A lot of what she was saying seems to be very true. Society today is based a lot on fast paced answers and remarks. Everyone is looking for the easy was to solve problems and keep moving on to the next one. I know from my own experience that I try to find the easy way out and have piled myself down with activities. I'm not sure I agree with the idea that students plagiarize because they disregard the rules, rather that the rules sometimes don't make sense and it is sometimes easier to find a way to work around them. For me I try and follow the rules and cite everything but its different in each class. I think it would be easier if there was a way for every teacher or professor to have the same rules about it so that there is less confusion about what is and isn't acceptable.
When she started to talk about the famous writers and how their plagiarism is still being argued about I kept thinking to myself why did they do it in the first place? Did they admire the people they copied and just forgot to cite them? Or did they just want to make themselves look better? I think it is a little bit of both in some cases but no one will really ever know why someone plagiarizes even if they know its wrong. I try to cite all my sources when I write but sometimes when its two or three in the morning and i just had my fifth cup of coffee and am writing feverishly to finish a paper it makes sense that I missed something I needed to cite.
One thing I don't get is the part where she mentioned that when professors plagiarize, they usually don't get punished. That seems unfair to students who are trying to learn not to plagiarize and showing them that if you have the right connections you can get away with it. It just seems morally and ethically wrong to me. If professors want students to learn not to plagiarize it makes sense to not to it themselves right? And if some students get away with it because it wasn't too bad of an offense, won't they just continue to plagiarize?
I think her approach to the issue of plagiarism was really well done and she definately spent a lot of time researching. I liked that she looked into all the possibilities as to why people plagiarize and I feel like she really understands the pressure there is on students. The next reading should be interesting.
Yeah it is so unfair that students get the blame while profressors don't.. very hypocritical
ReplyDeleteWe talked about this a little in class, but I think that professors (and professionals) tend to plagiarize differently than students. A professor can't buy an article off the internet and publish it in an academic journal, for example, the way a student can buy an essay and turn it in to a class. But professors might take all the credit for a piece of research which was mostly done by their grad students (that at least used to be pretty common practice), and no one would really care because it was just part of college culture. On the other hand, if professors do falsify research or directly copy work done by their peers, the consequences can be very harsh -- they'll lose a lot of their authority and professional standing. That can be much worse than the consequences faced by students, which are often no consequences at all, or maybe the equivalent of a talking-to by their professor or a department head.
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