This is a subject that has always baffled me as a college student. As undergraduates, we are sort of like lightning - we take the path of least resistance. Usually this comes in the form of referencing Google on whatever topic we have been assigned to research, and then spitting off exactly what we've learned in our own words, with a website address in the "references" section, hoping to God and crossing our fingers that our professors are too lazy to actually look up our references, which 99% of the time they are.

The dillema is this: how do we write a research paper without footnoting it after every sentence? I mean, none of us are doing any original research that involves interviews, government documents, or hard data. So essentially, every time we write a paper, it is basically whatever we have learned, put into our own words, with a quick references on the reference page at the end. Is that ethical? Is that plagiarism?

I remember I had this one class where we had a professor that was so adamant about us not plagiarizing that he had us put a footnote in parantheses after every sentence that we borrowed from an original author. This paper, which was supposed to be 10 pages maximum, ended up being somewhere in the ballpark of 25 pages, because there was not a single line that I wrote that was not taken from research. I couldn't even interject my own opinions out of fear of making the paper and extra ten pages.

So I guess that's the standard for not plagiarizing these days. We just have to put footnotes at the end of each page, or make a reference page with the basic information, and hope to God that no one cares that you completely ripped them off.