In “A plagiarism Pentimento”, Rebecca Moore Howard, teacher at Colgate University explains how students are not plagiarizing but found to be patch writing. In 1986 Howard was teaching a general education class she asked her students to write a brief extract from R.L. Davison’s poems. After the students had completed the assignment Howard began to grade her student’s papers some of what the students had written was too close to the original text in Davidson’s book. Her students did not give Davidson credit for using part of his text therefor they had plagiarized and for doing so they all received an F. Howard couldn’t understand why first year college students would plagiarize so she did her own research to figure out why. She later found out
