Does Technology Make Plagiarism Obsolete?
Poet Audre Lorde said, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” Still, that doesn’t give anyone the right to steal words and ideas from someone else and present them as their own. But more and more students are doing just that, according to The New York Times. Professors and tutors are reporting that more students are copying and pasting text from the web and not attributing the text to its original source or author. What’s worse, many students know this is plagiarism but just don’t care. Only 29 percent of students surveyed see stealing from the web as “serious cheating.” Whether plagiarism isn’t being taught in high schools, or if this generation is used to stealing music, streaming cable television for free, or simply getting all of their “facts” from Wikipedia, there is a real disconnect for students who use words found on the web, rather than using their own. Luckily not all students think it’s okay to grab what you want from the web without giving cr
