Intentional and Unintentional Plagiarism

Dr. Jamie McKenzie, editor of the online educational journal, claims that many students engaged in plagiarism truly do not understand that the exercise of cutting and pasting into a paper without attribution is morally wrong. “They [students] don’t think of it as cheating. They are simply collecting information and don’t understand the whole concept of intellectual property”. Many academic experts on plagiarism concur with this point of view. In other words, students who have acquired a certain view toward intellectual property (if they recognize the concept at all) with respect to music, movies, email, jokes, photos, and other web-related content assume that there’s nothing illegal or unethical about taking or copying material from the...