Another Plagiarist Caught - thanks Google!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Google Answers is a research service that is currently in beta testing. It appeared early in 2002 and contracts independent researchers from all over the globe. GA states that they maintain a base of 500 researchers.

At GA, a customer asks a question, sets their price and enters the query into the system where it becomes open for any researcher to answer although customers may request a particular researcher in the question title or text body.

Question prices begin at $2 and end at 200 and there is a tip function, too. Google Answers keeps 25% of the question price (researchers receive 75%) when answered and GA charges a .50 non-refundable fee for the question. On the tips, GA allows the researcher to recieve the entire tip amount.

It is used by all types of individuals from people looking for a product, like an out-of-print book, to someone wanting to know where a quotation originated to students asking for completed homework essays, etc.

To experience the service, visit http://answers.google.com

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Sorry, but no advertising is allowed on this site. Not even on Christmas day.
This message board is intended as a medium for public discussion. Do not post spam, including but not limited to advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes, solicitations, or other messages primarily intended to promote a cause, venture, organization, event (except Straight Dope-related events), website, or other entity or activity, whether or not money is involved. We allow exceptions for worthy causes (in our sole opinion) if you obtain prior permission from a moderator or administrator..

Your first post was great, but to mention $ and a website is a big no no here.

Hope you enjoy your stay here :slight_smile:

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Yeah, garesearcher. Should you be interested, check this out for our advertisement rates. Don’t use our message board to plug your or anyone elses business, however impressive it may be. Thanks in advance.

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My apologies. I wasn’t intent on plugging the service, I was only responding to pseudotriton ruber ruber’s request for more information (please see his remark above).

My reason for remarking on this board was to enlighten instructors that Google Answers could not be searched using the Google search engine - one has to go into Google Answers independently to search the answers.

I will edit my post above and remove the price quote and please accept that I was only explaining the service to pseudotriton ruber ruber per the request.

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PS I just tried to edit out the offensive pricing information but was not able to access the edit. If a moderator could do this for me, I would appreciate the favor.

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And now for a word from a “plagiarist”.

Ahem.

My seventh-grade English class was assigned a poetry project. For part of this project we were told to write an original poem.

Now, I was by no means a stellar student. It wasn’t that I bombed the tests- far from it, I usually aced 'em. My problem was that I despised doing the homework- and, of course, since homework was a large portion of our grade, I did poorly.

Needless to say, I hadn’t written the poem in time for the due date on the project. Luckily I remembered the assignment during the class before my English class… so I frantically composed a poem, and handed it in.

Imagine my surprise when I found out the teacher gave me an “F” for the project (which was a very large portion of my final grade). I, of course, approached her and asked her why she’d failed me on it. Her response? “Because you plagiarized.”

I was pretty confused, and upset. I asked her what I’d plagiarized. She said that she didn’t know where she’d seen the poem before, but that it looked familiar, and was written too well for someone of my (rather dismal) GPA. As such, she was going to let the grade stand.

Now, this was before the Internet- it was early 80s, as I recall. There wasn’t a good way to prove that I HAD written it- ever tried to prove a negative?

My mother called up the local library, and asked them to search on a few lines from the poem. They had no luck finding anything close, so my mother went to school to have it out with my teacher. Eventually the teacher relented, and agreed to let me write a replacement poem. Gee, thanks.

I did so, and when I got my new grade, I found that she’d given me a “D”- she’d counted it as being handed in late. :rolleyes:

Plagiarism sucks. Being accused of plagiarism, when you haven’t done so, sucks more.

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Lightnin’, that sucks. I’ve heard many similar stories. FWIW, I have never, and will never, accuse a student of plagiarism without rock-solid proof. If something seems plagiarized to me, I’ll go to a lot of effort to find the original source, but if I can’t find it, I bite the bullet and grade them based on the quality of their work.

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Lightnin’, something similar happened to me, though fortunately the teacher believed me when I told her the first time that I had never heard of a poem with a line similar to the one I had used.

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It never stops. I was sent a manuscript to review for a professional journal (of the highest caliber). I’m reading along, noting that a couple of my papers are cited early on. Then all of a sudden, I get to some great text toward the end. I know it’s great because I wrote it. There was no attribution for the text. The authors of the paper are not neophytes. I was blown away.

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I hope you blew the whistle bigtime on the bastards.

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Also–since I asked innocently and garesearcher seemed to be answering in kind-- where exactly did he go wrong? If he had given his link, but said nothing about pricing, would that have been okay? I thought I asked a legit question, and was satisfied with his answer, which didn’t seem to be plugging a product. If I ask, “Where can I get a good can of tunafish?” and someone answers with a link to a grocery store, is that all right? Should I not have asked?

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Why do cheaters get caught?
Why do criminals get caught?

Stupidity is sometimes an underappreciated commodity.

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I hate plagistists too, but sometimes teachers can become spiteful. My school generally has a policy of 1st time is warning or zero, next time a failing grade and it is brought to the dean. I had a teacher who once “caught” 19 out of about 40 students plagiarizing. But not only that, she caught about 3/4 of those 19 plagiarizing twice…We had two assignments and she handed both back at the same time and double whammed some students for the instance at one time. She supposed to give the warning first! That’s not the bad thing though. The people who plagiarized were accused even if they didn’t cite properly, like put quotes around direct quotations or for missing one citation for a paraphrased sentence. Most of these students did not intend to cheat.

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Here’s one… I run a message board on the Montreal metro system, as you may know. Someone brought another board on “urban exploration” (questionably legal access to interesting urban sites) to our attention. Some guy was telling them about how he boldly explored the new metro tunnel they’re building in Laval.

However… as our eagle-eyed users noticed… they had posted photos on their forum, as their own and as evidence that they’d actually visited this place, that they had ripped off from an official website!

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You will all hate me. Alot.

I graduated last April, and I cheated. Constantly. Tests, papers, projects, you name it.

I’ve paid people to write papers for me. I’ve done the old “download four papers, cut, paste, rearrange sentences and change words.” I took my cousins’ paper she used for her Masters degree and condensed it down to suit my needs.

I’m the lazy guy in the group project. I’ve paid people to do projects for me. I once stole another guys project from off his computer while he was in the washroom. Just put my disk in the computer, and hit save.

In most of the lecture theatres (as most are I’d imagine) the seats got higher towards the back. I looked at other people’s answers. I’m pretty good at recognizing the patterns on the multiple choice answer sheets. If the professor left the room for even a second a friend and I would be sharing.

I’m not proud, but really, is it all that bad? I mean, seriously, do any of the testing methods used in schools reflect anything even remotely resembling reality? In real life, if I don’t know, I can look it up. I can ask for help. In my (albeit short) professional life, I have never been given an assignment, a pen, and an empty room and have a superior tell me “I expect his done in two hours with no outside help.” That’s not reality.

And in the end, is the guy that scores 10% higher than me on an exam going to be a better worker in the real world? Not really. He may know it, but I can find it out. Tests don’t mean squat in the real world.

Writing rigorous papers, yeah, that’s important for some people. Mostly academics. Vie had to do a few reports at work, but my boss doesn’t really care about citing everything. I can picture it now “Hmm, the tech sector was overpriced you say? I’m afraid I’ll need some sources for that.” For the vast majority of people who need to write a report of some kind, the fact is that they don’t care where you got your info from, as long as it’s right.

I’ve never done a real group project at work per se, but if I did I wouldn’t be the lazy one. Work is work. My whole job is basically a series of individual projects, and obviously I don’t pay others to do them for me.

And personally, I don’t think cheaters (who cheat while in school) are scum or rotten or horrible people. I think it’s more in line with reality. University was a training ground for the real world. I think in real life people are alittle sneaky. Rules are bent all the time. Even if you don’t do it, guaranteed someone else is. And you gotta compete with him.

According to school rules, I cheated. Early and often. But most of those rules don’t exist in real life. I’m no less prepared than a non-cheater was, and in some ways better prepared.

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Hentor, are we twins? The exact same thing happened to me!

I was sent a manucript to review from a respected lab. The paper itself wasn’t very good, there were a lot of methodological problems with it. Then I get to a section that sounds great!..and familiar.

It was taken from a relatively low profile article that I published several years earlier. The author must have thought it was obscure enough to escape notice. Schmuck.

Also, pure? Be glad this isn’t the pit. You are right, I loathe people like you. Cheaters are the scum of the earth

MM

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If this was the pit i wouldn’t have posted :smiley:

And scum of the earth is alittle strong isn’t it? I reserve taht for murderers, rapists and the like. I don’t think cheating on my Econ 101 midterm puts me in that category.

Obviously in your profession you would have a different view of it than i would, from what you said you sound like an “academic,” where the writers originality is important. My job is more about numbers, so it’s not as big a deal. If someone lese already did the calculation, why would i do it again? Why would I put a little note at the end saying “by the way, Mr. X figured out the debt to equity ratio, not me.”

And I think it’s a fair comment that everything I said in my previous post was true.

(1)exams (university-type setting) mean squat in the real world. I could be a banker and not know how to multiply or divide AT ALL. Does it matter? I have a calculator on my desk. Same thing applies to me at my job, and for most people at their jobs. We’re allowed to use tools and reference materials. I can’t think of a job that doesn’t.

(2)People cheat and lie, bend the rules, and play poltitics. You could not do these things, and you may very well be very successful. But…you’d be better off if you did.

(3)The majority of people will never write anything even remotely resembling an english paper in their working lives. Reports, summaries, yes. Rigourously researched paper that demands complete bibliography and footnotes? Not so much.

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I’d also like ot make an analogy. University is like acting school. Note I’ve never been to acting school, but let’s just pretend.

Let’s say that in acting school that remembering all your lines is a VERY big deal. But i can’t remember my lines. Some would look down on me because of it. If the instructor makes remembering your lines a requirement for passing, I would fail.

If i’m a live theater actor, remembering lines is obviously very important. I cam’t be on stage and forget my lines. But you know what, if I’m doing tv or movies, it doesn’t matter. If i flub a line we’ll just do another take. No harm no foul.

Yet if I want to do TV or movies, I would fail, unfairly, for something that has no bearing on my work. Is this right? Does me failing this class because I can’t regurgitate some information demand mean I can’t act? No.

I could be the greatest actor in the world, but i can’t remember my lines, that’s what editing is for.

Most people are in the same situation. Most people don’t know everything they need to know at work cold. Most people use references.

You can look down on them because you know it and they have to look in a book, but what’s wrong with that? They’re allowed to.

Based on this analogy, academic types are like theatre actors, I’m like a tv actor. So i “cheat” and use editing to cover up the fact that i can’t remember al my lines. So what? It’s allowed. You can’t, you have to do it all on your own. Doesn’t make you better than me.

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The Profs in my department (and all other departments for that matter) write and review large numbers of research papers.

One of these fellas is considered an international leader in his field - his research is VERY specialized - at the time of the incident, he was probably one of only about 25 people in the WORLD who did it.

He was reviewing a paper that had been submitted to a journal for publication. He got about 1/3 into the paper, to the "Results"section, and found page long excerpt from HIS OWN PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED RESEARCH PAPER including figures, with absolutely no citation of any kind, whatsoever. He wasn’t even mentioned in the bibliography at the end.

Can you hear that wooshing sound? That would be your career, going down the toilet…

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I am curious as to what people here would think about a borderline ethical issue.

I would NEVER write a term paper for someone. I think that it is meant to be a learning experience, an opportunity for someone to get a chance to learn to express their ideas, which is a core part of a college education.

But I HAVE helped out with bibliographic research (sometimes for a fee if it involved an extended chunk of my time) for friends who have needed it. I have refused to do it if I thought that they needed to learn to do the research themselves, but have done it in cases where they knew the basics, but didn’t have some of the resources and experience that I have.

On one hand, I tell myself that it is something that they could do themselves, but they are time-limited, and in some cases overloaded with work. I am just assisting them in the legwork, similar to them paying someone to type their paper.

On the other hand, I know that part of their grade will be based on the quality of the bibliographic research. I have written papers in the past that my prof has commented that the quality of the writing was not “A” material, but that the quality of the research in an area that he thought I would be unable to find much on, was enough to push my grade from a B to an A.

So what do you think?