And what happened when you turned her in to her professor?
Stories from a friend who is a college professor:
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student who plagiarized from a book of essays on the topic – where the professor was the editor (and part author) of the book! Like you think the professor isn’t going to recognize quotes from his own book?
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a student who plagiarized from one of the seminal books from one of the founders of the field. Like you think the professor isn’t going to recognize quotes from one of the foundation works of the field?
And plagiarized unnecessarily, too. Had he used it as a properly cited quotation, it would have greatly bolstered the argument he was making.
Svlad Cjelli? 
I have a feeling, Trans Fat Og, that I’ve seen your essay somewhere before…
Thirding **Kyla **and even sven – I work with ESL students in summer, and Russian , Saudi, and Chinese students especially have a very difficult time understanding copyright, plagiarism, intellectual property, etc. As those two posters mentioned, it is very much a part of their culture and educational process at home.
Where it gets challenging for us here is that a lot of our ESL students are planning to go to the university (in the States) where I teach, and of course we have a policy in place against academic dishonesty.
The real challenge/headache (tick as appropriate) is when I teach our ITA program – this is the four week institute in July/August for the incoming International Teaching Assistants. A big part of the course I teach is for them to learn how to handle a classroom filled with Americans, and a subsection is dealing with cheating, plagiarism, &c. So it sometimes gets tricky first explaining to the graduate student why he or she can’t plagiarise, and then how to recognise it in their own charges, and how to confront the undergraduates.
t-bonham@scc.net That’s what my student did in the ‘ransom note’ essay; and yes! I’ve had others who lift stuff from standard works, thinking they’re quite clever to have discovered these texts. I know they must be thinking, ‘This is so cool, this Edward Gibbon guy - there’s no way the professor knows about this!’
That reminds me of when I’m giving out assignments. Their first task is “Read the assignment”. Their second task is “Read the assignment”.
I always remember that thread not only for its discussion of the main issue, but of Sampiro’s recollection of the time he was a proud black woman.
Wow. Just wow at that sort of thinking.
I wonder if that explains why so many of the websites filled with plagiarized copy that I’ve come across seem to be from China. I’ve had five articles stolen myself.
I always remember that thread because I was in a theater troupe with those guys back in the day. I oughta look 'em up.
I’ve never heard of turnitin.com before. I think I’m going to submit my old papers when I get home and see if it thinks they’re plagiarized.
I assure you they’re not, incidentally - and I have the shitty grades to prove it.
If you plagiarize after getting an express warning against plagiarism at the start of the class, you deserve to flunk, background and “cultural predilection” not withstanding.
Claiming not to “understand” the warning signifies that you are too stupid or insufficiently grounded in the language to pass the course, so the outcome should be the same.
There was a fooferaw recently over at the N.Y. Times about how one of their financial bloggers was stealing stuff from the Wall St. Journal, including online scoops that he was reproducing on the Times site within a short time after they appeared on the Journal website. His excuse was that he was mixing in his own data and research with stories from other media into a common file, and so was accidentally using others’ work. Uh-huh. His lazy ass got fired.
Oh, can I play? I am living in the grown up world where these plagiarizing twerp students have now entered the workforce as plagiarizing twerp adults. I mentioned in this thread that the production side of things is clashing with writers because they think the proofreader is mean and it hurts their feelings when he corrects their mistakes.
I didn’t really go on about the rampant plagiarism, here’s my favorite top three:
Number 3:
Assignment: Formal article about experts in the field of a certain high-finance topic.
Plagiarism: Copy-pasted info from the corporate websites of the individuals that had executive profiles online.
Tip off: Irrelevant content - “David lives with his wife Clara and their parrot, Moe.”
Number 2:
Assignment: Annual research article about the impact of evolving financial reporting standards on small to mid-sized companies.
Plagiarism: Copied last year’s article from the same publication but replaced “2009” with “2010” where appropriate
Tip off: See above thread link, plagiarized from last year’s rough copy, including egregious errors comparable to saying NYSE stands for New York Smurf Exchange*
Number 1:
Assignment: Formal article about anti-fraud controls and corporate governance.
Plagiarism: Copy-pasted from Germany-based business/finance publication.
Tip off: Run through Google Translator with predictable results: “…reminiscent of the days when the residence of the powerful steel baron a kind of unofficial seat of government of the German economy was.”
(That writer was summarily fired.)
*Fake example, but the real deal was just as bad.
Plagiarism story #23954
In college, I was a TA for a high-ish level engineering course where assignments were given out of the book. I knew that a copy of the solutions manual was floating amongst the students. I made it very well known that while I will not PURSUE those with the manual, if you turn in work that is copied line-for-line, I will give a zero on that assignment. (After some repeat behavior, I changed “zero on that assignment” to “drop in letter grade” to “see you next semester.”)
About halfway through the semester, a student turned in a suspicious homework assignment. It had:
Notation: All rounding, significant figures, and notation were directly from the solutions.
Layout: This is hard to explain. The way a student’s math flows on the page is like a fingerprint. This one was from the solutions line-for-line
The last work-problem required the student to graph something on a computer. His graph was PHOTOCOPIED from the solutions manual.
I would like to say that he failed the course, but the professor just dropped him a letter grade and eked out with a C-.
this is basically the accepted philosophy in Law, too (except the honor code part). Although you have to attribute/cite.
Not quite sure why their culture couldn’t adapt/the individual students couldn’t adapt in a given classroom to properly cite and source their material.
Cracked software disseminated via torrents is the second sincerest form of flattery.
My freshman year of college, I was assigned to a four-person group project for World History.
Two of the people in my group plagiarized. Not just one. Two. One of them at least had the decency to apologize, and try to fix it - the other one never understood that she’d done anything wrong all all. I had to work hard to convince my prof that I hadn’t been involved.
I despise plagiarists. If I had my druthers, they’d all be expelled on detection. But not immediately - it takes time to heat the tar properly first.
I had that happen in my senior year. My group got bad vibes early on though and one heard a rumor that the plagiarists boyfriend had been doing a couple assignments for her. So I guess technically, he was the plagiarist, she was just a lazy bitch.
Anyway, we proactively went to our prof and said we were worried about her contribution. Our prof asked who Lazy Bitch was and when we revealed her name, she went :rolleyes: “Oh, her.” She didn’t elaborate, but we gather Lazy wasn’t a particularly diligent student. Our prof’s solution was that, when we collated our material, we were to mark Lazy’s section with a sticky-tab, and she would grade the three of us according to the quality of our work, and Lazy would be graded according to her boyfriend’s work.
In the end, since our prof was being so fair, rather than excise Lazy’s part, our group decided to hand in a complete project, so we divided Lazy’s work into three and finished it. We handed in our project and Lazy’s component together, but separately, and our prof was pleased.
Ha. Decades before the internet existed, I had a 9th grade student copy his book review from the back cover of the book itself. When I explained why he was getting zero credit for the report, showing him my own copy of the novel, he cried.
In law school we had two people get expelled for plagiarizing an assignment for the class on legal ethics.
calls Alanis Morisette
reads Ender’s post to her
points out that THAT is irony