I've got a pedagogical question to pose....

I'm in a quandary. Suppose a student turned in a paper and you discovered, rather easily it turns out, that the student copied maybe 32% of it verbatim from another source, basically lifting entire passages from someone else's published (!) work and incorporating it into his or her own work and claiming credit for having written it.

Now suppose you confronted that student and his reply was as follows:

"In my eagerness to compile a compendium of successful reform initiatives, plans and best practices, I didn't properly attribute educational sources."

In other words, I was trying so hard I didn't notice I was stealing other people's ideas wholesale and passing them off as my own.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that student passes the course.

Now, suppose that student wants to run your education system...