Plagiarism Or Not?

Our class met with a case of so called plagiarism so I have decided to post a topic on plagiarism. Firstly, what does plagiarism really means and what does it means to you? I have checked it up on the dictionary and this is what it means,"the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work." To me, plagiarism means the exact copy or rephrasing of people thoughts and opinions about something. However, what I think about plagiarism may not be the same for what others think about plagiarism. And this is what happens to our class.

One of our teacher gave us an assignment to do, and alot of questions could not be found from the textbook so some of us went to search for it online and found the same set of questions with all the answers so they copied the answers from the website without checking whether the answers were right or wrong and sent it to the teacher. After that, everyone in our class received a message from the teacher about students copying answers word for word from the website,saying that it is plagiarism and hence decided to give us a test. However, some students do not feel that they have plagiarised anything as they felt that it was part of their research. I felt the same too as if we could not find the answers for our homework, we would try to find it on the internet. But I think that the pupils are in the wrong too as they copied everything without checking from other sources and some of the answers could be wrong. But the teacher meaning of plagiarism is that anything we copied from the website word for word is wrong. So this started the misunderstanding that we were plagiarisng from the website which is not really the case as everything on the website is all facts and not opinions of other people.

So what do you think plagiarism is?

A whole new year

One year had gone so fast, and now it is 2010. Second year in secondary school. New subjects, new topics, new teachers, and last but not least, new grading system! I hate the new grading system, but still hating it won't do any good to me, so at least the best for me is to get used to it. Two reasons for hating it: Firstly, there are now two new subjects, Oral Communication and Independent Studies. Oral Communication requires me to speak more and to take part in current affairs, if not the total score at the end of the year will be pulled down. For Independent Studies, I relied on Project Day's Competition to max my Science ACE, but now, ACE and Project Day's Competition are two different things, each is a part of the subject, so well you get what I mean and why I hate it. Secondly, ACE and OP would not be able to help to pull up the marks of each subject, so if I were to get B3 for Science, it would not jump to A1 as 10 ACE and OP can get help me to jump two grades.

However there are few good advantages to it. Now that ACE and OP would not affect the academic results, I would be able to see what I could achieved. And the current affairs prompt me to speak up more, which is something I hate though, caused I am really scared of saying something wrong, but luckily there is this critical thinking subject which would help me to think seriously so that I would not say the wrong thing. Hopefully.

So I think I would end my post here, wishing all a happy and enriching year ahead!