haha... plagiarism

I started my reading for today's class with Gabriel's Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age and I was astonished at how many points he made throughout the article that sound exactly like what you might hear if you sat in on a research paper's grading process. I completely agree that many students simply just do not realize that their writing is not original and that plagiarism is a big deal. I give the digital age we live in credit for how easy it is to copy other people's thoughts. Copy and pasting on a computer is so common there is even keyboard shortcuts to do so. Many people probably rely so heavily on their research to write their paper. They think they'll just take a little from here and a little from there, change some words, and had a couple sentences of their own. One of the surveys in the article that stood out to me was a study conducted that showed about 40% of 14,000 undergraduate students admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments. Right away, this number represented the IUP campus and I realized just how common plagiarism is whether the writer meant to or not. Many students believe that their copying is not causing any harm. If you take a look around out digital age there are multiple examples of why students get the idea that they aren't doing anything wrong. A lot of downloaded music is illegal and they aren't being caught. A lot of the music being downloaded is already copied within itself with stolen beats and lyrics and even songs within songs such as mash ups. Underage drinking is at an abundance and continues even after some people are caught. It is even evident in the media as TV shows use contents from other TV shows such as South Park or the Scary Movie series mocking movies. What role model are students creating for themselves if they are in the wrong so many times throughout the week. Copying to, what they think, help them get a better grade seems like a small offense compared to other illegal activity. Gabriel suggests that plagiarism could be avoided if more time was spent in the grade level education and I agree because thinking back on my honors and AP English experiences in high school, I never knew how to use scholarly sources without using quotation marks throughout my entire paper.