issue 1

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                Plagiarism is more prevalent in education, influenced by cultural difference and its ambiguous boundary. For example, Elizabeth Redden, in his article “cheating across cultures”, addresses the issue that 34 Duke university school students were found collaborating on a take-home test. Geenblatt, as cited by Redden, argues that one of the reasons of this problem is that Asian students cannot fit in the western styles of quoting and are regard plagiarism as normal, due to the cultural difference. For my own experience, our teachers have never told us the definition of plagiarism and how to avoid it. We can use others’ academic paper without quoting and download the music whatever we like. Nevertheless, these are illegal behaviors in USA, which is extremely different from Chinese situation. Another key point is the language barrier. Students and even honor code students maybe get pressure and lazy on doing homework. Consequently, they find people or some website to help them to write essay, as included by G. Thomas Courser and Dan Berrett in their articles “Dear plagiarist” and “An academic ghostwriter, the ‘shadow scholar’, comes clean”. Moreover, freshman have trouble to define the boundary of cheating, which can also result in plagiarism. Marita, mentioned by Mike Rose, in his article “Lives on the boundary”, was accused by copying others work, punished by teacher. She acknowledged some sources, not quoting all the sentences perfectly, but endeavoring to finish assignment well, which is unconscious plagiarism. Besides this issue, cartoonists are easier to make mistakes in plagiarism, since the symbols and pictures are common, which lead them to have unique ideas. All these phenomena result from the ignorance of importance of plagiarism. Patricia McGuire, in her article “the culture of deceit”, criticizes the problem of cheating spreading in society. She points out that many children are not regard plagiarism as a big deal and find excuses for their fault. Above all, we need to explore methods to avoid plagiarism to insure the quality of education.