Plagiarism is the taking of someone else’s work and claiming it as your own. This seems to be a major source of contention in schools, at all grade levels.
The consequences of plagiarizing a person’s work can be very harsh. It can include receiving a failing grade for the project and/or class to being expelled or suspended from your school. There are two types of plagiarism related consequences- academic and legal punishments. Academic punishments, which are school-related, consists of getting a zero on the paper in question; failing the course; or being expelled from school. Legal punishments, which are geared towards a work place environment, can consist of being fired from the job and/or being fined by the legal system (depending on the extent of the offense) anywhere from $1,000 up to $250,000; and possibly up to a year in jail (for example, a journalist for a newspaper) all for not giving proper acknowledgement to the person/s who originally wrote the piece.. In order to avoid these type of problems, in the classroom, the student needs to closely follow the teacher’s instructions on how they want to be informed on the citations that are being referenced in the student’s paper.
If anything is in doubt about what should be cited, it simply needs to be addressed as a citation.
Donna Stewart
Lib 1201
