plagiarism in kansas

in order to find out my school's policy on plagiarism, i searched the online board policy. the word plagiarism was no where to be found, so this is the closest i could find.

"Dishonesty--Any act of lying, whether verbal or written, including forgery.

First Offense: Nullification of forged document. Principal/Student conference, detention, in-school suspension, or 1-10 days out-of-school suspension.

Subsequent Offense: Nullification of forged document. Detention, in-school suspension, 1-180 days out-of-school suspension, or expulsion." - copied from the board policy of belton school district number 124

my next comments are based on an article about a plagiarism case in piper, ks. click here if you are not familiar with the article. if i did it right, it will take you right to the article.

my response: if i had 28 students plagiarize, i would give them zeros, but i would be absolutely sure that plagiarism had taken place. i was shocked to see the school board in piper, ks, undermine the teacher because parents complained. her policy was in writing ahead of time and the students should have had to live with the consequences of their actions. i remember the first time i turned in a paper without a bibliography. i had put all of the items in quotes, but i just ran out of time to finish the paper and just printed and turned it in. that teacher gave me a "c" on the paper because i did use quotations, but warned that future papers with any omissions would be "torn up and thrown in the trash." i had not signed any policies regarding plagiarism, but it only took that one time for me to learn my lesson.

unfortunately, the lesson learned by the students in kansas was that anything is acceptable if your parents are willing to back you up. i applaud the teacher and others for having the guts to resign on principle.

to search or not to search

i have learned a lot recently about crawlers, human powered directories, spiders, and search engines in general. it is very interesting that search engines do not all index the same sites.  i guess i always thought they were searching the actual web, not an index of the web...very interesting.  i also did not know that they do not search libraries or article databases.  i guess that's why i have better luck doing research through the web and through the cass county library site.  the library site gives me more articles.  i really enjoy finding out how things work, so this was fun to check into. when i am trying to find important info, i will definitely be looking for a second opinion from now on.