Why is plagiarism dishonest?

Plagiarism is dishonest because someone is taking credit for someone else's work. Imagine how you'd feel if you wrote a brilliant book of poetry and before you could publish it, your college roommate turns in one of your poems with his/her name on it and gets an A+.

Then, they take YOU before the schoolboard before you publish the book and claim the poem is really theirs. You have no way to prove it's actually yours because you have no copyright for it yet.

As it turns out, they get to keep the credit for the poem and the grade and the poem never sees the light of day in the publishing world. It may seem like no big deal, but consider the person who's BEING PLAGIARIZED'S point of view.

Because people claim to have done something that they didn't really do. In colleges people are asked to do research work themselves, so if they just use another person's work and claim that they did it themselves, they are being dishonest. Many will get zero marks if they have plagiarised the work they hand in.