Don't even try to tell us it's not plagiarized!

The BBQ Pit
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My campus subscribes to turnitin, but I never used it and I probably never will. It may be naive of me, but I don’t like starting from a place of presumed guilt (“I can’t trust you to write an original essay…”). I had many profs who used turnitin by default and demanded a digital copy of each essay so they could submit it before they started grading and it always left a really bad taste in my mouth. Plus, I agree with mhendo about it being unethical to force students to basically give up the rights of their own work. I think that any teacher should be able to spot plagiarism without the use of a program like that. I always catch 1 or 2 every semester. I tell them at the beginning that my entire academic career has been dedicated to analyzing text and writing. In other words, my best skill is reading and I can always spot when word choice, style, tone, structure, etc changes. But they don’t believe me.

The most galling example happened when I was still a TA. My department had an arrangement with a local magnet school to teach Writing 1010 & 2010 at their campus. The students would receive college credit for the courses. I worked with the same group of kids all year long and in a lot of ways it was my favorite assignment ever. But I had one girl who pretty much made zero effort. She wouldn’t show up, and when she did, she wouldn’t participate. She didn’t turn in any of her assignments and needless to say she didn’t bother with drafts or the peer workshops. When she found she was failing, she went to the principal of the school, who was a really great guy and who I respected a lot. He told me that this student had a rotten home life but she was already accepted into the U and it would really screw over her GPA and her financial aid if she failed the course. Could I work with her?

Being a kind, decent person, I agreed. I told her that she needed to turn her final paper in on time. It was supposed to be 10-12 pages, and represent the culmination of all her previous assignments (she was to choose an issue, research it and make an annotated bib, write a report on her findings, write an argument based on that report (ie, “Health care reform is not feasible”) and then finally write a proposal (ie “A feasible solution to the current health care problem is…”). Now this can be a very overwhelming assignment, which is why I structured the course so that the whole semester ultimately was about writing the final paper. I told her if she turned in that 10-12 page proposal that demonstrated she had done the research, analyzed the research, and could make an argument, then she would receive a C in the course. I thought that was fair, considering all her classmates had actually done the work all semester.

So, she does turn in her paper, and I notice right away it’s too short. Only 7 pages. By the 2nd paragraph of page 1, I knew she had plagiarized. For one thing, it didn’t look ANYTHING like the structure I told them to use. For another thing, it wasn’t the same subject she told me she was researching. For a third thing, she wasn’t very bright and those sentences were quite complex. I chose a random sentence and googled it, and sure enough her essay was the first result.

When I confronted her about it, she denied denied denied. When I showed her the actual website, her eyes got wide and innocent and she kept denying. That made me so angry. Couldn’t she at least apologize for wasting my time? Or for showing such a complete lack of regard for the course? Or for thinking I was that stupid?

She failed. And you know? The principal backed me up, god bless him.

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And even more if you wrote 3 A level research papers.

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It’s cheating everywhere I’ve ever taught, as defined by the department. Personally, I agree and have no trouble enforcing that rule. But then, I teach intro to writing and advanced writing. 90% of my students are terrible writers and I’m trying to teach them how to improve. They never will improve if they keep using their same crappy papers over and over.

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Well, yes, I probably should have clarified. I wouldn’t expect a professor in a writing class to be alright with it.

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A teacher showed me this in-text citation on an actual paper today; you gotta love it. (Wording approximate for the quote.)
Homelessness is a social problem that affects between 500,000 and 600,000 Americans (Google).

In works cited:

Homelessness. Google. Retrieved March 10, 2010.

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The spouse, who teaches, gets that a lot. Also “JSTOR” and, recently, “YouTube”.

It’s like a bibliography that just says “Library”.

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Actually, it’s more like a bibliography that says, “My car, 2001 Ford Focus”, since that’s what got you to the library. :wink: I guess the quote might have come from actual content provided by Google, but I doubt it.

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FWIW, while TurnItIn is a subscription service, there are some free services to check for plagiarism

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My wife has been looking to hire someone. Last week she got two resumes, both with the exact same bullet point. She said she Googled the sentence and it came up as an example resume on Monster or some place like that. Two different resumes with the same plagiarized points. She didn’t hire them.

What’s funny though is that she was working with a headhunter who didn’t care that they had done this. How can you not care that all they did was try and bullshit their way through their own resume? My wife was going to talk to her as well.

Why is it that I got crap grades in college, especially for writing, yet I know better then to try and steal someone else’s work. At least I know I did my own shit writing.

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I had an English teacher (9th grade?) who told us that if we cited any internet references we were to write out how we found them, as in what we typed into what search engine, etc. This was apparently more important than the URL.:smack:

She wasn’t very good.

I stil rite laik krap.

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That kind of behavior is what was (until recently, it’s now being changed) expected in exams for government jobs in Spain; it is also one of my old gripes about many of my teachers. For a teacher who doesn’t understand the material, checking regurgitations against the book is doable, but looking for a comprehension he himself does not have is impossible. The immense majority of Spanish math teachers can’t look for comprehension, it’s one of the two worst-taught subjects (the other one being Phys Ed).
I’m currently on a MSc in Translation and one of the biggest sources of frustration is that we’re receiving so much emphasis on “nobody expects you to be original” and “make sure you get your bibliography in the right format” (we had people losing grades for having an optional coma, and others losing grades for not having the same optional coma, depending on which professor had graded them) that we’ve started to ask “are we forbidden from being original?”

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Proper citation of a website should include the appropriate link and the date when you last visited that link to verify the information was still on the page.

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I am not defending plagiarists, here, but rather I just want to point out a few things that may help to explain why it’s happening seemingly more and more:

  1. it’s really hard to come up with your own stuff, especially when you’re not pursuing a PhD or graduate level degree where that’s your main focus. Especially as you go farther down the road of human history and our collective level of education and scholarly work grows at exponential rates, there’s a really really good chance that there will be some paper or book written on exactly what your topic is (especially with part 2, below). No, this isn’t some rationalization that plagiarism happens, but rather just a recognition that in many areas of study (esp. in the humanities, literature, and social sciences) at the high school and undergraduate level you’re basically re-treading over settled questions.

  2. A lot of writing assignments/essays written by teachers and professors are just really bad. They don’t offer a broad enough opportunity for independent thought and analysis

  3. most importantly, there is a poor communication on the part of educators (and a misunderstanding on the part of the student) about why the paper is being written. the teachers know it isn’t to produce groundbreaking, original, and poignant conclusions each and every time, but rather it’s to learn how to write and learn how to apply proper analytical/critical methods. both of those things can be accomplished even writing a paper that is devoid of any “originality” Bascially, they problem is that the emphasis is on content originality when they should be on analysis/synthesis/application originality.

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Are there really teachers who imply that plagiarism means coming up with something wholly original, never been done before? Because that’s not what plagiarism means. All avoiding it means is that you thought of it yourself. Chances are, especially at these lower levels, that it’s going to be something that someone else has said before. But that’s okay, because you didn’t steal if from them: you came up with it on your own.

My experience is that most plagiarizers are just really bad writers (at least by the criteria of the class) and are willing to risk copying something and maybe getting a good grade for it (or maybe not), rather than use their own writing and do poorly or fail. The better teachers get at detecting this, the less attractive that option will be.

The main thing that would help, though, would be better instruction. Hopefully this will take care of itself, as teachers realize their students don’t know as much about writing as the teachers think they do.

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But is it really that hard to write the idea in your own words?

Simply take the first sentence of the Wiki article on plagiarism:

and say it differently, like “Plagiarism is the use of another writer’s words and passing it off as your own original work”.

My sentence is very similiar, but not exact, and it’s my own work. Hell, even the Wiki article clearly cites the source of it’s definition and it puts it in quotes. I wonder how stupid and lazy these students are if they can’t even bother to do that.

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Last I checked, all of the standard citation styles had precisely this information in their templates, and using, or causing anyone else to use, anything else ought to be a hanging offense.

If the coma is optional, don’t fall into it! Resist the urge to imitate soap operas!

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Exactly. All I ask is that people cite their sources if they’re going to use any, and that they don’t just copy and paste huge chunks of website text into their “essays” and pretend that they came up with something original just because it’s a word-collage.

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I got caught plagiarizing in grade school and never did it again. I re-wrote a Patrick F. McManus story in my own words. About a third of the way through I had thought “this isn’t turning out as different from the inspiring story as I intended” but either way it was too late.

In high school, some of my initial reports to new teachers made them suspicious. I had (still have) a particular writing style that seemed too advanced to them, I guess. (I like long sentences and work hard to avoid reusing descriptive words.) After subsequent essays showed a consistent style, they figured it out.

In one college course I re-used two previously-written stories for assignments.
One was autobiographical piece that was thoroughly disliked by the last teacher who read it, but this new teacher absolutely loved it. I didn’t tell her that it was a repeat. It fit the assignment guidelines and I was very, very busy with my other classes.
For the second instance, I got explicit authorization to do a short-story adaptation of one of my previously-written screenplays. Not only was the task of adapting it to a different format unexpectedly difficult, I took the opportunity to change the weak ending.

I view “plagiarism” as more than just copy and pasting in a school report. That’s still cheating, and I guess fits the definition of plagiarism, but it still seems like the wrong term to me. Oh, well.

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This was three, 3000 level (Junior year undergraduate in America) history courses, so I had plenty of experience writing papers by then. Amusingly enough all the professors did eventually find out about the miracle paper. It became the foundation for my Honors thesis.

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Inspired by this?