Using an ethical decision-making model to determine consequences for student plagiarism

The incidence of plagiarism, intentional or unintentional, in the professional nursing arena has increased in recent years, as has the occurrence of plagiarism among nursing students. Strategies for cheating have become very sophisticated with the use of aids such as personal digital assistants, camera phones, and instant messaging. Cheating on written papers has also increased. The Internet provides students with ready-made research and academic papers, and access to Web sites on a plethora of topics. In this article, I describe my experience with plagiarism of ethics papers during students' final semester before graduation. How I discovered the plagiarized work and used the A-B-C-D-E ethical decision-making model in determining the student consequences for the event are presented.