Sometimes irony just washes over you like a tidal wave…
I was reading through a bunch of essays, many of which had to do with plagiarism, lying, cheating, stealing and related issues. Some were based specifically on a film the class was shown. Anyhow, I came across a paper whose author seemed to be writing at a level much higher than he had previously; he usually got Ds or Fs on past assignments because he can't write worth a crap.
I Googled some portions of the paper, and sure enough, he had kiped at least one whole paragraph from a free essay website. Either that, or he convinced someone else to write the paper for him, and that person was the one who stole the material off the website. This happens now and then as well.
Yes, we have been over plagiarism, quoting, citing, consequences, the dangers of letting others write your papers for you, and so on, many times. All the rules were established beginning on Day One. I have explained that I use the very same Internet that everyone else does, and that Google searches can locate stolen material in no time.
Sigh.
My favorite story is the kid I busted once for plagiarism. Then, when I gave him (and a couple of others) a second chance, I busted him again. This time, tho, he wasn’t aware that he had plagiarized. 'Cause his sister did the report for him…
(BTW, the report topic was a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry; when his sister “wrote” the paper for him, she just copied the write up from http://nobelprize.org/ )
Between the two of them, if brains were gunpowder, they couldn’t blow a nose.
[Hijack]I took a senior-level course in ethics in college. One of the last assignments was to write a lengthy paper. On the day the paper was due, I was standing outside the classroom with other students waiting for the professor to arrive to unlock the door. One of the Division I hockey players also in the class offered me an unspecified amount of money to add his name to the paper. (We were permitted to do the paper individually or with another person.) I declined, although he had just signed a contract with the NHL, so he was presumably flush with cash. Later, I thought about the irony of cheating on a paper in an ethics class. (Also, as my paper was typed, what was I going to do; handwrite his name on the cover page?)[/Hijack]
… and Wayne Gretzky spent the rest of his career playing exceptionally clean hockey to atone for this youthful lapse in judgment. Now you know … THE REST OF THE STORY!
And by failing the student, vivalostwages will be deconstructing his grade in a postmodern style by ironically exposing the “slacker” subculture to the classical notion of conformity. Bravo!
I just found three more plagiarized essays today, except that they were from a different class and were supposed to be literary analysis papers. It must be an epidemic. These things tend to occur in a flurry instead of being scattered throughout the semester.
A question: does a teacher/professor have to provide proof of plagiarism to fail the student? I ask because a professor of mine recently accused me of plagiarising an essay because “it was on such a higher level than what you normally turn in.” The story was that the essay in question was the first that I cared about. I was able to prove my ability by writing an impromptu essay in the prof’s office. But before that, I was in danger of being failed for the class, with no proof. Is this common?
I certainly can’t claim to speak for professors or anyone other than my own humble coughcough** self, but my usual modus operandi is to make damn sure that I can prove not just that plagiarism happened, but from what sites/books/etc. To me, it goes with the axiom: extrordinary claims require extrodinary evidence. If I am going to make the extrodinary claim that someone who handed in a very nice looking paper deserves a zero for it, I will have said extrordinary evidence (or keep my mouth shut).
Were I in your shoes, and the professor had not reversed his/her desicion, I would have spoken to my own dean to see what the policy was and if any pressure could be brought against said prof.
Like JAG above, I need evidence in hand. If they got it online, then I print up the page(s) that they copied from. If it’s a book/journal, then I photocopy the appropriate pages. Then when they come to me asking why they got an F in the class, I can point to the paper and the source material.
In the case you outline, where plagiarism is suspected but not provable, I’d talk to the student, saying that this work is so far above what they usually do that it seems suspicious. I ask them about the paper, to see if the ideas seem to be their own; then I might ask to see their notes/drafts/outlines. Usually one or the other will out them, especially the former (“So, you wrote this brilliant paper but you can’t explain what it means? Hmmm…”).
But I can’t fail a student merely on the suspicion of plagiarism. In fact, unfortunately, I’ve had to pass students who I was damned certain had cheated. No proof, no F.
My sister used to teach undergrad courses at several schools. Every year she warned her students she’d be using the school’s plagarism detection software, and every year she kept catching idiots who still thought that didn’t apply to them.
Her MO when making the accusation was to have the paper in one hand, and a webpage loaded on her computer, and pointing to the identical passages. (Or whole freaking paper.) The best result for this was when she confronted one sweet young thing, showing her a site with the exact paper on it that had been handed in, the SYT said, “That’s not the site I got it from!” In front of the dean. :smack:
She’d also told me that she usually had several other students each semester who handed in the ‘suspiciously better than normal’ assignment. But, unless she could find the site that the paper came from, she gave them a bye.
She also got more than a little pissed when the usual reaction of the administration of the schools (At least two different ones, that I can recall.) was to minimize the offense, and ask if there were some way the student could make things up. :rolleyes:
One reason she no longer does anything with undergrads.
I’ve had a couple of students in the past who i was almost certain had plagiarized their papers, but a thorough search turned up no evidence, so i had to let it go. I still feel like they got over on me, though.
I teach history, not literature, but because it’s intellectual history much of the stuff we read is primary source material, including things like sermons, philosophical works, and works of literature. I’m really wary about giving out any assignment that asks a student to analyze a single text, because that shit is just so easy to find on the web. The whole internet plagiarism thing is forcing teachers to be ever more inventive in setting papers, and it really sucks because i did some really interesting papers as an undergrad that i could never set now because the danger of plagiarism would be too high.
A while ago, i failed two student papers, both of which were plagiarized from the same website. I guess i asked for it, requiring a paper that compared W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk with Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery; there’s a ton of stuff on the internet about both those authors, and both of those texts. The really frustrating thing is that they didn’t even plagiarize from one of the dozens of really informative websites. Instead, they got their ideas from a sparknotes.com message board, from another undergrad who knew no more about the topic than they did. :rolleyes:
People who would buy essays from a website they found advertised in a message board post about how easy it is to catch plagurisers who use known websites? lets just call it… social darwinism…
Thing is, though, most plagiarizers get their stuff from free websites. If students buy papers from websites like the ones advertising below, they can be hard to catch because the bulk of the essays are hidden and password-protected, and you only get access to them once you pay, so a regular Google search often won’t find them.
If your college or university uses a service like TurnItIn, you have a better chance of catching students who use pay-for-paper websites, but even then it’s not guaranteed, and those services have quite a high turnaround time.
I’ve still been able to Google and find the first part of an essay even on the pay-sites. It’s like a little preview they give to see if you want to buy the whole thing–a sampling.
RE: writing levels…I often get students in Composition who are absolutely not ready for it and should be in a basic skills class. These folks can hardly write a sentence to save their lives. That’s why it’s so obvious they’ve plagiarized when they turn something in that sounds like it was written by a graduate student.
Suspicion of plagiarism is not enough for me to make a charge. I have only ever turned in reports on students who clearly stole things off of websites; I make copies of everything in order to prove it. Otherwise I would not report it.
**Here’s one for you: I just got an email earlier today from the student upon whom this thread is based. He wants to know what he got on his essay. This makes me even more suspicious that he got someone else to write it for him and has no clue that they stole it.
Or in the case of one of my 9th graders last year, “Oh, so you did remarkably above your level on this test after I was dumb enough to let you take it with your friend sitting next to you, but when confronted with the same test the next day, you get less than half the answers right orally.”
