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SteveDallas · 02-26-2002, 11:04 AM

Well ummm let me see, what's the most tactful way to say this?

Who cares?

Now, please don't get me wrong, I don't want to minimize how aggravated I am by all this stuff. I've spent my entire adult life in academia and I don't regard plagiarism as a trivial matter.

But let's just realize that for 99% of the population who ever had to write an essay or a research paper, it was an exercise in putting out something that would not get them a bad grade. I dare say that if you look at even the subset of people who valued their college education, most of them did consider the writing of papers to be the crown of their intellectual achievement. So I suspect even the ones that didn't indulge in occasional plagiarism for their own work won't consider this a particularly heinous crime.

Call me cynical, but I expect this to be a tempest in a very small teapot.

02-26-2002, 11:04 AM	#2
SteveDallas Your Bartender Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Philly Burbs, PA Posts: 7,651	Well ummm let me see, what's the most tactful way to say this? Who cares? Now, please don't get me wrong, I don't want to minimize how aggravated I am by all this stuff. I've spent my entire adult life in academia and I don't regard plagiarism as a trivial matter. But let's just realize that for 99% of the population who ever had to write an essay or a research paper, it was an exercise in putting out something that would not get them a bad grade. I dare say that if you look at even the subset of people who valued their college education, most of them did consider the writing of papers to be the crown of their intellectual achievement. So I suspect even the ones that didn't indulge in occasional plagiarism for their own work won't consider this a particularly heinous crime. Call me cynical, but I expect this to be a tempest in a very small teapot.