Comments on: Plagiarists take warning!

By: Don’t cheat. Don’t even try it. | Cranach: The Blog of Veith

Don’t cheat. Don’t even try it. | Cranach: The Blog of Veith — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:37:21 +0000

[...] It is part of our job to take you down (think, selling crack on the steps of a police station, ok?) Historiann concurs. . . “In my experience, it never pays to give a plagiarist a break. Hang’em high, [...]

By: Pat Bowne

Pat Bowne — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:46:33 +0000

Every course in our department makes students sign an anti-plagiarism contract and submit all their work to turnitin. I now see a difference between our grads and students from other schools in my graduate course; even very strong grad students from other schools seem to start out with a weaker understanding of what plagiarism is and is not than our grads.

Some folks are obviously getting away with it at even higher levels – in our last search, a candidate sent us a plagiarized teaching philosophy!

By: If I Had College-Age Children, I Would Give Them This Advice for the Final Weeks of School - Tenured Radical - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:21:32 +0000

[...] two plagiarists every semester and she takes them down. It is part of our job to take them down. Historiann concurs. “Message to students,” she writes. “We care. Please don’t f^(k up. But know [...]

By: quixote

quixote — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:41:56 +0000

General intertubes plagiarism may seem like just silliness in the cesspool, but that’s where plenty of students learn their communication habits now. I’d say not plagiarizing is the exception, rather than the other way around.

Ancient netiquette was to always provide a link back to the original post. Now, it’s good if there’s a “hat tip” to the immediate source, and there’s no attempt at all to pin down the origin. That’s become the norm. How do we even start waking everyone up to the fact that information turns into mere rumors under those conditions? I’d guess this is why so few students even understand what plagiarism is, without extensive drilling.

What I find most sinister, though, is that the de facto monopoly search engine actually forces terrible citation habits. Providing a link to someone else ups their ranking in Google’s algorithm, and therefore necessarily depresses your own. Bona fide news sources with reputations to maintain get around this problem by citing their sources in plain text, without links. That means readers don’t bother checking original sources. Plain old bloggers don’t even bother with text cites, obviously. And the way the situation is structured, this is just going to get worse as more people realize that forgetting attribution is a Good Thing in Google.

Even if a mad, viral, Occupy Web Sites campaign could get us back to a culture of giving credit where it’s due, I don’t think any power on Earth could get Google to do anything unless it makes more money from advertising. So we’re doomed?

By: Feminist Avatar

Feminist Avatar — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:54:46 +0000

@Profsweddy, I guess the difficulty with that approach is when ‘additional reading’ forms part of the requirement for essays, as it does in many of the courses I teach. A requirement that is meant to teach them research skills, to familiarise them with research databases, and to reward ‘going above and beyond’ in their intellectual development.

By: ProfSweddy

ProfSweddy — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:47:04 +0000

In the last few years, I have had a few cut and paste jobs from the internet. When confronted, to a person, those who have done this have said, “Oh. I didn’t mean to hand in that. I just downloaded that for my own purposes.”

I haven’t yet crafted a good response to this. I generally stutter and stammer and then say something like, “I asked you to read and interpret these sources in relationship to the required reading. How would this Wiki article serve any purpose at all?”

I have started adding a statement to all my assignments that reads: This assignment is to be based on the required reading and in-class material for this course. Any use of outside sources, web-based or otherwise, will result in a failing grade.

This is in addition to the academic honesty policy on the syllabus that forbids plagiarism.

By: Bob

Bob — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:20:54 +0000

Oh I should mention that I had a mentor who once caught a student plagiarizing her, which must have been satisfying.

By: Bob

Bob — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:18:12 +0000

I teach freshman composition, where we are teaching them citation/attribution practices. You have to have a little leniency, otherwise it’s a class where you can’t make mistakes. But I drill it into them that if it happens a second time I will “Crucify them. Upside down. Underwater.” Upper level students have no excuses.

RJB

By: Feminist Avatar

Feminist Avatar — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:03:16 +0000

At a previous institution, I used to catch 2-3 plaigerists a term amongst the first years, and in a large proportion of cases, they involved students who had English as a second language. And while I still had to do them for plaigerism, it was often the case that they just didn’t have the language skills to write what they needed to (at least in the time frame required to hand in assessments). And, I still feel that was partly the university’s fault for not ensuring that their written English was strong enough before taking their money – in a context where we were under a lot of pressure to accept ‘foreign’ students as they paid higher fees.

By: truffula

truffula — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:34:42 +0000

I make a point of modeling exactly the behavior I expect on everything I hand out. It is not clear, however, that students look to my writing as a source of information beyond “what is the assignment and when is it due?”