From: rigelau@yahoo.com.au
Marco van de Voort wrote in
news:slrndqqc5f.1lio.marcov@snail.stack.nl:
> On 2005-12-24, Alan Brown wrote:
>>
>> Plagiarism is Theft!! It will get you into a lot of trouble in any
>> school.
>
> To my knowledge, plagiarism is not theft at all. E.g. something can be
> in the public domain, and you can still plagiate it.
>
> Please don't fall for the silly one liners of the Hollywood mob. If
> something has different definitions in law texts, it is for good
> reasons, and equating everything with either theft or (mass)murder is
> ridiculous.
Perhaps I wrongly contributed a terse "one-liner" to the conversation.
However, it should be obvious to most people that plagiarism. legal or
not, is not ethical and is certainly not acceptable behaviour in all
academic environments that I know of. At the University I worked for,
plagiarism would get the student dismissed instantly.
The other aspect of this discussion is that mere copying of answers to
assignments, irrespective of ethics amd morality, is surely a waste of
time. The student is asked to do assignments so that s/he learns the
subject and becomes proficient in it.
Most tertiary education environments try to get students to "learn how to
learn", to be creative, to undertake research and so on. To grab answers
from a newsgroup is not going to help.
Without the "hard graft" the student will end up incompetent and,
hopefully, unemployable.
I would NOT like to have brain surgery performed by someone who holds the
attitudes of the OP of this thread :D Or be nursed by his Girlfriend!!
As a matter of interest the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives -
Plagiary; literary theft (from the Latin plagiarius: kidnapper,
literary thief.
Alan
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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