Not my students. They don’t change a darned thing. It doesn’t even seem to occur to them.
Those are the best!
“So, Johnny Cheater, can you tell me what a ‘paradigm’ is? What doe ‘heuristic’ mean?”
I love it when they can’t even tell me what “their” own paper is supposed to be about, or even what specific words in “their” paper mean. Almost always the plagiarism is screamingly obvious because of this.
I have not replied to the student’s email. It actually came from him and a friend of his who is in the same class. It’s possible that the friend is the one who “helped him,” though it could have been anyone. I might just tell them that I prefer to wait until our class meets again so I can hand back the papers.
I’ve never heard of this. Can you expound on it, and on how it catches pay-to-play plagiarizers?
vivalostwages, I see you’re in CA; what school do you teach at, what do you teach, and what’s your experience like there? I’m OK with email if you’d rather not hijack the thread.
It’s kind of funny. If you’re smart you can plagiarize without getting caught. But if you’re smart you don’t need to plagiarize. So a disproportionate fraction of plagiarizers are INCOMPETANT plagiarizers.
I might make a comparison to the master criminals that show up in fiction. These are superintelligent criminal geniuses who plan intricate crimes and steal vast fortunes. But an unethical superintelligent genius has so many other ways of making vast fortunes that don’t require out and out crime that there’s generally no reason for them to resort to breaking into bank vaults or museums. So the vast majority of criminals are dumb people with poor self control who can’t figure out a better way to make money. And the people who go to jail for their crimes are disproportionally even dumber.
Oh yeah, Lemur, ain’t that the truth. I used to do background checks for a little extra cash, and would go down to the courthouse to look up what people had been arrested for and whatnot. It was truly amazing to see the stupidity of most crimes; anyone with the least amount of intelligence, I suppose, would realize that honest work is usually easier and more lucrative. It was quite the eyeopener for me to realize that people could be so dumb.
By cribbing an essay about plagiarism, he was deconstructing the issue in a postmodern style by ironically exposing the Zeitgeist. Bravo! A++
This is my own post and I didn’t copy it from anyone. Yea, that’s the ticket.
It’s far from foolproof, because even a service like TurnItIn doesn’t have access to all the hidden papers on the pay-for-paper websites. But what they do is keep a copy of every paper submitted for checking, so their database is increasing all the time.
This means that there’s a good chance that the first person to download a particular paper from a pay-for-paper website will not get caught, even if the paper is submitted to TurnItIn. But now that paper is in the database, and every subsequent student that downloads and uses the same paper is subject to being caught.
You can find out more about the service at their website. It’s also explained pretty well at Wikipedia, along with a discussion of the intellectual property issues that the company faces.
Here’s a funny little piece of weird news on this topic from Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird:
Cheaters on the Rise: (1) In March, students at Mount Saint Vincent University in Bedford, Nova Scotia, persuaded the administration to prohibit professors from using any plagiarism-detecting aid, to avoid (said the student union president) a “culture of mistrust.”
Good gravy.
It’s not that we’re even trying to catch people or lying in wait, ready to pounce like mountain lions. It’s just that they make it so darned easy.
I am a little paranoid about being accused of plagiarisim any time I hand in a paper because once in a freshman literature course, my professor told me my very run-of-the-mill paper was red-flagged by turnitin or something similiar. And no, I hadn’t cheated. If I really didn’t want to do my work, I just wouldn’t do it and accept a zero, not cheat. She gave me the option of turning in another paper on a different topic. Later I signed up for a free trial from turninit, and uploaded my paper. The score report did give me a low, less than 10%, similarity index score, but when I went to the websites they linked to, they were either discussion questions about the story with no answers or an online text of the story itself. This was about three years ago, so I don’t doubt that the technology is better now. I wished I had asked her to show me what was supposedly copied, but I was too flustered.
Hrr-umph!
K’, that’s (obviously) not your fault. That sounds like a great example of someon who does not actually know how statistics well. Ugh; you got flagged and the prof probably didn’t even read the analysis. Sounds like the prof was letting the machine do the thinking.
Glad to hear that nothing came of it other than a redo (but, on the other hand, that sucks that they would ask you for a redo). I sincerely hope the prof never asked you again for a redo.
Cop friend of mine was telling me about a court case where the witness actually got up on the stand and responded to questioning by saying, “I have never been arrested. My record is clean.” Opposing lawyer picked up a 50 page printout and sailed it through the air across the courtroom, as flamboyantly as he could. “So you’ve never been arrested for armed robbery? Burglary? Assault?”
What did the guy think - that he could get up in a court of law, state a flagrant lie under oath, and nobody would check it??
It’s only half a hijack because the brain system is similar to these plagiarizers.
Complete hijack: Also, has anybody seen an Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers type carefully concealed and plotted homicide? All I ever get is drunk or irritated people blowing their tops and shooting eachother. No planning at all.
The subject came up at my university too. Partly it was the “culture of mistrust” thing (which, when I think about it, I kind of sympathize with), but the main thrust of the argument was the intellectual property issues alluded to above.
I’d have some sympathy with the “culture of mistrust” thing if i hadn’t busted so many goddamned students for plagiarizing.
I suppose that locking my apartment door at night also promotes a “culture of mistrust”. But imagine how little I care. 'Cause sometimes a “culture of mistrust” is there for a very good reason.
Funny how it’s always the crooks and cheaters lamenting the “culture of mistrust” the loudest, isn’t it?
And on that note, I just found another plagiarized essay this afternoon. That’s five this week. I get an average of four to six per semester, no matter what I say or do, no matter how many warnings I give, no matter if I share the college policies on academic honesty and the consequences for violating them, etc.
And as I noted earlier, I am not alone. If people want to be trusted, they need to behave in a trustworthy fashion.
Are most of your students not behaving in a trustworthy fashion?
It boggles me how many people are so willing to ruin their expensive, amazingly powerful college education. It’s like buying yourself a really nice cake and then throwing it on your driveway and running over it. I can’t comprehend it. It’s not just cheating–it’s also refusing to study or learn anything, coming in and demanding to know only what the test questions will be and nothing else, and then getting mad at the teacher because they fail the class. On your own time and money! Why?