Plagiarism at the UoP

Recently in one of my classes, a student made the remark to another student that "it seems that you found and used the same source I used on my original answer [on the online forum discussion question]."

Now that's a strange thing to say. So I scrolled back through the thread, and, to my surprise, what did I find but a word for word reproduction of the other student's post. Suspicious, I copied the entire post and pasted it into Google.

Sure enough, the entire post the student had submitted as a discussion question answer was none other than a Wikipedia entry regarding the statement of cash flows. Both students had copied the entry, submitted it as their own work without quotes or citations to indicate otherwise, and then the one incriminated the pair by remarking on the similarity of their posts!

Obviously, no bad intent was here, just an abysmal ignorance about plagiarism. For fun, I showed the blatant plagiarism to my wife, and then ran another student post through Google, which came back once again, word for word, as the precise text from another website. Wow!

I don't expect to see a great deal of brilliant prose from anybody in the accounting field, but some originality would be nice. It is disappointing to see that the rampant plagiarism on the Internet has transferred itself to academia in such a commonplace fashion. My experience evidently isn't unique, reinforcing my belief that plagiarism has become more common rather than less so.

It appears that everybody, my dear and loyal reader(s), cannot be both original and brilliant. There simply aren't a lot of possibilities to remedy this problem. And that's okay.

Because I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with seeing myself cloned.