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ABSTRACT
The incidence of plagiarism, intentional or unintentional, in the professional nursing arena has increased in recent years, as has the occurrence of plagiarism among nursing students. Strategies for cheating have become very sophisticated with the use of aids such as personal digital assistants, camera phones, and instant messaging. Cheating on written papers has also increased. The Internet provides students with ready-made research and academic papers, and access to Web sites on a plethora of topics. In this article, I describe my experience with plagiarism of ethics papers during students' final semester before graduation. How I discovered the plagiarized work and used the A-B-C-D-E ethical decision-making model in determining the student consequences for the event are presented.
According to Gordon "Mac" McKerral (2004), President of the Society of Professional Journalists:
Only the methods of stealing are new: plagiarism and fabricating isn't a new phenomenon, but technology makes them easy to commit - and to catch, (p. 4)
The incidence of plagiarism, intentional or unintentional, in the professional nursing arena has increased in recent years, as has the occurrence of plagiarism among nursing students (Cronin, 2003; Girard, 2004; Logue, 2004; Mason, 2002; Smith, 1999). Yet some authors believe that nurses are often plagiarizing without knowing it (Cronin, 2003; Girard, 2004; Mason, 2002). Nancy Girard (2004), Editor of the AORN Journal, stated that many authors believe that copying information from the Internet without referencing it is an allowable practice. Between 2001 and 2003, 10 manuscripts containing various forms of plagiarized material were submitted to Dimensions of Critical Care Nursing (Cronin, 2003). It has become a current practice in academia to teach nursing students the definition and consequences of plagiarism to avoid these pitfalls in writing.
Background
During the last semester of their senior year, three nursing students plagiarized the ethics paper required for their Role Transition course. All students had been verbally warned not to plagiarize by the teacher at the beginning of the course, and a written statement regarding academic dishonesty (Figure) was included in the course syllabus. Although it is true that plagiarism may be unintentional (Girard, 2004; Mason, 2002), this was not the case in these instances.
Two of the students copied and pasted many paragraphs of their papers from multiple Internet articles...