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?