<p>From writing the "Ask the Dean" column for College Confidential, I've learned that students who get in trouble in college for plagiarism don't always know they've done it. For some, "plagiarism" means handing in a paper that someone else wrote or copying a large portion of a writing assignment directly from a book or other previously published source. Thus college students are often astounded to discover that using the ideas of others ... but put in their own words without clear attribution ... can get them in hot water for plagiarism as well. Many will recall the 6th grade social studies teacher who peered approvingly over their shoulders as they made only small alterations in encyclopedia text as they crafted a report on Greek mythology or Roman aqueducts. And they wonder why they've been nailed for doing essentially the same thing in college.</p>
<p>Current college students: Do you feel that your high school prepared you for writing plagiarism-free research papers? </p>
<p>Do you think that fellow students at your college are apt to plagiarize their work ... and, if so, is it knowingly?</p>
<p>My high school prepared me. I don’t know anything about my classmates’ papers.</p>
<p>My high school definitely prepared me well for college.</p>
<p>There are enough resources online, in books, journals, libraries, and usually drilled in by the college about plagiarism and correct citation technique that there’s no excuse for anyone to claim ignorance, even if they weren’t taught in high school.</p>
<p>Nope, the first time I had even heard of MLA of referencing was in my college english class.</p>
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<p>By whom in the college? I’ve had students insist that professors just assumed that their students had been taught this, but, in fact, it’s not always being taught in college classes. Perhaps colleges with mandatory freshman composition classes or other types of frosh seminars and similar transitional programs include this sort of information in the curriculum … but all colleges definitely do not, and high school preparation is certainly not consistent.</p>
<p>I agree that there is lots of information online (in fact, here’s a good site that includes links to even more [Plagiarism:</a> How to Avoid It](<a href=“Plagiarism: Ways to Detect and Avoid It - A Research Guide for Students”>http://www.aresearchguide.com/6plagiar.html) ) but sometimes students don’t go looking for this information because they think they’ve been properly taught. If they’ve learned in high school how to write footnotes, end notes, a bibliography, etc., they probably figure that they don’t need additional information. But they never did learn that the ideas of others must be attributed, even when not copied verbatim.</p>
<p>I took honors and AP. My sophomore year honors teacher was the HARDEST language arts teachers I have ever taken by far even compared to the college writing requirement courses! When you type up your paper you should write not looking at the paper itself but phrase it into your own words, so it would also get rid of the chance of copying sentence structure. I do not think there is such a thing as ignorance involving plagiarism unless you are mentally impaired, plus with software and sites like turnitin.com you can check to see if you plagiarized (I believe).</p>
<p>Most of my professors are required to include a policy on plagiarism and what actions they choose (should they decide to take lesser action than the university require) to take and what they consider plagiarism to be–included in the syllabi. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, just as with the law, pleading ignorance isn’t an excuse.</p>
<p>My high school did not prepare me well enough for research papers; in my AP English and history courses we focused exclusively on quickwrites (essays on the spot) as a preparation for the AP test essays. There’s not much chance of plagiarism when we wrote all of our papers in class.</p>
<p>yea my ap lit and english teachers did. but even if u aren’t taught it, i think a lot of it is common sense. some people think paraphrasing isn’t plagiarizing it is if you had to research a topic or didn’t know it yourself, you need to cite it.</p>
<p>yep, only that though, nothing about writting other types of papers though.</p>
<p>In every class I have taken so far at my university, all upper division social science classes, we have had a run through on how not to plagiarize complete with powerpoint and practice worksheet. I guess I wasn’t aware that there are people who really haven’t learned how to do that stuff yet. I always thought it was just ridiculously redundant.</p>
<p>I suppose there are some holes in that I only know how to do MLA with parenthetical notation (+bibliography, obviously) off the top of my head, and I’ve done APA, too. I’ve never been asked to do footnotes or endnotes or anything like that. So perhaps my training is lacking.</p>
<p>I remember that as far back as freshman year of HS I was being taught how to properly cite my sources when we had a research paper in World History.</p>
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<p>I odn’t plagarize and haven’t ever really considered it, but no, my high school did not prepare me for writing research papers. We rarely used MLA (maybe once per year), and never even considered APA, footnotes, or endnotes. We wrote papers longer than 3 pages (or 3 pages) maybe three times in four years (although I didn’t attend all four years) and the vast majority of our written work was personal response to a prompt or on a test; never a genuine research paper. So I’ve probably had to cite my sources 4-6 times in all of high school AND middle school (I remember doing it in my high school level middle school classes). We weren’t expected to do very much writing at all. We did have quickwrites in my AP classes, but no real papers (longer than 2 pages).</p>
<p>My high school didn’t really teach me how to write a paper without plagiarizing, but I had an idea of what plagiarism was and I intentionally avoided it. I wished that my high school teachers had spent a class period going over exactly what counts and does not count as plagiarism, because often I can’t decide whether a sentence I’m writing was plagiarism or not. To this day, when I come across a writer who expressed a thought perfectly, like “Kant read Hume and it changed his life,” I still don’t know whether I can write that sentence in an essay, since expressing that sentence in a different way would be unnecessarily wordy.</p>
<p>I took IB classes in high school and the English and history teachers really drilled us for citing references. My English teacher focused on MLA format and had us submit all papers to turnitin.com, and my history teacher taught us the Chicago format. So I feel fine in terms of “accidental” plagiarism. I’m especially happy I was taught to list sources in the bibliography/works cited page even if I didn’t use direct quotes from them.</p>
<p>Also, easybib and citationmachine became my best friends.</p>
<p>My HS english teachers taught us the very basics of MLA. Basically they just taught us how to do a bibliography (which was basically telling us to just enter the info into Easybib) and my senior year teacher went over citations very quickly. I know I’m going to have to study up on it before I start college.</p>
<p>we wrote bunches of papers in high school here where i currently go and they ALWAYS just tell us
DON’T PLAGIARIZE so i never do :)</p>
<p>My HS didn’t, in fact I went into college not even really knowing how to properly write a paper. I placed high for english and math (I’m great at tests), but purposely put myself in remedial english anyway because I knew that I’d never get through the regular class. Definitely was a good decision, because now I feel I can write an okay paper and not plagiarize.</p>