School's plagiarism code plagiarized

SAN ANTONIO, March 30 (UPI) -- Portions of a new cheating and plagiarism code at the University of Texas at San Antonio appear to have been plagiarized, alert Internet readers said.

The allegation arose after a draft of the university's new honor code appeared online and parts of the code were found to have matched another school's code word for word, the San Antonio (Texas) Express-News reported Sunday.

UTSA student Akshay Thusu, who worked on creating the honor code, said any plagiarism was simply an oversight.

"We believe there might be a citation page," he told the newspaper. "We are still looking for it."

Yet for some experts in the field of plagiarism and cheating, the oversight simply indicates a lack of understanding by today's youth.

"Young people today have a different understanding of what in the way of ideas and words is property that can be taken without authorization," Rutland Center for Ethics director Daniel Wueste said. "That's the consequence of the Internet and the availability of things. It doesn't feel like what would be in a book. You Google it and here it comes."