Austin has a report due at school tomorrow, but has not started working on it yet. Now he is worried about getting a bad grade.
So he searches the Internet for his topic and finds lots of information. He chooses a small, obscure site, copies text and images, and pastes them into his report. He's done before bedtime. But he receives an F on his report. 1. What could Sam have done differently on his report to avoid failing?
2. Is this incident an example of an unethical action or an illegal action?
He could have read other sites with other points of view and summarized that. Most importantly he could have used footnotes that gave credit to every idea that he used.
He could have put the material down and begin to write. The words would have come out in his awkward style. He would still need to footnote the ideas. That is most important.
Question Two
It is both. Plagiarism is a serious crime if it involves many people being affected by what he wrote.
But it is totally unethical at any level. Trying to pass off something that isn't yours is totally unethical. It should never be done. It shames the subject which is shown to be unimportant and it shames the instructor (he knew enough to catch the plagiarism), and it shames the person getting caught.
