See, e.g.,

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/plagiarism-and-dead-sea-scrolls-did-nyu-department-chairman-pilfer-chicago-historian-s-work

(Department chair at NYU exposed as plagiarist in 1993 and was never even investigated.)

Of course, the assignment the student handed in was not research based, but a commentary on a film. Maybe students have gotten the idea that the only way they can write something for academic purposes is to look it up. It didn’t sound as if there was any need to use sources – students were supposed to relate a film to things they’d learned in class; but this student went to Wikipedia to get information about the film and was dinged (dramatically) for not citing it.

If the student read the Wikipedia article as a substitute for watching the film (the equivalent of reading Cliff’s Notes instead of Hamlet) that’s a kind of cheating. But turning it into plagiarism seems to me to rather miss the point.

Don’t librarians want to be thought of as good at critical thinking — nay verily, masters therein? This won’t help, it seems to me.

Maybe (at least one hopes that) her discourse was misquoted by _TWP_, or perhaps the comments were taken radically out of context.

If I remember the Canadian case correctly, the students had been told not to share the ANSWERS to the questions, and the invitation to the Facebook page included a request that students post answers if they had them. It’s the nuances that trip them — and us — up. When I work with our Writers Center student tutors, I begin with a question: why is plagiarism bad? It’s this context that is often lacking for them. I also ask them, would you like to drive over a bridge built by someone who plagiarized their way through engineering school? And wouldn’t you prefer to know the source of the information about weapons of mass destruction in [fill in your preferred country] before you decide whether or not invading them is a good idea? Understanding the context in this way is, to me, more important than knowing where MLA wants me to put the comma (which is what we mostly wind up dealing with), but we rarely get to talk about that.

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that colleges have fallen victim to the RIAA mentality, but I do think that they have become entranced on the technology, the same as the students.

Professors get neat and color coded originality reports that they often substitute for actual judgment about whether or not plagiarism took place.

The emphasis, it seems, is on eliminating copying, not on actually eliminating plagiarism. Furthermore, as you pointed out, the separation between “common knowledge” and research is a blurry one at best and leads to even more issues, especially when you research on the Web.

All in all, I think both students and professors need to learn that technology is just a tool and not a replacement for judgment or learning.