Ben Carson’s book is full of plagiarism and could be pulled from shelves

[HereSince1628]

10. I'm not really too terribly surprised by this

Over decades as a biology prof I dealt with many students, including pre-meds, who saw their undergraduate education as merely hoops to jump through. My expectation is he wasn't too different from many students who took a minimum of coursework in English, didn't take it too seriously, never embedded the meaning of plagiarism in his brain and avoided as much as possible courses involving writing term papers.

And he did his undergrad during the time before the availability of online plagiarism checkers. So, for the few papers he likely wrote in his undergrad education he probably didn't get caught very often. When he did, he chalked it up to not really being aware of the rules.