[Born Conservative]

I DO have a problem with plagiarism, but I have a bigger problem with students being required to submit their work to a potential Big Brother-type entity, to be saved for eternity on some unknown computer system.

What if the student writes an opinion in a paper, and later in life, when his opinions and views may have changed, this former opinion is held against him when he goes to apply for a job? Have your views and opinions changed since you were in high school? I know mine sure have. That comes with maturity as well as with experience.

One of the big problems with today's society is that we want everyone to be perfect and follow all of the rules, as well as to put systems into place to ensure that the rules are followed. While ideally we should all should strive to be model citizens, pragmatically it isn't going to happen, since we are humans. There will be a few that try to break the rules, but the majority that follow the rules shouldn't have to bear the burden for those that break them.

[Amelia]

What if the student writes an opinion in a paper, and later in life, when his opinions and views may have changed, this former opinion is held against him when he goes to apply for a job? Have your views and opinions changed since you were in high school? I know mine sure have. That comes with maturity as well as with experience.

For some reason, the first thing that popped into my mind was Hillary Rodham's paper from Wellesley that many people here thought ought to be made public.

[JLO]

"Have your views and opinions changed since you were in high school? I know mine sure have."
===
Just read your post Born Conservative, LOL, and wondering aloud, doesn't your FR name differ from what you just said?

Don't care to debate; just an observation. :-)

[rwfromkansas]

Student newspapers are not immune from comment of those outside the school.

As editor of my college paper, we have agreed to be published as a section of the local town paper instead of just being published by them. This increases our readership by a ton because we are actually part of the professional newspaper.

Quite frankly, I like this. It means we have to try harder to write stories of substance, not puff pieces on boring crap going on at school (I got a heck of a lashing though last year from one student for not covering homecoming king and queen at all...will have to cover that this year).

The point is, any legitimate journalist would love to have his work quoted elsewhere.

If some student reporter is upset about his work being on FR, he needs to grow a pair or quit writing. Obviously such a person does not have the heart of a true writer.