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[T-Folk]

In the tradition of such threads as the "Best Excuses" thread, I want to see  some of your "best" plagiarism stories.

Two years ago, I had a kid come to me after class and tell me that his mother had promised him a new Cadillac Escalade if he could manage a 4.0 for the semester. He asked if I would work with him to improve his writing so that he could do well in my class. I told him I would be available during office hours. For the first 10 weeks or so, this student came twice week for tutoring (he was one of only maybe three students that ever came by voluntarily). I felt good about the whole thing. Regardless of my opinion of his parents for promising him a $50,000 SUV, the kid worked hard and was making great progress .... unitl he decided to take the easy way through an assignment. He turned in a paper, I believe it was the fourth essay of the semester, and it was clear to me in about a minute that he had not written this essay. In fact, my wife and I were both pretty sure that neither one of us could have written the essay. Sure enough, a quick google search yielded a 15-page scholarly article from which my student had hijacked three pages from (he cut off the essay in the middle of a paragraph). I didn't want to ruin the kid (though, he had ruined himself). I decided that since the WP date had not yet passed, I would give him a chance to withdraw from the class if he would come clean. When I confronted him, he denied that he had plagiarised:

Me: "Is there anything you want to tell me about this paper?"
Student: "No"
Me: "Are you sure?"
Student: "What do you mean?"
Me: "Well, did you write it? Did you have any help?"
Student: "I wrote it. I mean, I typed it ...."

He said that last bit as I took the pages I had printed from internet from my desk - the portion he used highlighted in pink. After his refusal to come clean, I had no guilt filling out the AD form and sending the materials into the Academic Dean.

[sigh...]

"I don't know how my paper got onto that website."

"I didn't plagiarize!  My roommate wrote the paper.  She's the one who plagiarized."

Student: "I didn't plagiarize from papermill.com.  I've never been to that site."  
Me: "Did you use any websites?"
Student: "Yes, I used differentpapermill.com, but I put it in my bibliography.  It isn't plagiarism if I list the source."
Me: "It is if you cut and paste your entire paper from the source and don't put quotes around anything."

Then there was the student who submitted a production review paper to a colleague of mine.  The paper was supposed to be a review of our departmental production.  The paper the student submitted had grand descriptions of this fantastic moving set (not ours) and critiques of famous actors (also not ours.).  Oops!

[viola]

Ah, the memories. . . .

At the mediocre SLAC where I used to teach, one colleague reading through final papers in history was pleased to see apparent improvement in a mediocre student. . . . till he got to page 7.

On page 7 . . . . in a different font in an inset box in the middle of page 7 . . . was the legend "this paper purchased from" and the name and URL of the papermill.

He wrote on the title page:  "F:  see page 7."  
:)

At this same SLAC, another colleague of mine caught a student in a run of the mill internet cut & paste . . . twice.  First time student flunked the paper.  Second time she flunked the course.  (This was an upper-div major in a humanities department, btw).  She threatened him with death in her blog--no kidding--specific methods were discussed--and she and her pals keyed his car, slashed his tires, paintballed his house, shot out his windows with bb guns, etc.  Assorted deans and deanlets punted this case to the campus security people--who wanted to go to the police, but were prevented b/c Ms. Plagiarist was full pay with pals in high places.  In the end, all they had to do was write "notes of apology."  One highlight of this sorry situation was the dean of students standing up in faculty meeting to defend the admins' negligence by saying that there was no policy on academic honesty for her to enforce.  A faculty member stood up and read her the academic honesty policy from the student handbook published by her office.  *sigh*

[eternal adjunct]

When I was a TA, I got a paper from a student that was about twice the length it was supposed to be.  Irritated, I flipped through and noticed that there were comments written in the margins.  Upon closer examination, I also noticed that the student's name changed about half-way through, as well as the class, semester, etc.

It turned out that what this idiot-savant did was take a friend's paper, copy it, follow some of the suggestions for improvement, and then staple the whole thing togethor and turn it in.

The rub: if he hadn't been so stupid as to staple the paper he copied from to the paper he handed in, he would have received an A, since he did follow the comments and make a B- paper into an A paper.

[DrStones]

I put these in the other thread, but they really belong here:

A. "The Drugs Made Me Stupid"
I chair academic misconduct hearings in our college -- me, two faculty, two students sit as a tribunal. The most unbelievable plagiarism excuse I've heard was from a young woman who:

(1) Turned in a cut-n-paste job, that the faculty member nailed with a quick google.

(2) Informed student, per procedure, about the charges.

(3) Student informs faculty member that she was "on drugs from being ill" and  forgot to exorcise "notes" from paper draft, but she was so hopped up when she wrote the paper she couldn't tell what was notes and what was not, so she could not have knowingly plagiarized.  
 
(4) Student turns in second paper draft before hearing that removes only, and only, the segments identified (but not shown by the instructor to the student) as plagiarized materials.
 
(5) Student claims "my Mom is a journalist and I know what plagiarism is, and I would never, never do that! The drugs made me do it!"
 
(6) Just to repeat "the drugs made me plagiarize."
 
(7) When asked by the kindly hearing chair (me) "you don't know what you plagiarized?" she said "no." "But you also edited the second version of the paper to correct your error?" She said "yes." "But you only extracted plagiarized portions of the paper, and you didn't know which portions were plagiarized, right?" She said "Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah . . . . "
 
(8) Kindly chair then informs her that the definition of plagiarism is not just the taking of actual words, but the taking of concepts or ideas without attribution.  Here come the waterworks . . .
 
(9) Convicted and susended for one year.  Names have been changed to protect the clueless.
 
. . . lesson for me: those campy episodes of "Dragnet" in the 1960s were right . . . drugs make you stupid.

________________________________

B. "Statute of Limitations"
Another one . . . colleague is looking at a thesis in our department from the 1940s, discovers and old article, cited in the thesis, that he was unaware of and he goes to look it up.

Yep, you guessed it! Significant portions of the thesis were plagiarized from the article sixty years ago. We thought about filing a misconduct charge for kicks, in order to revoke the degree, but figured that plagiarism wasn't worth killing some old guy in a nursing home.

I mean, it isn't like we're Simon Wiesenthal and this guy was some SS camp guard at Dachau . . .

_______________________________

C.  "What? You Wrote That?"
In my own class, someone plagiarized a review someone wrote about my book.  Unfortunately for them, I am vain enough to read my own reviews.

[Almost former mediocre slac]

Had a student plagiarize in three different classes, two in the same semester.  I forced him to withdraw in all three cases, but he never would admit he did anything wrong.  It was only a book review, says he.

In the two plagiarisms in the same semester situation, the student's paper in Russian Politics (again a book review) contained the line "The last time I was in Russia....".  He had good taste, though.  He like to plagiarize from the Washington Post Book Review.

[science expat]

Nothing on par with the stories above but (remember I'm in the UK) I had a student refer to "our weather" in New England.

[Poli Sci prof]

My favorite--I had a senior thesis student lift whole sections from a article  on which I was a co-author! The reason the student didn't know this is that my co-author has posted it on his website and forgot to add my name a second author on the webpage. When he searched for material on Google, it kicked up our paper but without the attribution to me. Given the narrow specialization of the topic and the fact I teach a class specifically on the topic, you would have thought he would have assumed I already knew the manuscript... I laughed so loudly that my suitemates thought something was wrong with me.

[apatheist]

Student paper looks suspiciously well-written.  I go to the library and check her references.  She has helpfully highlighted, in the library's book, the portions she copied.  Moreover, the information copied pertained to the U.K., not the U.S.

[%sig%]

[E. F.]

I had one online student copy and paste an entire web page for his essay, including the pictures from the web site. What a moron.

[state U professor]

My favorite:

Student plagiarizes from the course text book. I called her into my office and told her: "this passsage comes from the class text." her reply? "I did not know that--I haven't read the class text."

[Orpheus]

All of this is too funny.  I deal with plagiarism all the time (I do it for the entire department), and mostly the result is simply that the students start crying.  It's not that I start off being harsh - they just feel actual shame.  Perhaps explained by my being in the UK - I never had that experience in my two years teaching in the US.

[a/non brit]

When I was just starting my PhD I discovered two very similar articles on the web, one by Dean Very Impressive at East Coast U and one published a little later by Dr Nobody who, a little googling revealed, had done his PhD at East Coast U. I was righteously indignant and emailed Dean Impressive to let him know his work was being ripped off. I wasn't expecting to hear anything back, but Dean Impressive did write back to me, to thank me, and also to hint, intriguingly, that this was not unexpected behaviour from Dr Nobody.

This is not a particularly unusual story, except for a couple of weird coincidences. Dean Impressive's post at East Coast U had been held by someone who I went on to do extensive archive research on. And then just yesterday, I had lunch with a friend who teaches on a west coast campus who tells me that their new university president is ... Prof Very Impressive.  He's in the same field as my partner, too. Perhaps I'll get to meet this guy, one day!

[Poppins]

I told this story on a cheating thread a while back. Is it plagiarism to steal another student's lab write-up and submit it as your own? I guess so, since it's an example of passing someone else's work off as your own.

The setting: a supremely challenging 4th year lab for hard-science majors.
The saga:

Year 1: Brilliant Student writes stellar lab reports and gets top grades. At the end of the term, Brilliant Student is disgusted to find that many of his lab write-ups have been stolen from the professor's "returns" box.

Year 2: Thief Student takes the same lab course. He erases the name on page 1 of the lab  reports, pencils in his own name, and turns them in. Thief student gets away with it and earns a very good grade.

Year 3: Bad Student buys the set of lab write-ups from Thief. Bad student erases Thief's name, writes in his own, and turns in the first lab write-up. Surprise: Brilliant Student, two years later, is now the grad-student grader for this lab course. Of course, he recognizes his own lab write-ups (in his own handwriting, even! Thief and Bad didn't even bother to copy them out). Bad Student gets an F, is kicked out of the program. Thief Student remains unidentified.

[%sig%]

[k16]

Random thoughts and questions:

1)Does anyone ever suffer serious consequences for plagiarism, which used to more or less merit automatic explusion?
2)Are college kids today really significantly more clueless as to what constitutes plagiarism, or just better at lying and whining?
3)Whenever an academic, someone with a PhD, working as a professor, etc., is caught at this, are these people ever fired?