Adam M. Goldstein

I identify a particularly pernicious form of plagiarism: bullshit plagiarism. According to Frankfurt, any and all (constative) utterances made without regard to whether they are true or false is bullshit. The bullshit plagiarist, often assisted by the Internet, turns in work which is not only authored by someone else, but does not care in the least how good it is. To have a policy of doing so is to reject the aims of college teaching wholesale. In addition to preventing, detecting, and punishing plagiarism, college teachers should think about how to make bullshit plagiarism more difficult to commit—a task which requires that the teacher give the student some reason to care about whether his or her work is any good.

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