P-L-A-G-I-A-R-I-S-M

Plagiarism is the act of taking another person's writing, conversation, song, or even idea and passing it off as your own

THE PROBLEM AS NORMALLY CONCEIVED :

1. Academic institutions have the power to fail and even expel student plagiarizers, even if this power is seldom exercised (Mawdsley, 1986; Reams, 1987). But colleagues are a different matter. Plagiarism among practicing intellectuals is widely considered to be completely unacceptable, but doing something about it is another matter. As in the case of students, word-for-word plagiarism is easiest to prove, and it might be expected that most blatant plagiarizers would be weeded out through their student careers. There are some dramatic cases in which word-for-word plagiarizers have been exposed and penalized, but there plenty of contrary cases in which plagiarizers have fashioned successful careers (Broad and Wade, 1982; Mallon, 1989; Spender, 1989:140-194)