You see, if you want to plagiarize, you need to plagiarize with style!

[Penguin]

What I don't get about the cheater's mentality: everytime they look at their degree they see a big FAKE sign across it, how can you be proud of something you didn't achieve by yourself?

While I believe that plagiatism has always existed (just look at the Roman Gods ), I think we have a special mentality among the younger generation. They think wikipedia is a reference for anything and that knowledge is only one click away. Information != knowledge, you gotta work for knowledge.

A professor from the uni I attend, told me that he finds wikipedia copy&paste in about 30% of the papers he gets. This is computer science studies, one should expect that people know to work scientifically and how good plagiatism software has become nowadays....

Another point which really interests me: how many actually let their work write by someone else? Hard to find any numbers here, but in the times of globalization, it became affordable for anyone in the West, not only for rich folks like it used to be. So I would bet that more people walk this path.

Originally Posted by Growler

It's just about criminal how much students get away with; it's even sadder when you think that, get away with it or not, these are the people who, upon graduating, will be eligible for the better, higher-paying jobs, just because they have that degree. *sigh*

Just look at the number of imbeciles in higher positions in any work environment, maybe we have a clue here...

Originally Posted by Growler

My aunt is a college nursing instructor for grad school students. She had one of her students submit a new paper for her class that - (you're gonna love this; your Frau will, too) - included a bibliography/reference list that already had comments and remarks from the instructor who'd graded that same paper for another student. The instructor? Yeah. My aunt.

good one!

Originally Posted by Schroeder

For those who missed it the (now former) German minister of defence had to step down and got his PhD removed because his thesis was plagiarized by about 25%.
I hope they get them all. They are giving all honest academics a bad name.

The latest numbers I read was that he copied 49%...

He didn't even have the guts to admit his mistakes. All he did was some lousy "mhh, yesm I had stress this time...you can't expect to be aware of any sentence of the work" excuse. And a big number of Germans still defend him!

[Schroeder]

Originally Posted by Penguin

And a big number of Germans still defend him!

Don't get me started on this one.

[Platapus]

What is actually funny is that about 200 years ago plagiarism was respected and expected in academia.

Contemporary readers slam Thomas Jefferson for his rampant plagiarism, and he did plagiarize a lot. But that's how scholarly work was done back then. Different culture