When you research on the Internet, she says, "you're not walking into a library, you're not physically holding the article," so it's easier to forget that the ideas don't belong to you. But online, she says, "everything can belong to you really easily." 'No Such Thing As Originality'? The notion that it's OK to borrow from all this information to mash up a new creative work was tested earlier this year by Helene Hegemann. The German teenager's best-selling novel about Berlin club life turned out to include passages lifted from other authors. Instead of apologizing, Hegemann insisted, "There's no such thing as originality anyway." That theory doesn't wash with Sarah Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University, who took aim at Hegemann in a column in her student paper headlined "Generation Plagiarism." She says relaxing standards "does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness." Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office at the University of California, Davis, would agree. Of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to his office last year, most involved students who intentionally it was wrong. To address the problem, some colleges are requiring students to complete online tutorials about plagiarism, which at one school cut down plagiarism rates by two thirds. (Click for an online plagiarism tutorial.) And a majority of U.S. colleges now subscribe to anti-plagiarism services like Turnitin.com, which can instantly search a database of billions of online sources to ferret out plagiarism and cheating. Andrew Siewert, an English teacher at Chaminade College Preparatory School in St. Louis, Missouri, says the service is useful but won't solve the problem by itself. "I think the [real] answer is going to be continuous teaching," he says. "We just have to keep talking about plagiarism every year till students get it." (The New York Times Upfront, Vol. 143, October 25, 2010)
When you research on the Internet, she says, "you're not walking into a library, you're not physically holding the article," so it's easier to forget that the ideas don't belong to you. But online, she says, "everything can belong to you really easily." 'No Such Thing As Originality'? The notion that it's OK to borrow from all this information to mash up a new creative work was tested earlier this year by Helene Hegemann. The German teenager's best-selling novel about Berlin club life turned out to include passages lifted from other authors. Instead of apologizing, Hegemann insisted, "There's no such thing as originality anyway." That theory doesn't wash with Sarah Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University, who took aim at Hegemann in a column in her student paper headlined "Generation Plagiarism." She says relaxing standards "does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness." Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office at the University of California, Davis, would agree. Of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to his office last year, most involved students who intentionally it was wrong. To address the problem, some colleges are requiring students to complete online tutorials about plagiarism, which at one school cut down plagiarism rates by two thirds. (Click for an online plagiarism tutorial.) And a majority of U.S. colleges now subscribe to anti-plagiarism services like Turnitin.com, which can instantly search a database of billions of online sources to ferret out plagiarism and cheating. Andrew Siewert, an English teacher at Chaminade College Preparatory School in St. Louis, Missouri, says the service is useful but won't solve the problem by itself. "I think the [real] answer is going to be continuous teaching," he says. "We just have to keep talking about plagiarism every year till students get it." (The New York Times Upfront, Vol. 143, October 25, 2010)
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