I once heard of a teacher that basically did this with a spontanous pop quiz, in a fit of annoyance at low attendance. Unfortunately it happened to a friend, not me.
A bit off topic, but not worthy of its own pit thread, is professors who are just incredibly anal about citation format. I understand that it needs to be consistent and coherent, but so long as it’s both what does it matter if it’s APA or MLA or Chicago or whatever precise? Yet for some reason- not sure if it’s an accreditation thing or whatever- the longer I stay in academia the more professors I know (even outside of Comp classes [where they’re anal because citation is part of the class]) who are just ridiculously strict and will count off points for the least little thing.
Writing
instead of the correct APA style
is not, imho, worth subtracting points unless the course is in citation styles. If it were cited as
I can understand perhaps, but so long as you can find the source that’s all that’s really important and why the citation guidelines are there.
I’ll also admit there’s blurriness in what is and isn’t plagiarism, such as “at what point does it cease being paraphrasing and not require a citation?”, but the advice I always give students is
IT’S ALWAYS BETTER TO PROVIDE AN UNNECESSARY CITATION THAN TO OMIT A NECESSARY ONE
which I think works for any academic project.
I don’t understand this at all. The purpose of an answer key in a math book is so you can check if you got it right. Did you really think your job was to do your Calculus problems by copying the answers from the book? Have you never had a math book before with an answer key in it?
ETA: I’m not trying to insult you here, I am truly baffled by what you wrote and trying to understand what happened.
By my senior year I was writing a lot on the political situation in the Middle East. For all of my papers, I started stapling an addendum of two lists. List 1 was the titles of all of the papers I had already written on the subject. List 2 was the complete bibliography of all of the books and major articles I had sourced for those papers. This was all in an Appendix AFTER the standard listing of sources for the paper. I simply had done so much on the subject, I knew that a variety of thoughts / issues / ideas in my head had no doubt come from other directions.
When I was a kid, I would cite the World Book and steal from Brittanica.
Oh, god, that’s ANNOYING. I had a damned library science class that had I swear WEEKS on citation form - and we’re talking about a graduate class here. With people who presumably had bachelor’s degrees. I started cutting it because I thought, you know, if I get hit by a bus at 7 on a Monday, what would I rather have been doing for the last hour of my life?
On the other hand, I’ve had patrons come to me with citations in books or articles that are so patently wrong and missing information that we absolutely couldn’t find the article or book. Especially legal stuff.
Legal documents and GovDocs and others are all a rule unto themselves. And you’re always going to have *that one *document per term that’s going to defy all known examples: the author’s surname is ?11xyz OOlv and it’s written on the side of a jelly jar or whatever. (I had to help a student cite anonymous handwritten marginalia from a photocopied corporate training manual a few months back- took for bleeding ever to figure that one out.)
Totally off-topic, but the Word 2007 citation maker drives me nuts because I don’t believe they asked anybody who actually uses or requires citations about how to format it.
Yeah, but there be rules, and some people evidently do not bother following them. Often you can’t tell if it’s a book or an article or an interview or an interpretive dance or what on God’s green earth it is that you’re even looking for in the first place.
ETA - I hope Word 2007’s citation maker comes with a shark that bites your kneecaps, too. I can’t believe those brats today are getting the same degree I got for a whole lot less work.
What did you suppose the purpose of the homework assignment was? To verify whether or not you’d purchase the answer book? To verify you know how to copy answers correctly from another source?
This is no different than being asked to read chapter 3 of Moby Dick and summarize it in less than 5 pages…and turning in an almost verbatim excerpt from Cliff’s Notes.
Stop throwing out strawmen. I said that this course – the one I was teaching where the student stole someone else’s work and turned it in as his own – was about designing and implementing software. I was not teaching code reuse. I was teaching code creation.
And things may be different these days, but when I was in college there were no classes in code reuse. When I was hiring programmers years later, their NIH attitudes did bother me, but the whole reason I hired them was to create new products, not to reuse other people’s code.
I saw your claim that you program professionally, but this response makes me doubt it – unless you’re just baiting us. Are you really claiming that every single person who reads a description of a program on shareware.com, decides whether it meets his requirements, downloads it, installs it, and runs it, is “dealing with the code itself”? Beyond the fact that my student removed the comment on the top line of the source code (the copyright notice), I have no reason to believe that he even looked at the source files, much less understood them.
When I hire someone with a degree in computer science, I expect that person to have a fundamental knowledge of data structures, algorithms, programming languages, coding practices, and a whole lot of other things. I expect that person to have a set of skills, too, including the ability to design a program and write the code for it. If you claim to know a certain computer language, I don’t take that to mean you’re able to search the Internet and find other people’s programs written in that language. I take it to mean that you can use the language, and that’s why I gave out that type of assignment when I was teaching.
And you are still wrong. If you had read your own cite, you would see that you do not need to cite “common knowledge”.
In the context of a chemistry class, Bohrs models are common knowledge, just as in the context of a history class the name of the first President under the U.S. Constitution is common knowledge. Context is key. If you state some fact or idea that anyone in your position should be expected to know you would not need to cite. The only possible way it could be construed as plagiarism is if you were specifically claiming it as a new idea, which would be doubly stupid because either you are plagiarizing or you paid no attention to any chemistry class since 5th grade.
Actually, I seem to remember one instructor saying if you can expect to find the exact same idea or information in multiple locations without citation, then you don’t need to cite.
Silly me, I thought that saying explicitly verbally and in text
"The ONLY requirement for this project is that you write SOMETHING original. If you write something on your own, you will get full credit and pass the course. If you copy an article from the Internet or another source, you will fail add fail the course. Once again IF YOU COPY YOU WILL FAIL. This is THE ONLY rule for this project. Get it? DO NOT COPY! This is the only thing I am asking of you. Do not copy and you will pass!"
would work.
These were students who already failed the class for not bothering to show up even once. I’m not actually allowed to fail my students, so this was their “make up exam.” I just wanted them to do a little bit of work before they got a passing grade for a class they didn’t do shit for.
I did have a laugh when said students showed up at my office crying their eyes out. Had to tell them to go to the Dean and he’d change their grades, but I sure as heck wasn’t…
Also note, these were university seniors.
Then they are SHOCKED that their degree fails to impress employers.
Ha. This all reminds me of the time that I received a book of poetry that my niece had a poem in - you know the kind, a student writes a poem and then for a small fee it can be included in the published book, copies of which are then bought pretty much exclusively by the parents.
So I’m flipping through that, and a poem written by another girl catches my eye: it was called Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, and started off, “Whose woods these are I think I know/His house is in the village though/He will not see me stopping here/To watch his woods fill up with snow.” And then continued on pretty much as you’d expect.
I wrote a letter to the organisers, informing them that they had a young Bob Frost in their midst. They sent the girl a pretty sharp note, but actually I wasn’t anywhere near as bothered by her plagiarism as I was the fact that apparently, not a single person prior to publication had picked up on it.
Bit worrying, really.
That’d be because people publishing those books don’t actually read any of the poems that go into them.
Yes, must be. At least I hope that’s the reason! 
Those things are targeted vanity publishing scams. If the fish’ll bite on worms, why shell out for chicken livers?
Pretty much. The Bulgarian educational system is terrible. I’ll try to avoid ranting here, and just say that I often felt that any attempts to teach my kids English were being undermined by the overall lack of discipline, respect, and anything resembling a legitimate attempt to provide a quality education in the school. People often ask me if I think I accomplished anything while working as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and frankly, I have no fucking clue. I think I did help a few very motivated kids who were really interested in learning, but the average student probably didn’t get much out of the opportunity to learn from a native speaker because the standards are so low that they know they can cheat and not do homework and not pay attention and there are very few consequences built into the system. A lot of the time, the only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that being in Peace Corps would help me on a personal level in achieving my goals (which it did in that I got into some top grad school programs I wouldn’t have stood a shot at otherwise).
Argh. There goes my attempt to avoid ranting.
The specific example I was referring to, where I tried to fail a couple student for cheating, was on an exam. I proctored pretty harshly, but I missed this one. Two girls both responded to a question with the same, very strange and very wrong answer. It struck me as HIGHLY unlikely that they had arrived at this answer independently. I gave them both 0s. My counterpart - the Bulgarian teacher of English I worked with - later overruled me and told me I couldn’t do this, that I had to just mark the questions wrong and that was it. My students sure as hell weren’t expecting it - I saw them on the street shortly after they got their grades back and before I got overruled and they just totally freaked out at me, begging to know why they’d gotten 0s and there must have been some kind of mistake and what’s so wrong with both of them saying that you can buy newspapers at the scuba diver anyway?
Standing in the road, I guess?
I don’t buy the idea that Chinese students don’t know that plagiarizing is wrong here. I’ve caught dozens of them over the years, and nearly all of them expressed remorse: “I’m so sorry…I was stupid…I will never do it again.”
It’s possible that they were sorry they got caught, but that still indicates that they knew it was wrong when they did it.
So I was searching through the internet for an essay on plagiarism so that I could copy it in here and chuckle a little bit while seeing if anyone figured out that it was plagiarized from another site.
Then I stumbled upon this: http://www.123helpme.com/preview.asp?id=27338
For $5.95 I can purchase an essay on plagiarism. Seriously, how awesome is that?