Question: If you read ten or fifteen different papers or books on a subject and then write a paper of your own using words or (para) phrases from these papers, is tihis plagriasm?
I’d call it research. ??
I have a story similar to Adridne’s:
About a month ago, my G/T English teacher had made us do a brochure thing on John Steinbeck. She just recently got around to grading them (she is one of two G/T teachers in the school system). The day after grading them, after my class (of 7) had all entered the room, she turned around in her chair slowly and said
“I did grades last night, and I am not a happy camper. Four of you, I discovered, have plagarized on your brochures.” Considering my odds, I began to try to recall every bit of information I had read and what I had written, but as it was so long ago, I couldn’t. I worried that I was one of them.
But, later, as she returned the brochures, she told me that she had tried quite hard but couldn’t catch me. She handed me back my paper, which I looked at. 95%. Phew.
AndJake, as long as you say something like ‘according to…(source)’, it’s not plagarism, AFAIK.
No. That’s what I find so ridiculous about plagiarism. You don’t need to do it.
Why? Because it’s not only acceptable, it’s almost expected in acadamia that you get the majority of your ideas from other sources. So copy from those other sources verbatim if you want. Just cite them! Ta da. Problem solved.
Citing is fine, but I wish they’d throw in an original sentence or two now and then so it’s not a total collage of other people’s words.
It could happen. I don't know yet...it's the intersession right now. It's out of my hands at this point, but the folks at Campus B (I teach on another one too) are pretty hard on cheaters. They take them out behind the gym and....no, they don't. But she has seriously jeopardized her permanent record and it's her own fault.
I should also mention, in a slight but related hijack, that the campus officials had to launch a massive sting recently to crack down on students who were forging registration cards with early dates and times so they could get into classes! (They get priority on adding if they register early.) The computer keeps track of when they registered, right down to the second, so when the discrepancies show up, it's pretty obvious what happened. It was so rampant that some students were selling CDs with programs on them for forging the documents! :rolleyes: They caught a gal who had taken my class a year ago and gotten into it illegally. Now her father's pissed because they're "ruining" her life. His exact words to the student disciplinary officials were, "Well, she wanted to graduate within a very short time, so how else was she supposed to do it?" (Oh, gee, dad, I don't know. Maybe by being honest and going more slowly, like the rest of us?) I think the whole thing was his idea in the first place.
**deborak: ** Yes, they most certainly are that lazy. They don’t even *try * to change things!
Sorry for going on so long above, but this stuff is getting ridiculous. My dept. head is now keeping a running tab in her office of those who plagiarize and how many times they do it!
Jake: Taking adapting an idea is not generally plagiarism, taking the expression of that idea is. If you just sat down with a book and took large chunks of it, changing the word order around, phrasing it different, of course that’s plagiarism. If you read a few papers and form your views, you don’t need to cite the paper that is closest to yours. It would be good form to cite a paper who originally came up with the idea, and in some cases is required. A scientific research paper would require more rigorous citation than an analysis of a book, for example.
The sad thing is when people inadvertedly are guilty of plagiarism. I read so many people who “paraphrase” their sources, without citing them. When I ask about it, they tell me they were parphrasing their source. They make huge changes, like changing “cash” to “money”. So many students don’t understnad that citing isn’t enough—you’ve got to interpret the ideas, not the words.
[old geezer voice]
Back when I was in college, before they had this “internet” thing
[/old geezer voice]
I used to occasionally make a few extra bucks typing papers for people. I was amazed at how many times what I was given to type included photocopied pages from books. Usually there would be handwritten adjustments to the printed texts (I loved the ones that added footnotes), but at least once all I was doing was retyping something word for word.
It’s been my experience that plagiarizers are stunningly stupid. They do in fact copy passages or entire essays verbatim off the net. Then they deny it, even when I show them printouts of the web pages and their own plagiarized essays. “Can you explain why this web page and your essay say the exact same thing, using the exact same words?” “It’s a coincidence!” Yeah, I’ll say. It’s happened at every college that I’ve taught at. Most treat it as the norm: when caught, and told that they’re failing the class, some ask “Does this mean that I don’t have to take the final?”
I had a college student explain to me once that his paper wasn’t plagiarized, and I should phone his mom (!) to verify that because she knows: she wrote it for him.
I do want to note that some of my international students have a different idea of what plagiarism means because they’re not accustomed to being asked to synthesize material–just to reproduce it.
I spot check from students’ reference lists, particularly if the diction is very different from my expectations. I also sometimes ask students to come in and explain their papers (without their papers in front of them).
I used to be an English teacher, and each year would first assign a novel that had no Cliffs Notes. This gave me a good comparison piece for students’ later work. Now I try to assign comparison/contrast papers, or papers on topics not likely to be available from the net. I take as my cue for this the paper assigned in my first college literature class, in which we bwere asked to write on the significance of dead hippo in Heart of Darkness.
Semi-apropos of this topic, I hate 1) when students don’t run spell check; 2) when they run it and make all the changes without looking at them. When my name appears as “Shoeshine,” I know that that’s what’s happened. I just received, in today’s mail, my customized self-inking rubber stamps. In green ink, they are respectively 1) my initials; 2) “Spell check please”; 3) and “Not APA style” (which we require). Unfortunately, I’ll probably be out of ink by the end of the term.
I belong to “The Netwits”, a collection of internet humorists. Earlier this year a couple of Witters (not just one) discovered they’d been plagiarized by a guy who was being published regularly in Malta Today, a weekly paper in that little country.
This guy would apparently find a column he liked from their websites, change a sentence or two to personalize it a little, or make it more Malta-specific, and then submit them.
We red-dogged the editor’s email with cites proving he’d stolen the stuff, and demanding that all his columns be pulled from their website.
Not only were the jerk’s columns deleted after that weekend, we got a profusely apologetic email from the horrified editor, who assured us the columnist was a freelance, not a staffer, no one at Malta Today was aware of his odious practice, and that this “columnist” was hereafter persona non grata.
Best thing…one of the plagiarized Netwits turned the experience into a new (and original) column! 
Oh, I hate that. If I see a slightly less common and more awkward synonym to a word keep popping up, it raises a red flag because it often means one of two things.
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The paper lacks susbtance and they are trying to use “big words” to sound smart (like when they consistently write “utlize” instead of “use”).
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They’ve plagiarized and are trying to “disguise” the fact by doing a search-and-replace. Ex./ “Use the device to place. . .” becomes “utlize the apparatus to site . . .”
I’m glad I’m not TAing anymore.
I’m acquaintances with an english professor at my university (we’ve done some website work together), and I remember her sitting down with a stack of papers and an IE window open to Google.
I go to a school known for its Engineering program. A lot of the students in that program are very anti-English classes (not all of them, but trust me, many). She told me how most of her students are pretty good kids, and even if they can’t write an excellent paper, they still try to do their best.
But then you have the “smart” plagiarizer. He writes most of his paper by himself, but will stick in sentences from other sources with no citation, treating them as his own. Gee, it’s not obvious at all when a paragraph shifts from remedial-writing freshman skills to practically dissertation-worthy sentences! :rolleyes: All the professor has to do is type the suspicious sentence into Google, and WHAM, 95% of the time it’s on the first page of results.
Once in college I was assigned a dreaded task: the group project. Half of the grade was a 15 page paper. I volunteered to take the short sections written by my team members and synthesize them into a (somewhat) coherent whole. One particular member handed me a floppy with his supposed “paper” on it. It was text file, with the hard returns all messed up, so there would be a full line of text, then three word, then a full line, and so on. It had obviously been cut-and-pasted from the web and this moron couldn’t even fix the formatting. He then went on to complain that the other members weren’t doing their fair share! Later, another group member asked to have the PowerPoint presentation that I made for the project, for her portfolio. And was shocked when I wouldn’t give it to her. I have mentioned that I hate group projects?
Cite? I’d like to read that.
The kid risks getting caught for that paper? If I were going to be a cheating hack, I would at least steal from the greatest damn paper on Earth. At any rate, I have absolutely no respect for plagiarists. A guy I dated once bragged about plagiarising to me! Thing is he wasn’t trying to be “cool” or anything, he was dead serious. I remember feeling overwhelmed with disgust. That alone was enough reason for me to dump him. Yuck.
Indeed:
“Blah, blah blah blah blahhhh-blaaah. Blaaah freddy and greakrg yadda yaddahhhh yaaaadda yyada sfgg. To paraphrase Red Grange, “flargh shredshlj.” (Grange, Book Title/Source, page or whatever)”
Cite and use of source material. IIRC perfectly acceptable.
Not Acceptable: “To put it simply, flargh shredshlj.” No indication of source; an unknowing reader would assume you made that thought yourself. It’s theft.
Cite? I’d like to read that.
As a researcher for Google Answers, I see numerous questions wanting homework essays and papers (or answers to test questions from X and Y books) and it is more than a bit unsettling when they come from law and medical students. Sorta makes you fearful of visiting a future professional, huh?
Most of the researchers at Google Answers won’t touch obvious homework questions with a ten foot pole. However, there are those who must need the money badly enough to willingly allow plagiarism of their own work. It’s mystifying to me why any researcher would be a partner to plagiarism but I do not judge them, I just wonder about their circumstances. Most researchers will happily provide links to students for research but many draw the line at writing the actual papers for the students.
The link to this board was left on a message thread in a private researcher’s forum where Google researchers gather to discuss issues and questions. I wanted to let those here know that Google Answers is a top-notch information service and that most researchers WON’T answer obvious homework questions. Also, to let all of you know that Google Answers answers do NOT appear in regular Google searches so if any of you are looking for “hidden” plagiarism sources, be aware you need to check there as well.
Here’s hoping that all plagiarists continue to get BUSTED.