How Dumb Do They Think We Are Summary

Response to “How Dumb Do They Think We Are?” by Jonathan Malesic In the course of learning, students transition from readers to writers. In most of the circumstances, academic essays require them to use other people’s ideas to develop theirs. However, the problem arises when the students can hardly present their original ideas without infringing the rights of other researchers. Although plagiarism is a crime punishable by law, it is common in most of the institutions despite their campaigns against it. In this article, Malesic evaluates why students plagiarize, despite knowing the consequences that accompany this practice. According to the author, narrow-mindedness and the perception of plagiarism as a typical practice in institutions account for its prevalence among students (Malesic 87). From observations, most of the students …show more content…
The author depicts unoriginality as an insult to his intellect as he can easily detect the plagiarized and non-plagiarized ideas. He should recognize that he is not the first assistant professor to encounter the incident and instead he should focus on addressing how the learners can deal with the problem. In some of the circumstances, the learners plagiarize unknowingly. With the widespread technology in the current times, students use some software to check their work. Sometimes, the software may generate positive results; thus failing to reflect the unoriginal ideas that a savvy researcher can identify manually. Besides, neither the technological nor the manual techniques guarantee an accurate detection of unoriginal ideas. Prior to the invention of the Internet, professors detected such shortcomings by reading the essays manually and comparing their content with the ideas of other researchers. As such it was possible not to detect unoriginality, especially when a student used materials that the professor had not