Plagiarism is the scourge of academic teaching these days. We try (and try, and try. And try.) to teach the students that plagiarism is the second deadliest sin in academia. That we catch at least quite a bit of those who try. That plagiarism is cheating, and cheating will ,if caught, fail them and even may cause a suspension. Do they learn? No way. Do they understand that if they can find something on the Internet, we can? No way. Do they realize that we have automated systems that crawl the web and search for the very phrases they use in their (electronic) reports? Apparently not. The last really makes me realize I’m an old fart: Are today’s students that fucking dumb?
Got another report this fall. Engineering project. Couple of red flags were raised on first reading. Put it through the plagiarism control system. Yep, the whole frikkin’ intro was lifted, verbatim, from a thesis on the frikkin’ web! Now I just have to find out if we’re going to fail them, or if we’re just going to give them a crappy minimum pass grade, and if the whole group should be slapped, or if we should single out the one student who “wrote” that chapter.
Fuck, do they think we’re so stupid that we won’t catch them, or are they themselves so stupid that they don’t understand? What really depresses me is that these guys aren’t freshmen. They’re master degree students. They should know better.
Only hole I can see is if your professor is intimately familiar with the literature. So don’t try it on a Master’s or PhD thesis work within your professor’s field of research. If it’s a minor project course outside your professor’s field of work, you’ll have a decent (but not perfect) chance to pull it off.
ETA: But if you’re going through the work of translating it, it’s even less of a chore to rewrite it and use it properly
I don’t see how there’s a question. You steal, you fail. Period. It’s not only the individual’s credibility, which apparently is crap, but the instructor who misses the theft and the department/institution if it chooses to give another chance or let the plagiarist pass with a minimum grade.
I’m sure money plays heavily into all of this, but it shouldn’t. But what do I know - I’m an engineer, not an educator.
MHO is the same. But apparently, we have some kind of scale for the severity of the cheating and the severity of the reaction. If I don’t conform to that scale, there’s just going to be a lot of crap flying, and when the shitstorm’s over, the result will conform to central guidelines. I don’t need that crapfest.
Then there’s the problem with the project being a group project, not an individual one. Yes, every group member is in principle accountable for the whole result, but frankly, it just doesn’t work that way in real life. If you’re a co-author or a co-worker, is it reasonable to demand that you’re personally responsible for everything your coworkers produce? Even if it’s outside your field of competence?
I’ve been accused of being a cynic more than once, but in this case, I don’t think so. We’re a public institution, so we don’t depend on donations.
My favorite is when a student that can barely write a coherent sentence turns in a paper with vocabulary and sentence structure far above their level. A semester of “The line has a midpoint because I figured that’s what it’d be doing.” becomes “Assume segment BD is bisected at point A. The locus of points …” when a report done at home. Of course when I ask them in class what a locus is, if lucky I get “It’s like a grasshopper.”
I’ve done a little research in this area, and it looks to me like students who plagiarize are sometimes genuinely confused but more often believe that they will not be caught – and that if they are caught, they’re unlikely to face the harsher penalties. Unfortunately, I suspect they’re mostly right about this.
I’m a university librarian, and it would be a pain for me to identify a journal article that’s relevant to a particular topic, isn’t obviously outdated, but that isn’t available electronically, isn’t written in English, and has never been translated into English. I started to write a much longer post explaining all the ways in which this would be difficult, but the short and simple version is that American colleges generally do not own a whole lot of old, foreign language print journals, nor are their database subscriptions likely to cover many old, foreign language articles that aren’t available online. Students are often pretty bad at finding even the current, relevant, English-language articles we do have access to, so what you’re suggesting sounds to me like it would be far beyond the abilities of most students.
Even if a student could manage to do this, getting ahold of a suitable article and translating it would probably take more time and more effort than just doing a half-assed job of writing an original paper.
Of course, that always happens. Always. If they were marginally competent with language and writing, they wouldn’t need to plagiarize in the first place; but because they are not even marginally competent, they can’t see the glaring differences between their own prose and academic writing. I’ve posted this before, but one of my favorite examples (real!) from a student paper went like this:
I have showed this passage to my freshman comp students and asked them to spot the plagiarized bits. Invariably, the top three or four students in the class hit the second paragraph and crack up laughing. The average ones will get it with some prodding. The ones at the bottom of the class look up in bewilderment; they cannot hear the shift in style at all. It’s as perfect an illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect as anything I’ve ever seen.
Depending on the level - it isn’t an absolutely horrible analysis and summary though. I’d be thrilled if my probably not college going tenth grader brought that home (although he does write gooder English). On the other hand, my ninth grade daughter has gotten accused of plagiarizing things she wrote herself because “kids her age don’t write that well or use those words.” (And she wouldn’t have, but she is familiar with the thesaurus feature in Word).
At least so far…