When UW-Madison chemistry lecturer Jeanine Batterton accused 42 students last fall of plagiarism on a written lab assignment in Chem 104, she was floored by the range of ?bizarre excuses? offered by the undergraduates.
Some contended that cutting and pasting information out of Wikipedia ? the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia ? was OK because no single author writes the entries.Others argued that since the assignment was a group project, and since they didn?t write the part of the report in question, how could she punish them for any wrongdoing?