plagiarizing. This article comes on the heels of a New York Times report in August on the same topic. As new forms of technology make it easier and easier to access information, and for anyone to post information, it can sometimes be a struggle to know how to cite information properly. Learning how to credit a source appropriately can be tedious, but, as these articles illustrate, it is a skill that is worth learning. Read the Cap Times article by Todd Finkelmeyer below. 


When UW-Madison chemistry lecturer Jeanine Batterton accused 42 students last fall of plagiarism on a written lab assignment in Chem 104, she was floored by the range of “bizarre excuses” offered by the undergraduates.

Some contended that cutting and pasting information out of Wikipedia — the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia — was OK because no single author writes the entries.

Others argued that since the assignment was a group project, and since they didn’t write the part of the report in question, how could she punish them for any wrongdoing?

One student even told Batterton that when he was caught copying homework answers in another class, the professor let him re-do the assignment — so why couldn’t she do the same?

“I’m like, ‘um, because you just admitted you’ve cheated at least twice and you didn’t learn your lesson,’ ” says Batterton. “A lot of them would claim they didn’t know what plagiarism is and then argue, ‘So how can you hold me responsible?’ These are college students. It’s hard for me to tell if the students honestly believed that, or if they were just saying that because they hoped I’d believe it.”

Welcome to the sometimes confounding topic of plagiarism in the cut-and-paste Internet era. While most seem to agree with the notion that plagiarism — taking the work of others and presenting it as your own — is wrong, everyone from national experts to professors and students say the vast quantities of easily accessible online information coupled with fuzzy definitions of intellectual property and common knowledge make this matter thorny. Many campuses are grappling with it. Continue reading here...