The Atrium

Plagiarism.org has some scary statistics posted on their website.

According to the Center for Academic Integrity 80% of college students have admitted to cheating at least once. The Psychological Record found that 36% of undergrads admitted to plagiarizing written work. And Education Week published a report stating that 54% of students admitted to plagiarizing from the internet.

So, what is a new author to do when she is accused of plagiarizing several passages from two separate and well known teen novels? Kaavya Viswanathan, author of the new book "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life : A Novel" is under such scrutiny right now. She is accused of using slightly altered passages from Megan McCafferty's books "Sloppy firsts" and "Second helpings". Viswanathan has claimed that she read McCafferty's
books several times throughout high school and that she must have internalized these passages. She believed that the idea and words were her own and has been very apologetic stating how much she admired McCafferty.
Viswanathan is a Harvard student and was given a $500,000 advance for the book as well as a movie deal with Dreamworks. The author and her publisher, Little, Brown, have agreed to change the questionable passages
in the next printing. Other than that, no decisions have yet been made.

So what do you think?

Also checkout:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=512965
http://www.livepunjab.com/news/harvard_teenage_author_tenders_apology_for_piracy-22093.html
http://www.anorak.co.uk/news.cfm?id=169507