Interesting, but I really don't think it's a view shared by students accross the board. From my current experience in an Australian university, plagiarism is taken very seriously, you spend most of your first year learning how to reference properly, and keep refrehsing that knowledge all the way through. Sometimes a reference may be used rather loosely, but students certainly understand and "recognise the concepts of authorships/ownerships." And I would argue that they make the appropriate effort to avoid plagarism where possible, the stretching of rules comes after those efforts have been made.
Nowhere in that BBC article does it say what degrees the students are studying, what range of Univerities were studied, there is no mention of where or how Prof. Brown aquired her information she bases her conclusions on.
I would say this is a case of the bad minority making the good majority look bad. A poor generalisation which we happen to be taught to avoid by our Univerities.
I'm certainly much more worried about the affect of the "prestigious" Universities' grading systems that are manipulated to keep them looking good while they pump throught the graduates like a production line.

Shh... don't tell anyone, but I got my grad dip at a place of higher education by reproducing information found on the internet.

As they say, there's nothing new anymore (unless you are into quantum physics or the like).

Ah yes the old plagiarism story being recycled again.

I was talking about this with some academics just the other day and we largely agreed that the problem was less with local undergraduates, because so easily detected, but was becoming a worry with foreign non-English speaking postgrads.

There have always been undergrads who have copied from books and journals, long before the internet. They are usually lazy or not particularly bright. Thus even if the marker was not familiar with the particular material students had found the copied insertions tended to cry out loudly, because they were well written, or sophisticated, or bore little relevance to the other words around them. The arrival of google world makes locating and cutting and pasting easier, but it also makes it very easy to detect. Google a suspicious phrase and one is well on the way to unravelling the deception, more so as google books improves.

And the penalty should be high at any credible academy. When I'm marking plagiarism means failure. Moreover the essay is usually worth around 40-50% of the total mark so a zero in it effectively means failure for the course. That usually means $1,400 odd of HECS down the drain.

There is a species of student too lazy, or perhaps obtuse, though I think this is actually rarely the case at university, to read the guidelines about plagiarism that departments normally give out, often in course reading packs. These are the ones who just don't footnote or take notes properly. They don't always fail but tend to drift toward the 50-55% level. (hint, think three times before hiring someone whose average in Arts or Commerce was less than 60%, personal tragedies aside they are probably thick or spent years stoned)

Overall the optimum solution is an increase in exam load, which is also a lightening of the load on teachers.

RE Non native speakers the problem is a little more complex. They are often extremely bright and hard working but have real problems functioning at an academic level in English. They are paying big money (indeed profit on what they pay makes up around half the subsidy of the Australian students) and the temptation to cut and paste something they can read, but can't yet produce in English, is high. Students can of course also just pay someone else to write their stuff for them. Bluntly this is cheating, but on the other hand if they hire a good sub editor to fix the English this is acceptable. (After all tutors in private residential colleges have been re-writing the essays of wealthy country kids for decades) Again exams are the most effective cheap solution to all this.

As to the plagiarism besetting journalism, again an old story. But in the case of the commercial TV stations ripping off the ABC, surely they should either be made to pay a massive compensation or more simply just have their licence removed for failing to meet their public service requirements. Oops, I forgot, we live in Australia, land of the protected media mongul. They already benefit from large subsidies via protection of their oligopoly, why shouldn't they rip off taxpayers by stealing the news taxpayers paid to produce?

So, unless you are writing about something completely new (ie an opinion, something creative or a piece of research and development hitherto undiscovered), is it possible to not plagiarise?

For example, if I write a research paper that summarises other research (a not uncommon activity in education), am I plagiarising? Does it then become a question of referencing?

So are the students in question penalised for plagiarising or not referencing?

According to West's Encyclopaedia of American Law (sorry, that should be Encyclop[i]edia[/i]), plagiarism is the "act of appropriating the literary composition of another author, or excerpts, ideas, or passages therefrom, and passing the material off as one's own creation."
It further goes on to broadly define plagiarism as "theft of another person's writings or ideas".
It seems that plagiarsim is not a legal term in itself; rather, one may be appropriately accused of breaching copyright laws because they committed the act of plagiarism. Plagiarism is not always illegal; there are exceptions cited and legal precedents to that effect.
I believe that in Australia up to 10% of another's work may be used without breach of copyright laws. Perhaps someone could confirm this.

Do I need a bibliography for this comment?

A reference would be nice SM :)

thepdaguy:

The problem isn't one of referencing vs not. The idea is that if you are bringing your own thoughts/concepts/understandings in an examined setting, you are marked accordingly. If you bring in someone else's ideas and reference them, you get marked as showing an understanding of relevant background thoughts.

If you take someone else's ideas (or worse, their words) and don't reference, you implicitly say, "these ideas are mine".

Therefore, plagiarism (trying to pass someone else's work off as your own) is much like trying to copy someone else's homework/assignment/exam