Although most students realize that submitting someone else’s paper as your own is plagiarism (and a major academic violation), a joint study from Swarthmore College and University of Michigan indicates they may not realize that cut and paste plagiarism is also a violation.
In a recent study conducted by Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob, students are given an essay writing assignment, but split into two groups. One is assigned a plagiarism tutorial which also covers cut and paste plagiarism while the other is not. Dee and Jacob report that assigning the tutorial “substantially reduced the liklihood of plagiarism.”
Penn State has several plagiarism tutorials available including: