I don’t even have to work hard to find plagiarism. I just found a paper the other day, while grading, that was stolen verbatim from one of those “Free essay” sites. The students are too lazy to change a single word and apparently under the impression that I am too busy to notice suspicious elements or vocab that is far beyond their abilities.
Well, here’s a new one…
One of my colleagues, who reads assessment essays just as I do, noticed a very ESL paragraph followed by a composition-level paragraph, followed by another ESL paragraph.
A Google search revealed that the student had used his cell phone to access some free essay website during the placement exam to look up the middle paragraph, which had nothing at all to do with the topic, and then copied it–either by typing it or by handwriting it. (I don’t know; I was not present at the scoring session that day.)
There is a HUGE screen at the front of the testing room with a clear warning about cheating and the consequences.
As far as we can tell, this had not happened before. They have only 45 minutes to write, and even copying one paragraph while having to look from the little phone screen to the bigger computer screen (testing center computers do not have internet access) or the lined paper would take a very long time unless one is incredibly fast.
Wow.
Just caught an interesting one the other day; the student peppered her essay with very erudite, very thoughtful, and very irrelevant copy ‘n’ pasted slabs of text from several Amazon book reviews (the ones readers can submit.)
I usually get suspicious because the writing style of the student suddenly changes, or in this case, there are suddenly thoughtful comments about the work in question, but just don’t mesh with the assignment (also, unfortunately for the student, one of the reviewers that she latched on to to copy had misunderstood what the main point of the work was.) Also, of course, when they leave in the hyperlinks it’s pretty helpful for me, too.
:smack:…haha teachers usually enjoy this…
Those abrupt shifts just give it away, don’t they?
And we’ve just had several more cases that occurred in the last week or two of the winter intersession. The fun never ends.
On that note, I submit my favorite essay conclusion ever:
*Wilde also brought in some biblical work like the Rev. Chasuble, he was the “Doctor of Divinity.” Jack and Algergon approach Dr. Chasuble to request that they be christened. That lets you know there that Wilde had a little faith. In general, this play had a lots of mature stage parts. When this play ended, it had the readers and audience asking question on what happens next after Jack found out that his name is Ernest and Algernon is his brother? The question I would ask is, did Jack ever marry Gwendolyn? since he found out they are cousin now. Did Algernon marry Cecily? since the play ended kind of crazy, it make you look for more of Wilde work to read.
In conclusion, Wilde is saying that “The Importance of Being Earnest” empties manners and morals of their underlying sense to create a nominalist world where earnest is not a quality of character but a name, where words, to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass (1871) mean what you choose them to mean, neither more nor less.*
Sadly, I am sure the student did not notice any discrepancies in style between the first paragraph and the second. Even more sadly, the plagiarized bits are from one of the assigned course texts.
Yeah, the cluelessness is perhaps the most depressing part. These students apparently know so little about writing that they literally cannot see the difference between their own tortured prose and the solid, well-constructed sentences that they copy verbatim from other sources. Fretful Porpentine’s example is perfect, and captures brilliantly the type of transition that makes most of these students so easy to catch.
Of course, then there are the students who copy or purchase sources that are just as bad as what the students could have done themselves. In one of my classes this semester, i’m using a book called American Reformers, about reform movements in nineteenth-century America. I did a Google search for the book the other day, just to grab the bibliographic information, and one of the hits i saw on the first page was this review of the book. You can only read the first few paragraphs, because it’s posted on a site where you students can purchase essays. If you don’t want to go to the page, here’s a sample of the paper:
Jesus H. Christ! The book is “generally” presented in “four general subjects,” and the author “explicated” historical causes in “very analytical terms.” The review also completely convinced me that something can “in a speck of prism,” become a “footstool of the rise of America.”
If you need to write a review of this book, and don’t want to spend the time reading it for yourself, these fine prose stylings can be yours for the bargain price of $18.95.
But mhendo, if a sub-mediocre student handed that in as a review, would you be suspicious that the student hadn’t written it his- or herself? And, presuming the rest of the review demonstrated that the student had actually read the book and understood some of it, would you give it a passing grade, despite the awkward prose?
My sister is an English teacher. She recently had a paper turned in with color spelled in the Commonwealth method. Talk about a red flag for plagiarism.
What is the Commonwealth method?
With a “u”. Colour.
That’s a fair question, and it’s something college teachers struggle with all the time, at least at non-elite schools. I taught classes at Johns Hopkins University when i was a grad student, and at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and while not all the students at those places were stellar, they at least had basic writing skills. Where i’m teaching now, however, it’s not too unusual for me to get the type of writing that i quoted in my last post.
I would, for such a paper, probably waver between a D and an F, depending on exactly how bad the writing was, and exactly how much understanding the student appeared to have of the subject matter. In the example i gave above, the writer not only had incredibly bad writing, but also really doesn’t seem to grasp the main point of the book’s argument. Bad writing and missing the point? Should be an F every time, but i admit that this probably doesn’t always happen.
One thing that helps me is that i can, in some cases, fail them without failing them. One of the classes i’m teaching right now is a required class for students in a particular major. In order to graduate, they not only need to take my class, but they need to attain a C or better. Giving those students a D is effectively the same as an F.
I should add, by the way, that a lot of my students hate the fact that i take their grammar and sentence construction into account when i grade their papers. Some of the criticisms i got in my student evaluation forms last semester included things like “Harsh on papers. Feels more like a literature/critical thinking class than a history class.” Of course, the students who write such things intend them as criticism, but don’t seem to realize that i actually consider a comment like this to be a compliment. History is all about critical thinking, and about learning how to communicate your ideas in writing.
I just realized that i forgot to answer this part of your question.
No, there’s a good chance that i wouldn’t be suspicious in such a case. The quality of writing in that example is, as i said in my previous post, bad enough that i might not suspect plagiarism. So when the student received a D or an F for the paper, they would be getting a shitty grade, but would not be suffering any of the consequences of their cheating.
But there are also other tools to help teachers out. My students submit all their written work through the class website (no paper at all), and i return their papers to them electronically as well. Our campus uses a piece of course software called Moodle, which is a free, open source equivalent of paid software like Blackboard/WebCT. Integrated with Moodle, we also have TurnItIn, which is a service that scans student papers and compares them against the internet, as well as against TurnItIn’s own database of previously-submitted student work. For each student, the teacher gets an “Originality Report,” which shows how much of the student’s paper might have come from other places. This also helps us to catch the cheaters.
I’m not LOLing I’m crying.
Fretful Porpentine, i showed your example to my wife (also a college teacher), and she was in hysterics.
What does an originality report look like for a genuinely original paper? Like, is there ever a gray area or is the average original paper like 2% chance of plagiarism? What’s the metric? Is there a difference between an A-level paper and a solid C minus?
Well, what you have to understand about the software is that it makes no distinction between stuff that is properly quoted and cited, on the one hand, and stuff that is simply plagiarized, on the other.
So, if a student writes a fantastic essay and uses a long quotation to illustrate a point, and provides a proper footnote showing the source of her information, the software still marks this section as a possible problem. Similarly, the footnote itself, with the name of the author and the book, might also get flagged because it replicates a sequence of words that can easily be found on the internet; this still doesn’t mean, however, that the student has cheated.
Using TurnItIn requires that the teacher evaluate the report and distinguish between duplicated material that is correctly used, and duplicated material that is an attempt to pass off someone else’s work as the student’s own.
Here are two low-res screenshots of TurnItIn reports from a couple of semesters ago, showing what the report looks like and how it flags sections of the paper. I’ve blacked out any information that might identify me, my students, or my university. Each flagged section corresponds to a particular outside source, and it’s all color and number coded so you can see where different information came from.
The first paper was, in fact, largely plagiarized from various sources, while the second was a good paper with no plagiarism.
You can see lots and lots of flags in the first paper, and a 63% similarity index, while the second paper has fewer flagged sections (and those are mainly properly-cited quotations) and a similarity index of 24%. Obviously, papers that are all correctly cited can still be bad papers. If a student does nothing but string together a series of quotations, without offering any analysis or argument of his own, that’s going to get a poor grade even if there is no actual plagiarism.
Basically, looking at the similarity index on TurnItIn is only ever a starting point, and you need to actually read the paper in order to evaluate what the flags are telling you. A similarity index in the 20s and even 30s is not unusual for an original paper, simply because students often use quotations from the sources to support their arguments. But anything over about 40% is a big red flag, either for actual plagiarism, or simply for lazy writing that uses quotations in place of analysis and argument.
I’m an American, but my parents are Canadian. For a long time growing up I thought it was spelled colour.
Fascinating. For the insight into the counter-plagiarism world, that the media used Upton Sinclair’s writings against him during his run for governor, and that “muckraking” is a word.
When I was in high school, I used British spellings for a lot of words. I guess I thought it was cooler, or something.