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The public school plagiarism Nazis are hard at work.

I guess that means you don't have a problem with students turning in work they've cut and pasted directly off the internet?

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.

I think it is a natural thing for students just learning how to use the internet to cut and paste. As they get more advanced, they can start learning how to put things into their own words. I have watched my son cut a picture of daisies and then take each flower and rearrange them in a window in a crystal vase. Would he have learned how to do this in Power Point if he could not copy that daisy? My son has been able to run circles around the best Power Point users since he was 14.

As for his ability to write a report without cutting and pasting the entire report, that has been replaced with footnoted quotes to support his thesis. This is something that has been done for ages and nobody has ever thrown the fear of lawsuit for something cited in a thesis.