Yes, you. The brazen-haired teenage hussy in the front row, who just turned in three pages from the bloody MERCK MANUAL, as if I wouldn’t notice it wasn’t your own work. And had the balls to ask if it was “too technical.” Yes, I think if you don’t fucking UNDERSTAND IT WELL ENOUGH TO PUT IT INTO YOUR OWN WORDS, it’s bloody well too technical.
Oh … I see; you DID put it into your own words – by using your word processor’s search and replace function to change “Fe” to “iron.” Well, here’s a tip – next time, search for WHOLE WORDS ONLY. It’s pretty fucking obvious that something is wrong with your paper when it contains words like “deironctive” and “irontus.”
And you, the boy who just transferred to UNC this semester. I don’t know what the instructors did at Podunk Secretary’s School or wherever the hell it is you come from, but here we generally READ the papers when we grade them. That means you CANNOT cut and paste the entire text of your second paper into your third paper. Do you think I’m too stupid to notice that I’ve SEEN IT BEFORE? Or that it was obviously written in response to a DIFFERENT FUCKING ASSIGNMENT?
Can you give a Dopeslap as a grade? And what’s the point value on that?
If it were my student, I’d publicly humiliate them in front of the class…“Hey students, here is what NOT to do…”
…But its probably a good thing I’m not teaching them…
I really hope he gets an F, for his own sake. He needs to learn a lesson and the quicker and harsher, the better for him in the long run.
I’m planning on going up to see my parents for Passover, so what say we try for a bit of a dopefest 'round Monday, April 9th or so?
[/byejack]
FWIW, my senior English term paper in HS (Brit Lit) was 98% plagarised. I took the excerpts from Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, alphebetised them, threw in a quarter page of footnotes, and got an A+…One of my proudest moments.
I’m sorry. I really, really feel your pain. How disrespectful.
But I gotta admit it, if I were grading the paper and I came across “irontus” et al., I’d be laughing sooooo hard! 'Course, I’d still give the student an A…
With evidence like that, you have a PERFECT case for an honor violation.
I mean, please Dear Student, if you don’t want to do the work, fucking take your low grade like an adult. Or drop out. But don’t cheat. What does someone like that think of themselves when they go to sleep at night? God, get some integrity!
At some schools, that student would be out on her ass. At others, she’d at least have to answer to a panel of her peers. Does UNC have something like this? Surely there is something you can do other than just slap a bad grade on it.
I laughed out loud with the “irontus” thing. quite classic.
I once had a student turn in a report on some scientist (Newton?) that was merely a printout of the text on the web page he accessed. I have him a big, fat, juicy “0”. Dad came in and had a conference with me regarding the grade. Boy did I have fun. I gave him a copy of the definition of plagairism that I gave EVERY student BEFORE the assignment. He read it and I asked him if he understood it. He said that he did. Since he had his son’s paper with him, and I had the printout from the website, I asked him to follow along in his son’s paper while I read from the printout, stopping me if I read anything different from what was in the paper. After three sentences, he left.
Knowing that you are in the right makes it soooooo sweet!
Well, I don’t know about UNC but at Oklahoma State, plagerizing would get Miss. Brazen-Haired-Hussy tossed right out on her happy little ass. No chance for appeal. Boot to the head.
As for Boy-In-The-Front-Row, boot to the head and a F.
I’m always amazed at what some students think they can get away with. Sheesh.
The trouble is, they often do get away with it. As blessedwolf’s and my own experience proves, there is a small percentage of lazy-ass teachers out there, who once they have decided you are a passing student, don’t read any of your work. When I know my paper is going to be skimmed through at best, the temptation to turn in a paper on a similar topic written for a different teacher is very hard to resist. Still, at least it was my own work I was turning in. Still, I hope you give TheHussy and PodunkBoy a good scare. Wait ‘til you have something you wrote handed back to you. That’s priceless.
Yes, it is indeed an honor code violation at UNC. The Merck Manual case is definitely going to the honor court. I may let the other one do a rewrite – at least it was his own work.
“It’s obvious that you just copied your entire paper verbatim from various websites. We have printouts of the websites here, with the copied portions highlighted. Why did you do it?”
“Well, I didn’t really understand the stuff, so I just found it and copied it into my paper.”
“Look, you can’t just cut and paste your entire paper from websites.”
“I did not cut and paste! I typed every single word.”
1.) group mebers 1-3 do no work for 3 weeks
2.) group member 4 hands me a disk with work obviously copied from a website…he hadn’t even deleted the hard returns so the formatting was all screwed up.
3.) group members 1-3 hand me shitty papers
4.) group meber 4 complains! about how lazy the others are!
5.) I weld this shit into a decent presentation, do a lot of extra work, we get A’s
6.) Group member 3 (STUPID BITCH) asks if she can put MY presentation in her PORTFOLIO!
I may have written gibberish sometimes, but it least it was MY gibberish. Bastards
I type papers for students, and although I don’t know most of the work in a subject field, even I can tell what has been plagiarized, just by the different tone of the passage. If I can tell immediately, how can one possibly pass those papers to a proffesor? I could just take the money, type it up, and keep my mouth shut, but my ethical compass dictates that I stop typing, and have the student do it over correctly this time.
"I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!
Plagiarize,
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’."
Fail them both! There is no room in college for people either too stupid or too lazy to do their own work.
Here at the business school, each group member is also supposed to grade the other members of their group. It’s a part of the project. It’s a little incentive not to ride on the coattails of the others, since they will ream the crap out of you.
Sometimes it’s obvious, but you can’t find exactly where it’s plagarized from–though typing a suspicious sentence into Google is always a good place to start. You don’t want to accuse a student of plagarizing (or any other academic misdeed) unless you can back it up if they appeal to a higher authority. As with any type of cheating, only the really stupid offenders get caught.
This probably hasn’t been your first experience with plagiarism, so your mind’s likely made up as to the appropriate course of action, but I thought I’d chime in.
I noticed once that four of my students’ homeworks were identical (I clearly specified that collaboration on homework was not allowed.) In fact, they were identical to the answer in the teacher’s manual. I was prepared to flunk them for the course, but since I was only a T.A., I decided to ask some of the professors in the department for advice.
Interestingly, the professors really didn’t give a shit about plagiarism, and told me I should do whatever was easiest for me. They saw teaching undergraduates as a nuisance to be approached with as little effort as possible.
This made me think: these kids have been conditioned that plagiarism is acceptable by their other professors’ attitudes. So I decided to give them a break and just give zeros for that assignment, and warn them that the next occurrence would result in an F and a report to the Academic Misconduct committee.
Whe I confronted them with the evidence, you could almost hear their pants fill with shit. They knew the jig was up. The punishment of a zero was really superfluous at that point; they had the fear of God put into them. I think it was the first time any of them had even considered that they might be caught and that it might be taken seriously. One of them even wrote me a letter of a apology, acknowledging the disrespectful nature of plagiarism.
I think I did the right thing. They got no credit for the work they stole, and I doubt they’ll do it again.
