Cheating Is Hard Work

I recently came across this “term paper,” which is either about me or taken from my work (I didn’t pay the $12.99 to find out which): http://www.freeessays123.com/termpaper21361/aestheticsitsvaluesby.html
The site belongs to Dave Stack of Cleveland, Ohio, who also owns a perfectly respectable site called MusicStack.com. I sent him a message via Facebook asking why he was listed as “owning this sleazy, illiterate term paper mill”? He replied:”I own a handful of different sites, all which earn alot of money. MusicStack is my biggest and the one i am most proud of. Free Essays is another which i accidently became the owner of years ago out of a business that went wrong. The site is so profitable that I would be a fool to let it go,especially when the web site runs itself. Kids are always going to look online for examples of previously written essays so if not from my site, it will be from others. So I can sleep at night. I’m sure that makes you cringe, but it is the truth.  I went ahead an removed your name from the essay, so over time it should drop on google from being associated with you.”

So there we have it. Depressing, isn’t it?

I once had a plagiarizing student who mixed up not just paragraphs but also sentences (one from column A, 2 from column B, 4 from column C, where those ‘columns’ were pages. It of course made little sense. I of course called him/her on it (s/he cited the book so it wasn’t hard to find the source, though identifying all the pages was a drag). In the hearing we are mandated to have, s/he said s/he didn’t think that was plagiarizing because s/he had mixed it all up. S/he showed it to his/her father, and he had the sense to respond that ‘s/he had a problem.’ Good for him. Most parents don’t deal with their children that way.

And once I caught a student who plagiarized from a law review article (‘it was on my topic and far better than I could write’) because it simply copied the law review style footnotes along with the text!

I had a great one last semester. It was a 2 page paper on a current issue/finding in biology. I noticed the first and last paragraphs read like a professional peer-reviewed article. Sure enough by Googling I found that they were. In fact, part of the abstract was copied right into the paper (“Here we show that…our results are innovative…). Note the plural, even though the student was a single author of the 2 page paper. Then there were some numbers still in it, which were, in the original source, citation references. The middle paragraph had several words underlined; these turned out to be hyperlinks – that paragraph was copied straight out of Wikipedia. But it is not only students who plagiarize; I have found that when I catch students cutting and pasting from the web, the phrase I google turns up multiple hits. Seems as if all the authors of the web articles are plagiarizing each other.

I’ve had my share of plagiarizing (from the cut and paste without removing URLs to the more tricky sentence copying from the text), and I finally solved it, at least mostly. I give my students an assignment the first week of class where they ‘write’ a one page paper on the class topic (for instance, I’ll ask them to do a one page paper on ‘what is ethics’) and I tell them TO plagiarize. And then, when they turn them in, I show them how fast *I* can find it using google.

It cuts down on plagiarism…a lot.

I had a student who plagiarized his *field notes* in a field research class. All he had to do was select a site, spend an hour or two there a week, and write down what happened. Instead, he found a place like the one he was purporting to be doing research in and copied the description from their website. He also copied an interview published in a magazine and claimed that he had done it. I don’t like to, but I felt I had to take it all the way. Because he had been suspended before for multiple incidents of plagiarism and had been allowed to come back, he was permanently expelled, just days before he was supposed to receive his Master’s degree.

Sorry for your trouble, Virginia. This problem has been occurring more often.  As you have no doubt discovered, once the multiple postings appear, you can edit them but not remove them.  Being able to remove a comment would be a blessing.

Google too! College students everywhere are lost and there will be loads of late assignments this week.

Here’s one: what about “self-plagiarism”? I’m an administrator in higher ed, not an academic, so don’t know about this.

My college student daughter used some work from a previous paper in one class and built upon it in an otherwise meticulously footnoted paper for another.  Her teacher accused her of plagiarism but wouldn’t show her the “proof”.  Personally, I have never heard of self-plagiarism which sounds like an oxymoron.  My Ivy League-educated stepdaughter, however, has and was aghast that my daughter would have used her work and not cited herself. 

Long story short: this report has now been placed in her file and her other professors have seen it.  An economics class she took a year ago and got an A in has now been regraded by another professor as a result — not because of plagiarism, but because the professor claimed that upon further review, it didn’t meet the “A” standard. 

Any insights would be appreciated.

Sorry to hear about your daughter’s case.  Charging someone without proof?  Would that even hold up in court?  I normally apply that test when I get our secretary to invite students in for the tribunal.  You need to ask the professor (nicely) to show where your daughter has plagiarized.  If the evidence is not turned over then you might want to look up your university’s appeal process for this matter.  In our university, the student has the right to appeal to the Dean’s office.  Having said that, some journals that I’ve reviewed for frown on authors who touch up their conference papers for the journal and they expect a substantial (whatever that means is open to interpretation) revision before the manuscript is submitted.  They might be applying that standard. Hope this helps.

Lindar, I am so sorry to hear that your daughter was subjected to the absurd charge of plagiarizing herself. This did happen to me once, when I was in graduate school. I delivered a brown-bag talk during a semester when one of my advisers was on sabbatical. I did a directed reading with him the following spring in preparation for oral exams. He wrote me an email asking me to write something down for his benefit, a written product that could be the basis for our meetings. I emailed him the draft of the chapter which was based on the brown-bag talk. He blew up at me, threw a flyer at me announcing the brown-bag talk, and told me he was appalled that I would do something so dishonest. He then withdrew from my committee and sent letters to the chair, my other advisers, and the ombudsman recommending that I not be allowed to qualify for the dissertation. This scarred me forever.

All I can say is that it is completely absurd — you cannot accuse a student of plagiarizing herself, and there is no way to confirm how much of the paper was adapted from the original paper turned in to a separate class, or to establish how much it ought to be revised for a new class. It is the professor’s responsibility to assign a specific prompt; if he simply said, “go write a paper,” then he’s asking for students, who are not receiving proper guidance or told proper limits, to dig up stuff they have already written, touch it up, and turn it in.

As a professor, I have strict rules about what students can write essays on. I assign weekly journal prompts, and their longer papers must be expansions of something they wrote in their weekly journals. That way whatever long paper they turn in, it was vetted in an informal state and I know it dealt with the primary texts of my syllabus in order to answer my prompt. If students turn in a paper unrelated to those limits, I return the paper without reading it and they have to redo the whole thing.

To raise an issue of academic dishonesty against someone for turning in papers on similar topics to two separate classes, especially if (as it seems) the second professor didn’t provide a narrow enough prompt, is just insane. There are faculty who let the issue of academic dishonesty drive them batty.

My teaching website is here: http://textontrial.blogspot.com in case you want examples of ways that study guides, rubrics, and schemas help to minimize plagiarism as an issue.

Without dignifying or justifying it, you must see that the effort kids put into cheating is telling us something.

Divide the cheaters into two classes: the lazy and the assertive. The lazy want something for nothing, and scorn our beloved discipline, and we know why we despise that.

The assertive, however, are like drug dealers or thieves who prefer those employments to McDonald’s. They may be bad at eluding the snares, but they are working hard, taking risks for a higher reward. So why aren’t they working hard at understanding the subject or developing the skill? What is the answer to this question?

These are the kids who prefer to assert themselves. Sure, they are gaming the system, but they also show an animal and pragmatic spirit unsuited to the academic environment where citation is directly tied to promotion, tenure, and salary. In a practical job we would call these people “resourceful.”

Professors too often invoke the dignified principle of “original thought” to oppose plagiarism, when in their hearts they know, and for forty years literary theory has been crowing, that in a culture overflowing with information, it’s hard to open your mouth without quoting somebody. Should we be teaching kids to ape and cite? Do you want fries with that?

The more challenging question, then, is how the good teacher adjusts the teaching to engage that animal spirit, reward resourcefulness, and encourage collaboration. Instead we say our system is the right one, punish the energetic and the lazy miscreants alike, and tarnish the reputation the academy wants for uncovering truth and finding a better path.

It did it to me again. So I’m editing here to post an apology and a pointer to the real comment, which is below.