The problem with plagiarism

Let me start off by saying that I have never plagiarized anything. If you don't know that I am the type of person who would frown on any type of cheating, you don't know my very well. Point is, I am completely against cheating. First off, college isn't that hard, and if you're cheating it's because a) you're a dumbass or b) you're a dumbass. No sympathy there. If you don't have the balls to take a zero for fucking up an assignment, you need to go on a vision quest or something.

I will say, however (Cate should be proud of me for not starting this sentence with "however") ... anyway, I will say that the GW Code of Academic Integrity scares me. The professor of my summer class is a big-time anti-plagiarism guy. We talked a bit about it during class, but every time I get a professor like this, I am a bit befuddled by the whole anti-plagiarism push, especially when it comes to citing lecture. Our professor wants us to make sure we cite him when we use things we learned in class. The idea that I would have to cite things I learned in lecture is the crux of my point about plagiarism. I believe that this is absurd.

Everyone learns about the world through experience. No one emerges from the womb with a categorical knowledge of 5th centrury Hindu archetecture. You have to learn it from somewhere. So when my history professor is insisting that we quote things from lecture, I just don't understand it. Where did he learn about North Korea? I know for a fact that he went to Harvard, and last time I checked, they go to a lot of class up there and read their fair share of books. So why isn't he citing every little thing he has ever learned in his lectures? This quesiton I know the answer to... BECAUSE IT'S A PAIN IN THE ASS!!!

It's just as much of a pain for me when I have to cite retardedly simple things in my paper. My professor said at the beginning of the course that he expects most people to come into the course with very little knowledge about North Korea. For me, this is true, I knew virtually nothing about North Korea. Granted I know a lot about the Cold War element of it, but not much more. I don't want to say that all I ever knew about North Korea I learned from Team America, but aside from knowing that Kim Jong-il wears women's sunglasses and is insane, I don't know much.

Point is, in a class where you aren't expected to know anything, everything that ends up in your fucking paper is going to be gleaned from some other source. By the logic laid out by my professor and by GW, my entire paper should be composed of citations. This is ridiculous for the two above reasons. One, professors have to get their knowledge from somewhere, so as fellow scholars, why are they not bound by the same rules? Two, they expect us to cite the information we gain just by listening to them in class when they simultaneously carry the assumption that we don't know anything about the subject. Then, when you overuse citations, they yell at you for not being original enough.

I'm all for strict punishments for those who are too lazy to put any thought into their assignments and instead use someone else's words. As a student who puts in a lot of time to succeed, I would be pissed if any of my friends ever took a paper of mine (or anyone else's) and passed it in as their own. At the same time, however, all this academic integrity talk from GW and the professors inspires a completely unnecessary culture of academic fear. I suppose that my fears are unfounded, as I have never met anyone brought before the Academic Integrity committee, but every semester I let these professors scare me with their "cheating" talk. And every semester I think of how absurd it has gotten.