Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a specific form of academic cheating, entailing passing off other people’s words or ideas as one’s own. We all like to believe that “cheating is cheating” – that is, some things don’t change! Nonetheless, copying-and-pasting, the physicals act at the centger of plagiarism, is also one of the first things we learn to do on a computer, and also (alas) one of the easiest.

Listen Up


• Here is an NPR report (9:13) drawn upon discussions with students and faculty at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland.


• Here is a longer piece from Soundprint (28:39)

Write Now

• ”Cheating” is always wrong, but “borrowing” is sometimes less black-and-white. How does labeling something change how we feel about it?
• ”Modeling” is an even more ambiguous term: Learning to do something well often entails copying certain aspects of a master. Do you have any experience with modeling?

Read On

• More from Wikipedia on plagiarism