Hi everyone, After reading several articles on plagiarism, cheating, and copyright I have several thoughts... First of all I have 2 examples of times where I have witnessed copyright infringement. The first time I witnessed this was in my first year at college. I had a friend in one of my psychology classes who had downloaded her paper off the Internet for one of our assignments. At the time I was not aware that this could be done. As far as I know she did end up getting away with this. Another time I witnessed this was with one of my own students who literally copied an entire article from the Internet and handed it in as his research paper. I had a long talk with the class on plagiarism. We also discussed the consequences when doing such an act. These actions violated copyright restrictions because in both situations students were coping other peoples work and pretending as if it were theirs. They were stealing the passages from other authors as if they had come up with the original idea. Both assignments could have been done without violating the copyright restrictions. The two students could have used the ideas from the authors or quote the authors ideas and then reference them in the paper. This in turn would have been OK as long as you reference the material. As a teacher, I would definitely structure my assignments in order to avoid these types of situations. I require my students to hand in any outlines or rough draft that they worked on before doing the final copy. I also ask my students to hand in a bibliography just in case I have to go back to check a specific source if it seems a little fishy. I think it is essential to have a talk with your class about plagiarism as soon as you ask them to do any type of research assignment. By having this talk they are then at least aware of the consequences ahead a time. Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving!! Kelly Fede ------------------------------------------------------------ Class website: http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/taylor/suny/ ------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from this listserv, go to: //www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/list?list_id=edi581 If you have any problems, send an e-mail to: JerryTaylr@xxxxxxx ------------------------------------------------------------