Student plagiarists: Do they think we are stupid?
... There are probably dozens of reasons why some students plagiarize. They're lazy. They're afraid. They perceive plagiarism to be standard practice at their college. They believe that any means to a good grade are legitimate.
What's most astounding, though -- and most insulting -- is that students plagiarize in ways that are so easy to catch. They cut and paste without thinking to cover their tracks. They copy from the most obvious sources possible. They find and replace words and then do not proofread to ensure clarity.
Do they think we're stupid? If they're going to plagiarize, why can't they at least do it in a way that acknowledges that their audience is intelligent? Don't they know what the big framed diplomas on our walls mean?
I think that student plagiarists are often poor plagiarists because they don't realize that it's even possible to be a savvy reader, that it's possible to read a text that has been cobbled together from multiple sources and determine where one source's contribution ends and another's begins. Those students don't pay attention to diction, syntax, or tone when they read, so they can't possibly imagine that someone else might.
If that is, in fact, what goes on (or, rather, doesn't go on) in our students' minds when they are copying material from the Internet, then we may have run into an example of a broad human tendency to take our individual selves as the standard by which we judge everyone else. ...
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