Mrs. Mancer is a college English professor. She was telling me about a student of hers who, for a term paper, was all hyped up to write on the Bermuda Triangle.
“Why?” I asked. “Man, even kooks don’t talk about the Bermuda Triangle anymore. It’s so 70s.”
She tried to steer him away from the topic, knowing that it would be difficult for him to find scholarly sources for it. I had told her to watch out if he references Berlitz, whose books on the topic have been debunked as total cack by even ardent paranormal believers.
So he goes from having no good sources for this paper to suddenly having a fully-formed rough draft in a very short amount of time - a warning sign. She also notices on his draft two cites for Berlitz. She asks him about these and he seems to not be overly clear about them - books he supposedly read for this paper. She asks him to leave the draft with her.
Come on, people. Does it really not occur to you that if YOU can find a paper on Google someone else can as well? In fact, it’s even easier, since the searcher just has to select a chunk of text and pop it in. Here’s something you might want to know about Google, crafty students - it sorts by popularity, not by quality. So that great paper you found on page one is very popular. So the chance of your prof having seen it before is increased. And even if not, it still may suck.
So kid, you’re facing a serious problem now. Was it worth it? Was getting out of that paper worth what you’re now going through? And not only that, you pretty much insulted your prof at the same time. Real crafty.
I put this here rather than the Pit as a warning to students out there. It is so not hard to detect this sort of thing. Don’t screw yourself up just to get out of one stupid paper.
I’ve acquired an entirely new level of loathing for plagarists. Two weeks ago I competed in the legislative assembly of the Florida Blue Key debate competition. During the preliminary round, this kid from Nova High School (I only mention the school because it’s a fairly strong team; I doubt the mods would appreciate it if I were to actually name names) starts giving a speech. After a few seconds, I think, “damn, those were the points I was going to use.” A few seconds later, I notice that the syntax sounds familiar. Then I realize why: I had read it that morning. (Here it is, in case anybody’s curious).
Being the vengeful bastards that we are, my teammate and I decide not to let it slide; during cross-examination, my teammate asks point-blank, “Can you explain for us how exactly I have a copy of your speech in my hands?” and hands him the printout. Then we send the transcript over to the judge. Aha! Victory was ours! He cheated and we shot him down! We’ve discredited him for the rest of the competition!
Not quite.
He qualified for semi-finals. Last week the data from the competiton was posted on the Blue Key website (see above). I checked the kid’s data. His punishment for plagarism? A slap on the wrist; a relatively low score on that speech (3 out of 6 possible points) and NO OTHER PUNISHMENT. Any other competition would have disqualified him immediately. Had that happened, I would have made it to semi-finals (I was ranked just short of the cut-off). Grr. . . .
To add insult to injury, one of my scores was lost in the paper shuffle.
My wife is a teacher and has caught numerous students (six in one class on the same paper!) via our friends at Google. Google is your friend, unless you are a stinking cheat.
Even the professor I currently TA for, who is not computer-savvy at all, has the good sense to give papers he suspects of being plagiarized to his secretary and ask her to Google them. Caught one (maybe two, he had just found this one today) in the batch we just finished grading.
After my repeating warnings and examples re: Google and how easy it is for us teachers to find plagiarized Net papers, I still got two this semester…so far. Research papers haven’t come in yet.
:rolleyes:
And I just busted a college student a few weeks ago for repeat stupidity!
She turned in an essay some time ago that was totally plagiarized from the Net. I made copies for my records, gave her an “F” but was feeling generous, so told her she could submit a rewrite. So near the end of the semester, she turns in a PLAGIARIZED rewrite along with her PLAGIARIZED research paper! :mad:
At that point, I made copies of everything, wrote up an incident report, and turned everything over to the woman who handles naughty students. She sent me a copy of the letter sent to the student as well which tells her what a bad thing she did, how they have put a hold on her records, and tells her to make an appointment to discuss her offense. Obviously, she also got an “F” for the semester.
One of my colleagues was handing out letters of reprimand to his little darling plagiarists, one of whom actually tried to complain to the dept. secretary and of course got nowhere. The secretary’s exact words were: “You are not going to win here.” (That was after she asked me to sit and be a witness to the confrontation because she was afraid she’d go off on the student.)
It's not that we're trying to target students, but jeeeeeezzz.... Some of them make it so easy! :rolleyes:
Would’ve been a funny story to tell if the kid was in high school. Seeing as how he’s in college though he probably won’t get too many laughs about it in the future. Is he getting expelled?
I helped bust a student for plagiarism a little while ago. The instructor didn’t find anything using the “Eve” software I mentioned above, so tried Google with the first sentence and got one hit that wouldn’t come up. She was thrilled when I showed her Google’s cached copy.
I was (sort of) on the other side of this last spring. After we had handed in our (non-plagiarized in my case) second research paper for the semester, but before the professor was supposed to hand it back, he came into class and gave a speech something like this:
“Some of you still have some things to learn about writing papers. Dictionaries, in addition to having the correct spellings of words, will tell you what words actually mean. You will be spared the pain of misusing a word.
Over the course of my career, I’ve read many, many papers. Sometimes you know that a student has not written a paper. This can be vague. Maybe a student who hasn’t been doing well turns in a stellar paper. You feel that this paper is out of their range, but you can’t prove it.
But sometimes, you read a paper and you know you have read it before. You recognize it. This has happened in this class. If you feel that this speech applies to you, you should make an appointment to see me in my office and we’ll talk.”
Dead silence. The most uncomfortable moment I ever had in a class. I never did find out who had done it…
I realized something- anybody crafty/intelligent enough to get away with writing a plagarized paper is probably also crafty/intelligent enough to know better and perfectly able to write a good paper on their own acoord. I guess its a nice form of intellectual darwinism; that the people who plagarize seldom seem to be subtle about it and are easy caught (at least in these examples)
As an English Major at SJSU,I feel that its just not worth it. Writing a good paper is a matter of competent research, hard work, and discipline. I’ve found there are no shortcuts. I’ve had my disappointments; earlier this semester I wrote a rant on how frustrated I was with writing MLA papers, it was stupid and I hated it and god forbid I ever do it outside school…But not surprisingly my attitude changed- I took the challenges and frustration and worked on improving myself and the improvement has been rather impressive over the months. Hard work does pay off in the end, I can attest to that
Are these kids turning in the exact same papers that they plagiarized (I mean not changing a single word)? I would think that it would be much harder to catch a student who had stolen a paper off of Google and then re-written it, just changed the sentences and paragraphs around. Are they THAT lazy?
I really think that plagiarists should be skinned alive and have their hides pinned up outside of institutions of learning as a warning to others.
Okay, maybe not.
But I think that plagiarism is one of the scummiest of all intellectual sins, and it should be a big deal. If people who did it really got nailed to the wall, made an example of, then, darn it, we wouldn’t have these mealy-mouthed whiners in college complaining that they didn’t know it was wrong (which is total BS, but often has a strangely ameliorative effect on kind-hearted professors.) Every time a plagiarist is let off with a slap on the wrist, it’s a blow against inellectual integrity.
I hope this student does get expelled. Not expelling a student for plagiarizing once is arguable, but she plagiarizes the rewrite you were so gracious as to offer her? She is an idiot and an unethical one. She doesn’t belong on any college campus. I mean, really – that’s just disgusting.
It’s not all that hard to evade detection. Just rearrange some word ordering, sentences, and paragraphs… copying it verbatim is stupid. Smart Plagiarism™ may take SOME effort, but you only do a fraction of the work that you would do with writing a real paper.
