Comments on: Plagiarists: srsly, d00d?

By: Julia

Julia — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:36:28 +0000

I hope you are well, too!

By: Historiann

Historiann — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 04:04:33 +0000

Not really! The last time were some students in my freshman survey course who (again!) didn’t really get it how much I know vs. how much they didn’t know. When I got to the line in a student paper in which ze wrote about the “eucharistic piety” evident in Mary Rowlandson’s narrative–something that we never discussed or read about in the class–the gig was up. The problem I run into more commonly is students who borrow exact language without attribution from a secondary source.

Thanks, Julia. I hope you are well.

By: Julia

Julia — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 03:51:27 +0000

Historiann,

I can say, as one of your former students, that your assignments would be almost impossible to plagiarize. You require so many sources and specific analysis that I think it would impossible to cheat on without it being super obvious. Have students really tried to plagiarize one of your assignments? I can’t even figure out how that would work…

By: Tenured Radical

Tenured Radical — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 01:16:22 +0000

I think Clio Bluestocking wins the prize. Fucking priceless.

By: quixote

quixote — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:58 +0000

Z, your story had me laughing even harder. That’s like that special class of car accident where you plow into a cop car.

And Indyanna, “some of them may be doing as much as they can under the circumstances to adhere to best practices recommendations in the expropriation of knowledge.” Bwahahaha. That rings too true as well!

By: myiq2xu

myiq2xu — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:48:50 +0000

My old faculty advisor said the really sad cases were the students who put together term papers full of other people’s ideas with cites so it’s technically not plagiarism but who forgot to add any of their own ideas.

They did good research and put it all together in a paper, but still got a failing grade.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:32:56 +0000

It’s possible that there are some malfactors out there who would be perfectly willing to plagiarize only the hottest, freshest, newest, “cutting edge” (sic) work,
only to discover they’ve enrolled at a place whose library has gotten sick of being a “warehouse of books,” and invited the cognate “service delivery units” (faculties) to partner with them each spring to come up with lists of journals to cancel, or to pick which rows of volumes to ship off to the remote sensing unit in suburban Cheektowaga so Rock City Coffee can expand its footprint. An Eff is still an eff, of course, but some of them may be doing as much as they can under the circumstances to adhere to best practices recommendations in the expropriation of knowledge.

By: Clio Bluestocking

Clio Bluestocking — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 10:41:28 +0000

I once found a student’s paper on a website that sold student essays. When I confronted the student, the student told me that s/he had written the paper in high school, then donated it to the website, and was now turning it in for my class. I didn’t know where to begin to address that response. It ended in an F.

The thing is that most of these students who do this that I’ve encountered do not have a strong enough grasp of the material or the English language in the first place to understand that their cutting and pasting does not usually address the problem or question at hand, and that all are in different styles — and none of those styles match their own in class or written communication. It’s a fail from the beginning.

Sadly, I do take it personally because it is one of the hundreds of ways that they have shown disrespect for education, the class, professors as a class or professionals, the school, the library, the process of writing — for pretty much everything that the college is there for and they are supposed to be there for.

By: Z

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 03:43:06 +0000

You do remember what happened to my colleague, right?

He has the best plagiarism case, ever.

Part 1: reading paper, thinking: yes, I used to believe this.
Part 2: realizing: I used to believe this so much that I wrote it down and published it.
Part 3: I used precisely these words.
Part 4: Has this student turned my old article in, to me???
Part 5, after Googling: Yes! How dare they?

By: Feminist Avatar

Feminist Avatar — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:13:06 +0000

I have also had a wiki page just pasted into a document and handed in as the assignment. In this case, there was no attempt to integrate it into an argument or really add any original words to the page. The best of it was that this was for a ‘source’ assignment, where students were to assess the usefulness of a handful of selected primary sources. This was for first years so they weren’t even required to use secondary reading (although they got extra points for doing so). So, it was pretty difficult to ‘plaigerise’ from the internet (I did have people who copied each other though!). I was impressed that the student made the effort to google the relevant topic though (all the sources were on the Depression in the 1930s).

And, I have other essays where half way through a selection of wikipedia page is just pasted into the essay with no effort to format text.

I don’t think these people thought they’d get away with this, they were just desperate to hand something in.