plagiarism

[d-m-c at worldnet.att.net]

Oh jesuschristoncrutches Gregg, consider yourself blessed that your
students don't actually plagiarize from the damn book they've been assigned
to read.  Heck, they'd even plagiarize my handouts.   Made me thoroughly
disgusted, since it happened quite regularly.  These were students who were
very privileged (private school/elite public schools) and ostensibly
smart--Colgate University.  They were given warnings, a handout on what
plagiarism is, and they still did it.  As they generally told me, they did
it because they could get away with it.  They hear that profs don't
actually read their papers.  Well, I'm not surprised about this.  I
reviewed a grad student paper for a lousy in house grad student journal
once.  It was awful:  the author spelled consensus six different ways, had
the numbers on unemployment over the past 50 yrs all wrong, incomplete
sentences.  It was clearly a seminar paper that must have passed through
the hands of some prof at some point, but apparently s/he never bothered to
point out these mistakes.  Something wrong with that picture.  Well, he'll
go on to be some policy wonk in Washington, so whatevA.