Colleges have been writing honor codes for hundreds of years. Plagiarism stretches even further back. So it may have been simply a matter of time until the two forces collided in irony of the highest order, courtesy of The San Antonio Express-News:

It seemed like an honorable goal: Draft an honor code for University of Texas at San Antonio students to follow, exhorting them not to cheat or plagiarize. But when students threw a draft of the new honor code onto the Internet for feedback, some noticed a problem: Parts of the code appeared to have been lifted word for word from another school’s honor code, without attribution. Even the definition of plagiarism was, well, plagiarized.

The words were traced back to Brigham Young University, which wisely included a note in its honor code: “Some of the content and structure of this policy were adapted from the following sources.”

The U.T.S.A.’s version may have also included a citation page, a student in charge of the code said. “We are still looking for it,” Akshay Thusu said. But experts treated the explanation like the proverbial homework eaten by the dog. (or mascot).

For an expert quoted in The Express-News, which flagged a New York Times reporter’s plagiarism in 2003, it was emblematic of a wider pattern in recent years: Internet plagiarism. “That’s the consequence of the Internet and the availability of things,” Daniel Wueste of the Center for Academic Integrity said. “It doesn’t feel like what would be in a book. You Google it and here it comes.”

A conservative commentator disagreed, citing another problem. “The Internet is not the reason that plagiarism and cheating has become so woefully prevalent in our schools,” Warner Todd Huston wrote at NewsBusters. “For that we must look to society and the lack of attention of our educators.”