blog.7 issue

                 There are two main aspects to explain the reason why students get involved in plagiarism. Actually, plagiarism happens more often in recent years. In my opinion, plagiarism is not a simple question to think about; it must be considered in the exactly situation. First, from a subjective position, plagiarism is a bad behavior so that students get in trouble because of it. Students should take responsibilities for themselves, which means that they are cheating on purpose. For example, for the Harvard Cheating scandal in which 125 students cheated on a take home- exam, Susan Blum writes in her “11 Reaction” article that “Students everywhere are trained early on to attempt to ‘get something for nothing’.” In other words, every student could be willing to cheat. In that case, plagiarism is not related to other reasons such as educational backgrounds, because they know the consequences of cheating. The pressure of studying, being short of time or other excuses are not acceptable. In my view, it is not fair fundamentally because they want to get high grades by plagiarizing. These students must get their punishments. However, everything has two sides. From objective, different situations could lead students who are not willing to cheat to be involved in plagiarism. As it was mentioned by Stanley fish, “Plagiarism is not a big moral deal.” Plagiarism is just like a rule game. The definition of the rule to a game is similar to the definition of plagiarism to study. Once you change the rule, some behaviors could be defined as plagiarism even if they were not before. In that case, the reason of some international students’ plagiarism is excusable. Especially when an international student writes a paper for the first time, from my experience, it is reasonable to use other’s opinions in academic writings without quoting them. These students who are in that case do not want to cheat at all and the reason they got plagiarism is just because the change of the rules. So, we should comprehensively consider for each plagiarism cases. I think plagiarism cannot be generalized for one reason. The best way to consider it is from subjective to objective position. In short, plagiarism is complex.