I just caught three plagiarized essays last week. Two came from students whose skills are so low that they never had any business being in a comp. class; unfortunately, there are loopholes in the system, grade inflation, etc. that allow this to happen. Still, I had given both of them several referrals to the writing center for help, and it does not appear that they went. Other students are struggling but are at least doing their own work. These two plagiarized the entire essay verbatim from a website. The other plagiarized her essay from two different sites, one of which specializes in providing essays as long as you log in and register. They also pay you for sending them essays to be used again.
The latter student had seemed to be doing well on her own on the first couple of essays, but since the third one was completely stolen, I wonder if I just didn’t catch it on the first two, or one of them. I also discovered that she had left the name of her previous English class (one level lower than the one she’s in now) on what she turned in, leading me to believe that she not only recycled the essay, but that it was plagiarized in that earlier class but had not been caught.
The essay is theirs, they retain the copyright on it, and they certainly have the right to sell it to this site, or any other publisher if they want. It’s future people who would buy that essay and try to pass it off as their own who are cheating.
You must not use “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun
Let me tell you, the reports I ended up writing were very stilted due to the hoops I had to go through to simultaneously meet before requirements.
What continues to amaze me semester after semester is that there are always a few folks who do this lazy-ass copying-and-pasting even after I spend a lot of time during the first week telling everyone specifically not to do it. I explain that if they can find something on the internet, I can find it too. I repeat it. I give handouts. I write it on the board. I give a quiz.
I’ve just finished a paper on macroeconomics and basically had to follow the opposite process, because the notion of someone 42yo having their own ideas (or not remembering where the heck they learned something 20 years prior) is not acceptable. Note that this is a field where the big names themselves will sometimes claim that the notion which made them famous is “just common sense”.
Write paper, with Name (XXXX) stuck in every single assertion.
Find sources backing up every single assertion.
Paper: four pages. Bibliography: three pages. There were some sources which got reused
For some papers, we have the following requirements:
never use the first person, either singular or plural. Nobody cares about your opinion.
[This Section] must include your opinion.
This student wishes to thank Caesar, Caius Iulius (c. 40 b.C.) for his contribution to paper-writing…
I had a book of short stories on my desk. One contained a rare printing of a favorite short story that i had seached for for over twenty years. The book disappeared and the short story reappeared in the “creative writing project” of one of my high school students writing students. Since I was very familiar very the shorty story, I knew that it was almost word for word.
The student denied the charge and even refused to return my book, dmmit!
Do they really think that a teacher cannot dudge the difference in their beginning efforts at creative writing and in the polished efforts of professional short story writers? (This particular one had been made into a television production.)
This was one set in Poland on September 1, 1939. The student had no sense of the significance of that day or even where Poland was located. What really pissed me off was that instead of showing any kind of shame, he fought to be believed as the original author. Fortunately, the Assistant Principal backed me up 100%.
Then the student got smug and angry with me for his getting caught.
The people I’m referring to merely take an entire article off of GradeSavers, 123HelpMe, or a similar site and stick their name at the top before handing it in.
Another tried twice, recently, to hand in an argumentative paper railing against Hillary Clinton running for President. Problem is…She isn’t running for President these days. I rejected that draft this semester and last semester, when he took the same class and ended up dropping it because I caught him stealing an article that was written entirely by Paul Krugman. :D:D
There’s nothing legally wrong with it, but if the professor can substantiate the accusation, then every Academic Dishonesty bulletin I’ve ever seen would count this as an instance of such, and the student could be disciplined.
If the seller of the paper is a student at University A, and the buyer is a student at University B, i wonder if University A’s academic dishonesty policy would apply? I don’t think i’ve ever seen an AD policy that dealt specifically with this type of situation.
If, on the other hand, both the seller and the buyer were students at University A, then it seems clear to me that both of them would (or should) be in the shit, even if the sale took place through an intermediary like a website.
Of course, even in the first case, i think the university could make a reasonable case for discipline, based on academic dishonesty. If you sell your paper to a term paper website, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to be used for the purposes of cheating. While arguing that you have no way of knowing what the buyer was going to do with it might be sufficient to convince a jury, university ethics committees are not constrained by the same evidence requirements as a court of law.
We actually have one member of the Dope who, if he/she is to be believed, actually supported him/herself through grad school by writing papers for undergraduates. Here’s the rather jawdropping rationalizations offered by this cheat:
So, this shitheap actually sold papers to undergrads at the same university; the university where, as a grad student, he/she was charged with overseeing undergraduates and ensuring that they conform to the requirements of the academic ethics policies.
Back when I was in college, I had to take 5 different Humanities courses. So, I loaded up on Lit. I took an English Lit course and, as a final and worth a billion % of the final grade, we had to do an ‘analysis of a poem’.
When I received mine back…it was chock full of red everywhere. Panicing, I turned to the last page to look at the grade… A+++ with a paragraph written by the prof. Confused I looked at it and it said something like:
“This analysis is completely ‘wrong’ and, in no way, represents what the author of the poem meant. However, your analysis is completely airtight in its logic and is one of the most imaginative and well thought-out analyses I’ve ever read. It is obvious that you did not look at any reference material or outside analyses before you wrote yours. This is very refreshing in this day and age. Good job.”
I.e…it was well written bullshit :)…and I did it much faster than looking up what other people thought and trying to copy their ideas into my own words.
Sentence A and Sentence B are mutually exclusive. If you have a good thesis with an “airtight” analysis, your interpretation of what the author “meant” is *exactly *as valid as anyone else’s.
I rejected that draft this semester and last semester, when he took the same class and ended up dropping it because I caught him stealing an article that was written entirely by Paul Krugman. :D:D