Brown-noser!
I catch a student or two every term, not necessarily from using turnitin, but getting suspicious of a sudden change in writing style, and so I type the sentence into Google which usually coughs up a match.
When matches pop up, I feel strangely exuberant, like Janine in Ghostbusters – ‘We got one!’
Guy last autumn really raised the bar – the students had to write a short paragraph summarising their group’s presentation, and every sentence of this guy’s paper was from a different online source. Tip offs included: switching back and forth between American and British spellings, and realising that one strangely familiar sentence was from one of my own published articles. Google also told me that one of his sentences came from a site called something like cheaters.com (significant because the student claimed he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong – despite explicit instructions in the syllabus.)
It read like a ransom note – the only thing missing were random letters cut out from magazines (although fair enough he hadn’t bothered to make all the fonts the same style and size.) I suspect it took him longer to search, copy, and paste than it would have been simply to pull something out of his arse.
I also like getting papers with passages lifted off wikipedia – blue, underlined links still intact.
What I’m getting from this is that portions of the writing were the students own, or were rephrased copied material as he would have put it in his own words. And that, based on this, he thought he could get away with it.
But then he was offered the grace of a chance to remedy this, and then he insisted that nothing at all in [del]his[/del] the paper was copied-- that takes the cake!
- Og
ETS tests are for the most part largely fair. Tests are developed with testing professionals and revised quite often.
The issue with ETS is not the tests given. It’s with how they treat the people who actually grade the tests. The CEO is a greedy piece of dirt who has handed out bonuses to top execs and pay cuts for everyone else.
I have a unique opinion on the subject of plagiarism.
Perhaps you’d be interested in my latest essay on the subject.
- Og
Ahhh, teachers. So stupid. At least, according to students.
I don’t think I’ve told this story before, but as you may be aware, I used to teach English as a Foreign Language in a public elementary school in Bulgaria. My kids’ language skills were not particularly good, especially those of my older students (the Bulgarian government had changed the age that students begin learning foreign languages from fifth grade to second grade a few years previously, so paradoxically, my younger students had a better handle on English than my older students.)
One of my seventh graders, Gabriella, had received a 5 (B) for the first semester and a 4 © for the second. I was on the fence about what to give her for a year grade, but she begged and pleaded with me for a 5. I finally told her that I would give her a 5 if she could create for me a nice poster, written in English, about anything she wanted. Something pretty I could put on the classroom wall.
She brought me back a poster - about the TV show The OC - that was CLEARLY plagiarized. I mean, I was offended she thought I would believe she’d written it. I told her immediately I could tell she hadn’t written it, and she told me her neighbor had helped her write it. Uh huh, right. As soon as class was over, I googled the first couple sentences, and the Wikipedia entry popped up.
She plagiarized Wikipedia.
If this were America, I would have given her a 0, but that shit doesn’t fly in Bulgaria (I tried this once and got overruled), so I gave her the 4. The next time I saw her, she asked me why she’d gotten the 4. She’d made the poster, hadn’t she?
Me: Gabriella, do you know what Google is?
Gabriella: Yes.
Me: Did you know that you can search for sentences? And if you copy from, say, Wikipedia, Google will find out where you copied from?
Gabriella: I DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD DO THAT! HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW? IT’S NOT MY FAULT! YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO CATCH ME! IT’S NOT FAIR! I DESERVE A 5! YOU RUINED MY LIFE!
I was leaving for America in two weeks and didn’t really care about burning bridges with seventh graders, so I pretty much lit into her, told her she was lucky she didn’t live in the US, where she would have failed the whole class for that little stunt and that was what she deserved.
Yes, it was my fault I didn’t tell her I would be able to catch her cheating.
I just want to know… did you get it?
The closest I had was for a website assignment people copy and pasting whole pages from wikipedia when they were expressly told not to. A colleague of mine had a student who plagiarised my colleague’s own work in an assignment. Bright spark. 
Yes, that’s the case. The plagiarized portion is neatly sandwiched between portions apparently written by the student (with the student’s unique writing thumbprint). The flagged portion consists of long paragraphs that immediately jumped out and show no variability from the source text. The chance of someone writing that exact text is probably a billion times less likely than the proverbial room of chimps banging on typewriters for a million years.
I’ll check out the essay at work tomorrow - better connection! If you can shed some light on the motivations for such behavior, perhaps this episode will educate us. We’re both traditionalists and would/welcome /could use any insight into the thought process at work here. Hell, I cheated in college (once) and have no idea why!
Kyla and An Gadai - Good God.
That’s what I could never understand about plagiarizers. I used to basically make shit up off the top of my head, then find cites that vaguely supported my ideas. My writing was mostly bullshit, but at least it was my own well-written bullshit. Much easier than copying an article and rephrasing it. I never got less than a B- on a paper either.
There is an online freelance site that matches skills with people willing to pay for those skills. I signed on to it. One of the things it wanted was a writing sample, and I didn’t feel like writing something new, so I included one of the better paragraphs (IMHO) from one of my novels.
It flagged me as a plagiarist.
And linked to an online review of my novel! But of course, the site didn’t distinguish between that and plagiarism, even though to any live person it would have been obvious.
This all reminds me of a internet English College class. We had to write papers on something or other throughout the class and they were turned in on…a message board. Yeah, that was weird. Before you turned in your homework you could sift through everyone else’s first…strange. Anyways, there was one person who’s papers were always terrible until one day when he wrote a great essay. For shits and giggles I googled a chunk of it. Yup, the whole thing was stole from two or three other sites. I emailed the teacher to let her know that it was stolen and figured that would be the end of it.
Next paper, same thing. Again, I emailed the teacher explaining that all all of his paper was plagiarized again, and added in a line about how unfair it is that I have to do all this hard work and he get’s to just steal his and get away with it.
Next paper, same thing. This time I emailed the teacher and told her that if she didn’t take care of the issue, I’d be letting the English Chair and the Dean of Students know about it.
And I wish I could remember what happened after that. I think he either started submitting his own work or got kicked out of the class. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I ever got replies back from any of the emails I sent it. Rethinking it, I should have set up another user for myself and just started pointing all this out right on the public board.
If they are Chinese, culture may indeed play a part of it. China has an academic tradition going back thousands of years that is based on imitating the masters. The old imperial exams were basically about memorizing and reproducing huge chunks of text. To some degree this model lives on, and students are rarely asked to produce the kind of research and analysis that we consider to be the main point of a university education. Furthermore, it is considered better to turn in something perfect that might not be entirely original than to turn in something that may be flawed. Finally, the idea of an honor code doesn’t really grok- most people would consider it stupid not to do something that would get you ahead.
For example, on a final exam where I asked my Chinese English students to define vocab words and use them in a sentence, I was surprised that they used the exact sentences from the book- they had apparently memorized the entire thing! Colleagues assured me that this is normal and expected. Even essay questions are usually about reproducing chunks of the textbook.
So they don’t really get why we get so worked up about plagiarism- in China, it’s kind of considered a useful technique. Indeed, I’ve heard my students report that university professors actively teach them how to plagiarize more effectively. It’s considered just another tool in the academic tool chest.
Makes you crazy, huh? I had an essay writing assignment here where I told my students outright “If you plagiarize, you will fail. If you write you own thing- anything no matter what it is, you will get full points” and fully half of them still plagiarized!
I hate when that happens.
Kinda lends a new perspective to the issue of intellectual property piracy.
Guessing there’s at least one other person out there who’s wondering so:
[hijack]
What’s the website?
I sure did. Plus a letter of apology written by said student.
God, I wish all my parents were like that.
I almost feel bad for that one kid* who rolled the statistical shitdice and independently wrote a paragraph verbatim from some famous industry standard paper or something. Who would believe them?
Actually I almost did that once, though not independent thought so much as forgetfulness. I had read something three or four years before I wrote a paper that I restated exactly. It was only when I was looking it over that I got the distinct feeling that what I had thought was an original thought I had most definitely read somewhere. Yup. :smack: I’m really glad I caught that. It was only a sentence, but wow, I think I probably dodged a bullet given the (justifiable) zero-tolerance plagiarism receives.
*imaginary kid who probably doesn’t actually exist
It’s amazing who is caught plagiarizing though. Apparently one of the doctoral recipients at my school was stripped of his degrees because his entire dissertation was plagiarized, almost verbatim.
[QUOTE=phouka;12207486
God, I wish all my parents were like that.[/QUOTE]
I caught a kid plagiarizing once, and her mom came in and defended her. The kid had simply copy-pasted from Wikipedia. Her mom at one point said “Now listen, I’m working on my M.A. and no professor of mine has ever had a problem with me doing anything like this. It’s standard.”
Rrrrriiiiggghhhhttt…
Just had to maintain my position and my cool and let the crazies be crazy.