<p>Well jude, aren't you special? Sadly, Cornell and your super-selective high school haven't taught you much about manners or modesty.</p>
<p>The ignore list enables you to add users whose messages you do not want to read on cc. It works - I just added someone to it - hides their messages. Click on my control panel (on the left of the blue bar at the top of the page) and it is near the bottom of the page that takes you to. Thanks originaloog - I did not know about this option.</p>
<p>A friend of mine is the general counsel of a large organization here, and also actively uses interns from law school. He tells me that the first week with an intern, he gives him/her garbage work to do - filing, opening mail, etc. He said if the intern gives even a hint of an arrogant "this is beneath me" attitude, the intern is let go. Even if they're from Cornell. Raw intelligence isn't everything.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Cornell and your super-selective high school haven't taught you much about manners or modesty.
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</p>
<p>No one ever said that they manners and modesty go had in had with and elite college admission. Folks you have just seen for your self that one can be book smart while at the same time be life stupid</p>
<p>Guess Jude's last post was deleted?</p>
<p>I don't doubt your academic qualifications, j-j-jude. My comments related solely to your willingness to justify plagiarism. Not acceptable no matter how smart you are, or how elite your school. Not acceptable even if you don't get caught.</p>
<p>hahaha j-j-jude is probably the coolest person I've seen on CC so far.</p>
<p>While I don't share the exact sentiments of JJ, I recognize that there is a large amount of regurgitation in high schools in regards to writing assignments (I do realize that the OP is speaking of college, but the replies discussed both college and high school).</p>
<p>I don't understand why some teachers are adament about forcing their students to write their own notes rather than use readily available information from other sources.</p>
<p>I do understand that plagiarism is unacceptable but I believe it proves that a person is lazy rather than unethical. I really doubt that most students care if the their teacher believes the writing is their own, they just want to be done with the assignment and get the grade. The truly unethical plagiarism is similar to the example previously given concerning an office worker stealing information from another and presenting it as her own.</p>
<p>The idea that plagiarism is wrong cannot be refuted, however you must take into account the reasons why students practice it. I don't think it will change any time soon, as education as a whole must undergo serious changes for most students (especially the ones who aren't gifted) to take an interest in it and actually desire to learn.</p>
<p>"Hey j-j-j-jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better" (1)</p>
<p>1 Hey Jude, John Lennon & Paul McCartney, 1968.</p>
<p>"Well don't you know that its a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder"</p>
<p>Ibid</p>
<p>Thanks all for your responses to my rant on plagiarism. </p>
<p>I know in a broad sense that it happens. I'm just always surprized when I meet it up close and personal.</p>
<p>I've been conciously careful to stress to my children that it is the learning process that is valuable. And that success is more than just a full resume and a high GPA. (Though those are great too.) My hope is they take the message to heart.</p>
<p>A number of years ago, a local school district had an elaborate interview procedure in which a group that included teachers and parents asked a standard set of questions, for which there were right answers, during interviews for new teachers. As a prospective teacher in that district, I was asked "what would you do if you discovered a student plagiarized in a paper or cheated on a test?"</p>
<p>I replied that I would give a grade of zero and report it to the administration. (I teach high school sciences and am certified in biology, chemistry, and physics.) I was not admitted to the applicant pool for that district, because the "right" answer (and still the official policy of the district, ten years later) is: "call the parents, recommend counseling, and allow the student to redo the paper or give a second version of the test." Note that this solution is administered regardless of the number of times a student has cheated or the grade level of the student; it applies equally to a first grader or a senior.</p>
<p>dmd, you probably wouldn't have enjoyed teaching in a district with that policy anyway. Ugh.</p>
<p>I noticed jjjude posted in the spring that he was going to Brown. Now he appears to be at Cornell. It also appears that he likes to create new screen names and argue for his case. (It's amazing what you can learn by reading a few posts...very entertaining!)</p>
<p>I sure do hope there is really a place in the country spelled "Stanfurd"...lol! (I know there isn't in New York City, which is supposedly where this boy (if he's even a boy) went to school.)</p>
<p>jj...ya gotta work a little harder on keeping your story together if you want to have any credibility... :)</p>
<p>Mathmom: actually, that district has over 25000 students, beautiful new schools, and some of the highest ranked high schools in the country. But, apparently, no integrity. Sad, isn't it?</p>
<p>It is sad. I'm happy to say that our Code of Conduct defines both plagiarism and cheating. First offense: a zero on the assignment, parents are notified and a conference held with them. Second offense: automatic grade of 55 for the quarter.</p>
<p>I'm hoping to revive this thread. I've been thinking about the problem and yesterday, serendipitously, heard another viewpoint. Music prof (for whom I was babysitting) returned exhausted and vowed he was never assigning term papers again. His students just cut & paste from Wikipedia anyway, so why was he wasting their (and his) time. Why Wiki? Well, it turns out, music journals are expensive -- online journals require subscriptions, and good info is hard to find. The Wikipedia entries are often copied verbatim from standard texts and subscriber journals, but often without proper citations. Many of these students work, at least part-time, and they're on tight budgets. If it's okay for an internationally recognized entity such as Wikipedia to "plagiarize" (this from the students and their prof, but I see it as possible copyright infringement, not plagiarism), they can't see why it's not okay for them.</p>
<p>I'm suggesting we need MUCH more discussion in high school and before high school about just what does constitute "cheating." It's all very well to fail kids for consciously stealing others' work and hiding the theft, but most plagiarism is nowhere near that black-and-white.</p>
<p>If a student buys an essay from a third-party source, and then passes that essay off as his/her own, that's cheating, right? And if a politician pays a speechwriter for a speech and then passes it off as his/her own, that's not cheating, right?</p>
<p>Do you remember when your third-grade teacher told you to write about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and fully expected you to find and copy the entry from the classroom Encyclopedia Britannica? When, and how, did you learn the difference between copying and paraphrasing?</p>
<p>Point being, before we slam the kids, let's look at what the establishment is teaching them.</p>
<p>Well, since you expanded the scope of this thread, I recently read about the controversy surrounding charges of plagiarism against author Ian McEwan; many of his fellow authors immediately jumped in to defend him. In searching for coverage of that story I went to google news, and was surpirsed to find additional plagiarism controversies involving Jimmy Carter, and even Lindsay Lohan!</p>
<p>"When, and how, did you learn the difference between copying and paraphrasing?"</p>
<p>EXACTLY. At my high school, we were all of a sudden hit one day with the idea that ANYTHING we say that isn't our own idea needs to be cited. No explanations or anything - we were just immediately expected to do it. I think there needs to be more learning about what is and what is not plagiarism.</p>
<p>We didn't have a lot of writing assignments in third grade. My class started getting them -- a lot -- in fifth grade, and we were explicitly told "no copying from the encyclopedia". There were only two -- World Book and Britannica -- and of course the teachers knew what was in them, so copying was a poor strategy. Reading them, of course, was fine.</p>
<p>Wikipedia: There is a difference between copyright violation and plagiarism (the latter will usually entail the former, but not vice versa). Wikipedia is entirely self-regulating, so if the author of an article that has been copied doesn't object, it's hard to see how it would get removed. In most cases, I suspect that it is the authors copying their material into Wikipedia, probably with a cite to their journal article. The journals themselves, which often-not-always hold the copyrights, are entitled to be peeved by this practice, but I wouldn't call it plagiarism.</p>
<p>JHS, I agree, and I'm not out to slam Wikipedia (I use it often, even edit articles sometimes), just to point out that defining plagiarism (or copyright infringement for that matter) was never easy and has gotten harder. Cutting & pasting from an Internet source for a research paper is a waste of everybody's time (thus the music prof's unwillingness to assign and grade the things), and maybe we should be using our time to teach Internet research skills instead. Maybe, at the intro level, the in-class essay needs more prominence, reserving complex research papers for serious students in close collaboration with their teachers. In other words, let's approach the problem proactively, not wait to see the kids fail and then tch tch.</p>
<p>I'm happy to hear your fifth-grade teacher was all over it. Do you attribute your future academic success to this worthy soul? (grin) Unfortunately, my own struggling eighth-grader's teacher suggested he go online, find an interesting science project, duplicate it, and turn it in as his own work. She was a new first-year teacher without a clue and eager to please her own supervisor with successful classroom projects. Sigh.</p>