This made me laugh because it is so true. How stupid do they think we are? The mind boggles, really.
As for turning in material with active hyperlinks, I had a TEACHER submit program material not only plagiarized but with the Wiki [citation needed] things still intact. Jesus. I don’t hold grudges usually but that still makes me mad whenever I think about it.
I know that kid! Well, I know of him. When my psychology tutor was explaining about turnitin, he told us that a few years ago someone handed in a paper that was apparently 30 or 40% plagarised (I don’t remember the exact figure). It came from a book that was written in 1912, was long since out of print, wasn’t available online and wasn’t in the university library or any libraries nearby. The student insisted he’d never heard of it. They gave him the benefit of the doubt.
IMO, plagiarism restrictions should be relaxed for the “introduction” section of scientific publications. When you’ve got a dozen different groups all working the same field, they’re all going to have the same introduction. But even though everyone is citing the same damn papers, they still somehow have to come up with an “original” way of summarizing each and every citation. After three or four different permutations of “Previously, gene X was found to regulate gene Y in tissue Z (Jones, 2001)”, it’s pretty much impossible to avoid unintentional reuse of someone else’s phrasing of the same statement.
Everywhere else, of course, plagiarism is completely unacceptable.
Excellent! What a marvelous idea!
I am reminded of a Foxtrot cartoon in which Peter (?) gets caught plagarizing off Wikipedia, and his teacher calls him for that, he then counters with “but how do you know I didn’t write the Wikipedia article to begin with?” Teacher shoots him a “don’t try that shit with me” look.
I know that my reference site on national anthems is known by students (of all grade levels up to and including university) by the emails I’ve recieved, I have a morbid curiosity now if any of it has been used for plagarism. I’m tempted to put in some random untruths in there, but my integrity, and love for the subject, is so far preventing me from doing that. I wonder if there’s any way I can make my site more plagarism proof?
(Emphasis added).
That’s funny.
My teaching days were pre-internet, so students had to plagiarize from actual, you know, books. Which made it slightly harder. Still, me being the teacher and all (I taught high school and college, simultaneously), and having various degrees n the subject I taught, you’d think one student in particular might have realized that copying an entire essay by Harold Bloom, of all people, might set off a few bells. He denied that he’d copied anything, of course, even though I had the source in my hand during the conversation. I do recall asking him what some words he’d used meant. “Inchoate” was one. He didn’t know. No idea. Couldn’t even guess.
That particular incident led to my resignation from the school (the high school). This student had been busted cheating before, so I gave him a zero for the entire semester. I’d had it with the cheating, and I wanted to penalize him and send a warning to the other students.
This led to a meeting with the parents of the student, who insisted (not asked) that their son’s grade be changed. He was applying to colleges, this would screw up his chances of getting into a good college, etc. Not my problem, I replied. He’d been caught cheating before, and warned repeatedly of the consequences of any future cheating. As far as I was concerned, not doing the assignments for the course (and plagiarizing is at the very least not doing the assignments) was the same as simply never showing up. I wasn’t going to change his grade.
The principal of the school, however, changed the grade on the final report card of the year to a passing grade. I resigned.
A friend was contacted by the Dean of his former college (with whom he was in contact) and told that a current student had plagiarized his doctoral thesis.
His entire doctoral thesis.
And by “plagiarized” I mean “photocopied all the pages with the author’s name whited out and submitted it as his own”.
The Dean invited my friend to be present for the meeting with the student. Apparently it was… quite awkward…for the student who, needless to say, did not receive his doctorate.
Why? Was it a bad thesis? 
Well, what if at the beginning of a work, the author stated “I hereby disclaim any originality in this material”?
However, the plagiarized code does demonstrate the student’s ability (or lack of it) to recognize useful code. And in computer programming, that is a useful skill. In the real world, programmers are encouraged to reuse code.
A plagiarist could defend the opinion just as well as anyone else simply by cutting and pasting the supporting arguments. Penalizing unsupported assertions is a separate issue from penalizing plagiarisms.
Process can still be most important, even allowing plagiarism. The process of finding and copying the correct answers, for example.
By the way, the Straight Dope is about fighting ignorance, not promoting intelligence. There’s a difference.
Stating an idea that’s not your own without attribution is plagiarism. As far as I know, there’ no statue of limitations on plagiarism. Unless you show us how you yourself proved that theorem, then if you state it without attribution, you’re plagiarizing.
It’s unclear to me why originality must always be the primary consideration. What if we first graded on correctness and then had only partial deductions for unoriginality? Or, maybe some assignments could be graded strictly on correctness, without regard to originality, while others are graded strictly on originality.
Why must plagiarism always take precedence over all other features of a work.
Knowing how and where to find correct facts and theories is a useful skill. If a student could always assemble answers that were correct, why should it matter if they didn’t originate them themself?
Facts and theories cannot be copyrighted or patented. Algorithms cannot be copyrighted. Furthermore, plagiarism that significantly rephrases its source completely avoids copyright, which protects only a particular fixation. While one could violate a patent by doing what it describes, the actual description is in the public domain, so copying it is legal.
Plagiarism does not demonstrate any original knowledge, skill, or understanding. It might demonstrate knowledge, skill, or understanding about how to find correct answers, facts, or theories.
The value of the course would to show how well you could find the answers to the questions it asked.
Yes, I know; I’m questioning why using a source without attribution is considered more important than understanding the material.
Communication skill can be judged separately from originality. If a student takes a bunch of ideas from sources without attribution, and compiles them into a coherent, easily-understood and correct synthesis, are you saying that the plagiarism completely discounts all other positive parts of the student’s work? In today’s academia, it does, but it is not clear to me why it must be so.
I don’t know what your field is, but in the industry I work in it’s almost impossible to do anything new. In the rare cases we do come up with something new, we patent it, and we get large incentives to do so, because it is difficult and unusual. Most of the time, we compete by doing slightly better the same thing everyone else is doing. Plagiarism is not an issue–doing things well is more usual than doing things originally.
Science is determining how the world works. Attributing who did each little part of it is not a necessary part of it. If a scientific paper is only going to be judged on the parts that are new to science, then should we need to waste time on attributing previous work?
A photographic memory and the knowledge of how to use a library seem very useful skills to me.
An ability to communicate and an ability of properly cite sources are separate skills. One can have the former without the latter.
Guts and integrity.
Kudos to you.
My lecture that I gave to my students every year and before writing assignments stressed that (1) copied work is stolen from the original writer and (2) I’m only grading you on your own work. If the work you hand in is not yours, then as far as I’m concerned you didn’t do the assignment at all and your grade for it is zero. Not just failing, but zero. You’d be better off handing in a crappy paper and getting a 65 on it than handing in a fake and getting zero.
I also pointed out to them that an ethical college course would have the same standards and that they’d better learn that lesson now rather than later when it would be even more important.
Just to add my admiration for you. Did the principal have any justification for his actions? Was there any repercussion from (say) the teachers’ union?
I almost didn’t get it. Thanks for that one. 
I agree, but the purpose of the test isn’t to find out if you can reproduce someone else’s work, it’s to find out if you’re good enough to create new work. It’s like the difference between a lookup table and an actual calculator - only the latter is much use once you go beyond the bounds of the table.
But the whole purpose of taking the class is to learn how to write code. From scratch. And understand the programming languages.
There is no connection whatsoever. The plagiarist only has to read the description of the program, download it, see that it works and meets the requirements of the assignment, and turn it in. He doesn’t have to recognize doodle-squat in the code itself.
Pleonast, I don’t know if you’re playing Devil’s Advocate or just full of shit. The reason that “originality” is required is that it demonstrates the extent to which the student has digested the material and understands it. Plagiarism demonstrates that they were able to find a paper somewhere on the topic, not that they understand said paper.
Yes, being able to find resources is a valuable skill. That’s why research methods courses often have assignments consisting of merely finding books or articles and turning in citations. I’m quite sure I’d be able to find a good book on, say, stamp collecting in about 15 minutes in any resonable research library. Give me another 15 minutes and I’ll have a paper copied from it–reformatted to look like my work. I wouldn’t have learned a damn thing about stamp collecting, though.
True, but that can only get you so far. If you’re taking a programming class, you are (usually) required to be able to **write **code, not just recognize it.
Defense of plagiarism. Good Lord. I thought **Cesario **was banned.
ETA: Pedophilia is more reprehensible than plagiarism, but just.
Not a union situation.
I was at the time, an adjunct instructor at a branch of the City University of New York. Given that adjunct’s pay is, or was then, roughly equivalent to that of McDonald’s, a lot of us took part-time high school teaching jobs to supplement our income.
The job I took was at a private, religious school for boys. The full-time faculty were of the same faith and ethnicity as the boys, but generally the part-timers, who taught secular subjects, were not. We were definitely second-class citizens, in large part because we were not of the same faith or ethnicity as the boys or the full-time faculty, who were not to be permitted to screw up the futures of the boys.
The principal’s justification was simply that he wasn’t going to let me reduce this boy’s chances of admission to the college of his choice. None of the part-time teachers had, or would ever have, sufficient rank to make a stand on the issue (other than by resigning, which is what I did).
Ugh. 
Did the principal not realize that if the kid pulled this after he was actually in college that he would have gotten a shitload of worse treatment than you were giving him, unless his dad was a major booster or the kid was a sports prodigy?
I plagiarized exactly once in college.
Second semester of my freshman year. I couldn’t write for shit and was getting very frustrated with the bad grades. So, I copied an essay out of one of my Sociology books and submitted it to my English prof. It was kind of an open-ended writing assignment and the essay was on a suitable topic. Another shitty grade. Said the essay was poorly written and was my worst effort yet. I decided I needed to learn how to write better.
I’ve questioned the whole paper-writing concept in the U.S. since middle school. I agree with everyone that the outright stealing of another’s work is a no-no, whether one copies it word-for-word or shuffles the words around and replaces some using a thesaurus. But the premise that the dozens of research papers, essays, etc. composed in the thousands of middle schools, high schools and colleges by the millions of children in the US are all supposed to be original works with original ideas is ludicrous.
Kids that do it wrong are essentially lazy and get caught for plagiarizing. Kids that do it right piece together many sources and rephrase the concepts, which all results in…nothing. They’ve haven’t learned any more than anybody else that simply read the same sources. They haven’t added any value to themselves or society in general. They’ve basically only proven that they can follow the rules of the literary world. Okay, maybe in some cases they’ve also proven that they can write. But that’s generally not the purpose of most assignments.