I’m a junior in high shool right now and am in AP Writing. We have to write a 10 page paper talking about an author and their writing style, comparing works, etc. (I chose Truman Capote because I wanted to read “In Cold Blood”) Out of curiosity, I checked some of those sites, and these 10 page supposed high school/college papers look like they were written by a 12 year old. But to answer your question, I never intend to take one of these papers anyway, because I like writing and always get A’s on my papers anyway…
Without attribution? I hope you busted her. Man, the lengths some professors will go to avoid writing a syllabus.
“What’s your paper on, Vinny?”
“Uh, the Irish French Fry Phantom.”
–Cliffy (quoting “Welcome Back, Kotter”)
Personally, I’m all in favor of those sites. It makes it that much easier for the teachers to weed out the cheaters and get rid of them, freeing up the honest students to pursue their education. I mean, if some students are going to cheat, I’d rather catch them easily than have to go to a lot of trouble to catch them.
Definitely increases the fear factor, and the great thing is that it also spots utterly honest mistakes in citation format, and so those become “teaching moments.”
Nonetheless, one student tried to hand in an essay from one of those sites last year. She’ll be taking the course again.
Forgive the 'jack, but the whole industry of cheating is getting worse. I just heard today from some colleagues at community college that some students have been paying other students at a nearby university to pose as them and take classes for them. Apparently this has resulted because of the increased tuition fees for international students. Crap, will we all have to check everybody’s i.d.'s now before we can start a semester?
On a related note, a bunch of people were deported last year for selling CD-ROMS which would print out phony but authentic-looking registration forms so that students with them could have priority to add classes (on one campus, we go by date of earliest registration).
:rolleyes:
Your university must care about the problem to fix it, Viva. (Mine doesn’t give a rat’s ass about much other than seeing the tuition revenue come streaming in.) I often assign an essay early in Freshman English, asking my students to tell why plagiarism still goes on at XXXX University, and the best answer I get is that the only remedy, expelling repeat violators, is against the university’s religion.
mnemosyne: If failing the lab section of a course means that a student fails a course, does that imply that the lab section is worth more than 50%? None of my lab sections were worth more than 30% (maybe a few were 40%), even though some of them involved more work than the entirety of two or three other courses…
Any online term papers I’ve seen haven’t been that good. Even the ones that claim to have earned an A or B certainly wouldn’t have been A or B material at my school (but, then, mere mortals can’t earn anything better than a B in most courses). A lot of online papers seem to be so badly written that even the most lazy and incompetent students could write a better one.
EVE2 (Essay Verification Engine) is a similiar program to turnitin. You can download a 15-day trial from the website.
Well, firstly, if you get a zero for a lab section (which is what one should get for cheating) that is worth 30% of the course, then that means that you need to get at least 50 out of the remaining 70 percent to pass the course. For the sort of person who cheats, that might not be very easy.
Secondly, i know that some departments in some universities have a rule whereby, in order to pass the course as a whole, you also have to pass every major component of the course. Fail one major component, you fail the whole course.
So, say the final exam is worth 30%, and you have already received 60/70 for the rest of the course. Theoretically, you could get 10/30 for the final exam and get a final grade of 70, which is a comfortable pass. But, at some schools, that might still lead to a failing of the course, because you had performed inadequately on an essential component.
You’d be surprised. And it was even worse in the past: during the part of my undergrad years spent at a Very Prestigious School’s campus there was no live time spent “impressing”, and the plagiarism policy was buried deep in some middle page of the academics handbook. Sure, that was 20 years ago and might have been because at the time it was “understood” that the “quality of applicant” there would already know better, but still… Heck, I do consulting work for one (lesser-tier) institution these days where things are only marginally better.
Also, you’ll always have with you those sharp minds who’ll conclude that absence of an “honor code” system must mean that Anything Goes, and the only sin is getting caught… but even more annoying are the types who believe that the whole point of school is to punch the ticket and get on with Real Life, where you CAN hire a consultant to write the reports, so why bother with these silly rules about original work.
I’m sure that you’re right.
At the private university where i’m going to grad school, i’m pretty sure that the incoming freshmen are given big lectures about the evils of plagiarism during their orientation, as well as handouts on the subject. I think the problem is that this does not get adequately reinforced on the departmental level during the course of their studies.
At my undergrad school, in Australia, the history department (where i was a major) had its own booklet about plagiarism and acceptable citation of sources. This was handed out to all students taking a history course, copies were always available in the department office, and the guide was also posted on the department website. Each semester, at the beginning of every course, the professor would refer to the booklet and tell students that there would be no excuses for plagiarism or any other form of cheating.
In my two years of teaching and TAing undergraduate courses, I only saw one paper I suspected as plagiarized. I thought it was too good for a college freshman, and opted to speak to other grad students who had the student in other drama classes. They were able to confirm that it was, in fact, his paper; we were all impressed by his command of both critical language and intelligent thought. It sucks, though, that due to concern about plagiarism I couldn’t just enjoy reading an amazing paper by a brilliant student. My first thought was that he didn’t write it. Sadder, though, is that the majority of freshman and sophomore papers I read were atrocious. Many papers read on something like a sixth or seventh grade level, from my experience.
I wonder if he wrote, ‘This text is, of course, plagiarised.’ at the end? 
My university had a “policy” that every research paper was supposed to include a special report cover where we had to list all of our sources and sign a statement of academic honesty.
This was all well and good except for the part about “no one has helped me with this paper”, or some such nonsense. We all helped eachother, even if it was just limited to proofreading. I was a fast typist and types papers for a number of people. We discussed our papers with others to gain additional insights on the topics.
So I stopped including the cover sheets when I turned in my papers. And, interestingly enough, not a single prof ever complained to me.
Got another story for you all from the Bottomless Pit of Stupidity:
A student’s mother came onto the campus to confront an English prof about her daughter’s paper, which had received a poor grade. First, Mom complained that the prof was a racist because the paper was about MLK.
The prof replied that it couldn’t possibly be a racial issue, because he was the one who had assigned the topic on MLK in the first place.
Failing to get anywhere with this tack, the mom took another and said, “Well, when her sister turned in this paper at XXX University, she got an “A” on it!”
True story, from a colleague.
:rolleyes:
I already told y’all about the student who protested that I had falsely accused him of plagiarism and, if I didn’t believe him, I should phone his mother who could attest that he hadn’t plagiarized the paper because she helped him write it.
Great plagiarism story from my History and Culture of Mexico professor this semester. (Same university that mhendo is at, for reference) She also teaches Latin American literature sometimes, and one year one of her students decided to write his paper about a particularly difficult and obscure author that they’d read. (One of her personal favorites) He assured her that he really wanted to do this, that he really loved the author, that he’d be okay. She let him do it. When the paper came due, he came in to ask for an extension, because writing about this author had been really hard. So she let him, unsurprised. When he turned in his paper, it was good. REALLY good. But it didn’t sound like him, and the subject had been, well, really difficult, so she reread it and reread it, trying to figure out if it was copied from somewhere. She finally called a colleague in to ask about it. He or she (can’t remember) read through it and told her, “Sara… it’s YOURS.” She had written it years before for some sort of encyclopedia-type thing dealing with Latin American authors, and the student had found it and edited it to fit the size requirements.
I hope it’s true. It’s a good story.
Heh.
Should be true, were this a fair world.
And I have a suspicion that the Very Prestigious School I washed out of lo those many years ago is the one geting addressed in these later posts…
Sounds like an old story from Snopes:
(there’s another story that’s more rellevant, but not as funny.)