This past Thursday my Art History professor decided to give a different kind of lecture...
About a week ago my class had to turn in a short research paper regarding any historical work of art that we were interested in expanding on for a larger paper later on. The word minimum was approximately between 500-800 words -- not asking much. However, the previous weekend was homecoming, which is quite a big deal in the college town that I live in. Needless to say, many of my classmates were probably not pensively sitting at a computer diligently typing up an essay on the Venus de Milo. When my art history professor finished grading all the essays this week, she came into the classroom this past Thursday with a murderous look on her face. It turned out that several people had plagiarized their essay from some other online source. A few students even used the same sources, thus producing similar essays.
I'm happy to say that I wasn't one of those students. Although I'm part of the freshman majority in that class, I've taken enough AP classes in high school where teachers wouldn't be afraid of failing a student because of plagiarism; so I knew right away that committing this type of act in college would result in even harsher consequences. The students that plagiarized in my art history class will have a certain code stamped onto their profiles signifying "Academic Dishonesty," and depending on how severe the matter was with each of those individual students, some may have to withdraw from the course, or be asked to leave the college. What shocked me the most was when my professor told the class what online source many of the "plagiarizers" used. Even if it was a last minute ordeal, there's just no excuse for taking information from a highly uncredited source, Wikipedia, for a formal research paper.
I'd like to end this post with a proper definition of plagiarism (for those that aren't quite sure what it is, or just need to be reminded): The attempt to represent the work of another as the product of one's own thought, whether the work is published or unpublished. "Plagiarism" includes, but is not limited to, the use, by paraphrase or direct quotation, of the published or unpublished work of another person without full and clear acknowledgement. This applies to speech and electronic media as well. It also includes the unacknowledged use of materials prepared by another person or agency engaged in the selling or distributing of term papers or other academic materials.
Students who have made the decision to go to college and advance their knowledge to compete in the global economy for respectable careers should never consider plagiarizing their work just to get finished with an assignment. It is one of the most serious offenses a scholar can make, and with good reason. The whole idea of higher learning is to meet the challenges given by the instructors in an effective and efficient manner. When students plagiarize, they basically make the statement that they either cannot do the work or they do not want to do the work. Either situation is completely unacceptable
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I agree. Most of the students in my class are freshmen (myself included), so those that plagiarized probably went overboard with the partying/drinking the previous homecoming weekend (which is another issue that needs to be addressed), but that shouldn't pose as an excuse for poor quality work. It's a shame.
That has always shown the bad lot in the class. Wikipedia didn't make it any better. A similar type of thing happened in my high school journalism class recently. The worst part was the fact that the article we were writing had to be made up. The plagarized for something that they were supposed to make up.
Tell me the world we live in isn't crazy. Come on. Tell me.
- UZ, The Master of Everything
I don't get why people even try that. Especially with the invention of turnitin.com
Maggie
Yeah, but I bet the majority of the people in that class probably don't even know what that is, being freshman and a bit clueless...