asked if the recent Supreme Court decision is a license for students to plagiarize? "
My answer is no. To say that it is a license to plagiarize is to read into the decision more than what it contains. It does not say that plagiarizing is ok, but it considers that "plagiarism presupposes intent, and a deliberate, conscious effort to steal another's work and pass it off as one's own". http://sc.judiciary.gov.ph/jurisprudence/2010/october2010/10-7-17-SC.htm To say that the decision is a license to plagiarize is to say that the SC allows people to murder each other because it acquitted a murderer. This is illogical. The Court said that "At its most basic, plagiarism means the theft of another person’s language, thoughts, or ideas. To plagiarize, as it is commonly understood according to Webster, is “to take (ideas, writings, etc.) from (another) and pass them off as one’s own.” The passing off of the work of another as one’s own is thus an indispensable element of plagiarism." In the case of Justice del Castillo, the question was whether he should be disciplined by the court for failing to cite the source of certain portion of his writings, as complained to by the losing lawyer, Atty. Roque. The SC investigated the complaint and came up with the resolution exonerating Justice del Castillo from the charge because it was shown that the author was given generic references in the footnotes, ... and the researcher demonstrated by Power Point presentation how the attribution of the lifted passages to the writings of Criddle-Descent and Ellis, found in the beginning drafts of her report to Justice Del Castillo, were unintentionally deleted. The issue of intent became material because of the punishment involved. There is no intent to pass off the words as his own, because he did make the general citation. "Justice Del Castillo did not pass off Tams’ work as his own. The Justice primarily attributed the ideas embodied in the passages to Bruno Simma, whom Tams himself credited for them. Still, Footnote 69 mentioned, apart from Simma, Tams’ article as another source of those ideas. The Court believes that whether or not the footnote is sufficiently detailed, so as to satisfy the footnoting standards of counsel for petitioners is not an ethical matter but one concerning clarity of writing." Are we to remove a sitting justice from the Court simply because of the mistake of a staff in attributing the source properly. The analogy I used was if a student submitted an original draft to me with the proper footnote, but in the final draft the footnote was deleted accidentally. In that case, the student may have failed to cite his source, but if he can show me the original draft then I will not fail him for that paper on the basis of plagiarism. One last point I have is that it is not fair to use the plagiarism standard for the workplace with that in the academe. The memo of Dr. Vergara of Ateneo is insufficient in that he did not specify the difference between work and study. http://www.ateneo.edu/index.php?p=120&type=2&sec=29&aid=9149 In the academe, the standard for intellectual honesty is very stringent because the life of the academe is the research output. In workplace, the output is the work, the result. Parenthetically, the author was not really complaining about the non citation per se, but that the conclusion of the Justice was not the same as that of his book. In a workplace, no one is claiming originality of their work. The issue should be put in that proper context. Also, the question of due process is important in the workplace. A man could lose his livelihood and his dignity just because of that. I also quote hereunder the words of Sen. Saguisag, as found in the column of Mr. Jarius Bondoc (http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=630884&publicationSubCategoryId=64)
"My favorite ex-senator, Rene Saguisag, reacts to last Monday’s piece on plagiarism bugging the Supreme Court and Justice Mariano del Castillo:
“There was no ruling by J. Mar, but that of the entire Court. No single Justice can issue a ruling. Only the SC can. So natulog sa pansitan lahat sa Vinuya months ago? Resign all? Hmmm. The law has to be administered, not with an ‘evil eye and an unequal hand.’ (Yick Wo v. Hopkins, whew.)
“Students cannot invoke the lapse of staff they do not and are not supposed to have. The educators overstate their case. Students are on their own, as individuals, no staff, no collegiality.
“Students’ brains should be sharpened, but we as educators are also supposed to nurture the hearts, and develop in students not only a sense of fairness but also of compassion.”
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