Plagiarism and the Web

Plagiarism is a tricky business. Devoss and Rosatti would suggest that it is fairly straightforward about how plagiarism occurs in the classroom, but I would say that they are somewhat misguided. There are several key factors that play into plagiarism and figuring out what constitutes plagiarism is a challenge for students and teachers as well.

In the work force, people often work on projects that require collaboration as well as existing material (Web material, research, work that has been done prior to the current project) without formally citing such sources. It is done all the time in the corporate world but is rarely accepted in academia. Discerning what is common knowledge from an original idea is hard enough, but to decide when credit should be given to a particular source in a particular situation is something that teachers and students have a hard time grappling with.

It is easy enough to understand that students who copy and paste papers that are clearly not their own constitutes plagiarism. But when does "crossing the line" become truly, "crossing the line?" Students can easily reword something that they have read on the Web to make it sound like an original piece. How this differs from scholars who write papers under the assumption that their readers have common knowledge about tenets that were established by other scholars but may not be widely known is hard to discern. Most scholars, of course, have a transparency in their writing that clearly delineates their ideas from others. Plagiarism is a hard subject to tackle and I think that Web learning exponentially increases the problem.