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November 27, 2006, 04:00 PM ET
A Second Chance for Plagiarists
Students who hand in papers with text copied from the Internet: Are they unethical sneaks, or just young people confused by the wide-open nature of the Web? Often they're the latter, some experts say.
Now Pima Community College is about to put that theory to the test. Instead of suspending or expelling students found guilty of plagiarism, the Arizona college will try to rehabilitate offenders by putting them through a five-step "traffic school," reports the Tucson Citizen. The program requires students to read articles about plagiarism, write a paper explaining what they did wrong, and meet with a writing tutor to learn about proper scholarly citations.
That may sound lax to some professors, but it makes a certain amount of sense: If the Internet has proved to be a haven for term-paper mills, it has also swelled the ranks of thoughtless plagiarists -- students who copy passages from Wikipedia without paying much heed to what they're doing. --Brock Read
Categories: Student-Life, Teaching
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