Kids today with the hair and the endless excuses.

I came home Sunday after The Best/Worst Wedding Ever (more on that later) only to be met by my mother flailing this in my face. I already had a headache and it was only make exponentially worse by listening to the petulant whining of unrepentant cheaters.

The questions raised by this article should not be, "are the standards of one of Virginia's, and moreover the United States', most prestigious universities 'too harsh'?" It should be, "why do students continually think they can skirt rules and nothing will come of it?"

I went to a far less impressive Virginia university but the honor system there was no less clear. Citing improperly is tantamount to plagiarism because you are not adequately attributing the work of others and instead, passing it off as your own. The students in the article seem to have paraphrased parts of Wikipedia entries (I'll get to why that's an awful idea in a minute) and did not remember where their notes ended and the language used in the article began. There is an exceedingly simple solution to this: if the assignment calls for you to watch a movie and summarize it, you do exactly that. If you actually watch the movie (and perhaps take your own notes if necessary), you shouldn't need a wiki-summary. You can write your own in your own voice. Problem solved. Yes, the two summaries might say the same thing but with different words and syntax. You have a writing fingerprint and the people whose job it is to read your stuff will invariably notice when you stop writing like yourself.

If you absolutely must reference an article in your summary (a dead giveaway that you didn't actually watch the movie), cite. Not hard to do. If you take an idea and reword it, cite the idea. Every style guide I've ever used (MLA, APA, and Chicago) has a way for you to cite a paraphrase. Here's an example of how to do it in MLA:

Ahab’s insistence that he can develop a blueprint for the whale’s movement, coupled with his private sense of injustice, serves to create the egocentric Western binarisms that cannot penetrate the whale any better than Ishmael’s meandering definitions (MD, 178).

Would you look at that. I managed to get across the gist of a quote without actually quoting the passage, at the same time making it clear to my audience that I didn't make this shit up. And it only took me two seconds. Incidentally, that's from my senior thesis on Moby-Dick. For which I did not use Wikipedia.

The students also argue that research in the online age actually makes drawing the line between your own thoughts and the notes you take from others more difficult. The opposite is actually true. Unlike looking something up in a book, you don't have to hand-copy titles and site URLs. You can copy-paste everything into a word. doc and have all your notes in a convenient location. You can know what you borrowed and where you borrowed it from without so much as a hand cramp.

Admittedly, I did not know all of those going into college. But these students are not first-day freshmen. Plagiarism issues are made painfully clear to incoming students, both in the universally issued student handbook and in every freshmen composition and/or research class, required at pretty much every college. Ever.

No excuse for this. None. At. All. Damn, I have to get my doctorate and start teaching. Actually, I might start teaching with my masters just to put the kibosh on this everyone-gets-out-of-jail-free bullshit.

Now a word on Wikipedia...

While the open-source, peer-edited encyclopedia is immensely helpful when you want to, say, remind yourself who wrote Gravity's Rainbow. It is not a reliable research tool, though. Certainly not at the collegiate level. Far too many articles are not adequately researched or cited. Many are bias or one-sided. It has too many flaws not to be used with the utmost caution.

Ok, end of rant.