• Plagiarism has long been a problem at nearly every level of education, and technology such as the Internet has made the transgression easier to commit---but also easier to identify. Plagiarism has a price, though. Penalties for plagiarism in college, where developing a capacity for original thought and expression is considered of paramount importance, are steep, and ideally will make students realize the seriousness of the transgression.
  
  

Considerations

• Many colleges penalize students according to intention and gravity. A student commits plagiarism if he passes off ideas, part of his work or the whole of his work taken from another writer as his own. This can be either intentional, where the student deliberately stole from the other author, or unintentional, where the student simply forgot to acknowledge the source material or did not know how to do so correctly. Another factor to consider in penalizing offenders is the gravity or extent of plagiarism. Research manifests itself in a work through summary, paraphrase and direct quotation. All of them necessitate the citation of the source. The first two require the student's understanding of the source material and its articulation in his own words. Simply replacing the key words with synonyms or altering the original source's sentence construction are plagiarism. Only direct quotations allow the use of the source's text word for word, but the student has to remember to place quotation marks and to cite the source. Colleges will often impose lighter penalties on students who inadvertently plagiarized a sentence or two and heavier punishments on students who plagiarized several passages on purpose.
  
  

Range of Penalties

• Every college has its own set of rules, but the penalties range from a reprimand to the invalidation of a degree. If the teacher who spots the plagiarism considers it small and unintentional, he will often let the student off with a verbal warning. The teacher may also advise counseling. More serious is a written warning, which can turn into a formal report that will stay on a student's record and affect his dealings with teachers and prospective employers. In terms of the student's grades, he may get deductions or a zero for the assignment in question or, depending on the intention and gravity of his plagiarism, a failing grade for the entire course. Some colleges will take away the student's scholarship and even his privileges to use school facilities. Probation and suspension are also penalties. The heaviest punishment that colleges will mete out is expulsion, or, if the student has already graduated, voiding his degree.
  
  

Implications

• According to Scanlon and Neumann's study on Internet plagiarism, many students are unsure about what counts as plagiarism and what their colleges really have to say about it. It is only recently that colleges began to put up standard procedures for carrying out punishments. However, as Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today points out, the issue of penalizing plagiarists has brought to light the different purposes that teachers and students find in the academe: teachers are there to teach, students are there to survive (see Reference 1). Colleges should focus as much on information dissemination, because the purpose of higher education is not to scare students but to instill a love of learning and other intellectual pursuits.