The spouse teaches at the university level in London, and continually hammers home the point about plagiarism and the need to properly cite sources (footnotes and bibliography and all). And yet it still takes some of her students two or three papers to grasp the concept. While this means that their papers get heavily marked down (these are first-year students, and so get a little slack), they still need repeated reminders. Some students are just really dense, I guess.
The advantage of kids copying stuff off the Internet, however, is that instructors also know how to Google. The spouse says she catches a lot of them this way, although the usual giveaway clues still work too.
Spears? Harpoons? DARTS??? You people aren’t thinking big enough.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put steel-spiked shoes on my horse, grab my handy jousting lance, get into a full gallop, and have at the scurvy wretch!
The rest of you might like to stand by with a mace, or perhaps one of a tasteful selection of halberds, if my first jousting pass doesn’t finish him off.
Ah you melbournites.
Same here.
I swear to god, I get told oe more time about their sophisticated programs that check if you plagiarized, I’m gonna… whack them with a woomera.
It’s dumb, because they say it about programming assignments, programming assignments that involve only one possible solution. So in a class of a couple of hundred people some of them are going to look mighty the same. And what do their sophisticated programs do then?
Let alone when we have to only extend code, which is going to look even more alike.
But that guy is dumb. How the hell did he even get into university?
Screw that, I say stringing them along is a great idea. I suggest that every instance of plagiarism be recorded and only brought to light when someone is about to graduate or transfer schools. That way you can really screw them over. Their fault for plagiarising. Hell, that should help reduce the cost for my tuition too.
He cut and pasted pages of material. That’s way beyond common knowledge that’s lazy plagiarism. There’s no way he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong.
‘Non-citable common knowledge’ is antithetical to everything that a piece of academic writing should involve. So even if your suggestion were true, his essay would still be a zero-ranking crock of shit.
I think Tony Blair should at least congratulate him for the skill he showed to get away with this so long.
Blair and crew can learn something there. They went on plagiarizing as if it was nothing and got away with it only long enough to get away with invading and occupying a sovereign nation. Killing thousands of people and still killing them.
By the way: Where is the outrage gone about that little harmless stunt?
Salaam. A
Aldebaran, I believe you owe the OP an apology. Tossing this post into this thread was completely inappropriate. Next time, find a Blair bashing thread or start one.
I believe Aldebaran may be referring to this incident, where a British dossier on Iraqi WMD was plagiarised from an old thesis or two from some British University students. So, plagiarism + Britain = a vague link.
If I could get paid every time I busted a student for plagiarism, I wouldn’t have to teach for a living.
And this continues to happen even after my repeated dire warnings, explanations of college policy, coverage of how to–and how not to–use sources (Internet or otherwise), special sections in my syllabus, etc. It’s worse than it’s ever been.
I have no sympathy.
Well, I don’t know exactly how the version works which your university was using, but for the CS department in which I study most submissions are electronic, including essays. We write out work, save it to a text file, submit it using a command, it’s then copied onto a server and after the deadline the program is run.
It works a bit like a compiler, so I’m told, breaking down the work into a tree and then analysing it. I’ve often wondered just how valid this evidence is though. Especially in a CS department, it isn’t inconceivable that two independent students have similar styles of writing code (especially since we all more or less learn from thje same book) and find the same solution.
The difference, +MDI, is that when humanities departments look for plagiarism, we’re not looking primarily for students who have plagiarized from one another, which is the type of search suggested by your post.
We’re more concerned about students plagiarizing from third party internet sources, whether the sites are free or a pay-for-papers service. Obviously, students who use free internet sources are much easier to catch. I’ve busted a student just by Googling sentences from their papers. Fee-based sites are different, because they are password protected and you can’t see the paper without paying the fee, so Google isn’t much help.
Sadly, i’m sure that plenty of students get away with it every semester.
Part of the responsibility for preventing plagiarism rests with the tutors actually setting the essays. A well-written essay question will be damn near impossible to answer simply by cutting-and-pasting or copying from existing literature. If students can get away with this, then the question they’re answering is a probably generic one which provokes little original thought. Also, better-written questions will steer students away from the ‘mainstream’ aspects of a topic and into exloring niches, which again makes the use of readily-available material less of an option.
I Google exactly the way you do. Actually, I did find two papers that were purchased from the Internet, and it was because these particular sites showed a little blurb, like the first paragraph of the first page of the essay, and I was able to identify it just from that. The students never bothered to challenge it.
