Comments on: Why is plagiarism bad?

By: kgqbrt uxaelir

kgqbrt uxaelir — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 03:14:06 +0000

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By: Club Troppo » Missing Link

Club Troppo » Missing Link — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 02:41:31 +0000

[...] comes up with some surprisingly thought-provoking answers to his own Dorothy Dixer questions: why is plagiarism bad? and are we really short of discretionary time? Harry Clarke also muses about leisure and [...]

By: Ken Lovell

Ken Lovell — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 02:12:06 +0000

The student plagiarism issue is an instance of moral panic I think. While real, it’s over-stated and can be avoided easily by setting intelligent assessment tasks. I believe a lot of the problems that do arise come from students thinking they ARE expected to be ‘original’. Once they understand that scholarship consists of demonstrating engagement with the work of recognised authorities they tend to see why referencing is worthwhile.

Having said that, I suspect we only catch the less capable plagiarists and that some clever ones sail through undetected.

By: conrad

conrad — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 23:39:46 +0000

I think I’m one of the few people that doesn’t care too much about petty student plagiarism where I work (much to some of my colleagues dislike). Apart from reasons of laziness on my own part (filling in the 23 forms and sitting in the 6 committees you need to when a student gets caught), I think there a few things to consider

1) The Australian standard on unethical behavior is pretty low — AWB and so on are good examples — a majority of people evidentally couldn’t care less about unethical behavior. I don’t see why we should be enforcing elitist standards light years above the community ones.

2) More generally, often plagiarism occurs where one individual is stealing the unoriginal ideas of another. If the stolen ideas were not original to start with, then I’m not quite sure where the plagiarist stands or whether it is plagiarism at all. Should I worry about copies of copies?

By: whyisitso

whyisitso — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 09:55:04 +0000

In my view the student who plagiarises is simply cheating and deserves zero marks. He or she is dishonestly trying to defeat the assessment process. On the other hand an author’s main aim is to inform or entertain his readers and if this aim is enhanced by some use of others’ material I don’t really see that any harm is done. It’s quite different though in circumstances where the author either claims originality, or the circumstances of his work requires it.