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[case_insensitive]

Inspired by iomhaigh and makonnen, this is the place to post your nominees for the Plagiarism Hall of Fame.

[amlithist]

When teaching an Am History survey at a large state school one summer, I had a research paper as the final project.  About halfway through the stack (and once I'd grown comfortably numb at the inane things I'd been reading), I came across one that was really engaging, well-written, on target--just a really, REALLY good paper.  Then I realized . . .

(wait for it)

. . . the student had copied, verbatim, an article I'd had published a year earlier in the leading reference collection in the field.

D'oh.

[cackalacker]

[quote author=amlithist link=topic=31851.msg431404#msg431404
. . . the student had copied, verbatim, an article I'd had published a year earlier in the leading reference collection in the field.

D'oh.
[/quote]

Fantastic! At least you've reaffirmed that you like your own work.

A variation: I had a co-worker in my college work-study job who had been forced to take a year off due to plagiarism. An athlete, he took the same literature (let's just say, I can't recall) class that a teammate had taken the year before. Same final paper assignment, so Co-Worker just turned in a copy of Teammate's year-old final paper.

A week later, the prof calls him in and says, "Co-Worker, you didn't write this paper." Co-worker spews and rants, "This is *too* my paper. I am responsible for the paper! No one helped me on it! Blah blah bah." 

"That's all well and good, son" the professor responded, "but you lifted these four parapraphs straight from MY book."  Double d'oh. So Co-worker was put on academic probation for Teammate's year-old plagiarism.

Ah, the jackassery.

Sadly, I'm sure he's making much more money than I am these days.

[halfpint]

I don't believe I can top the examples listed thus far, but here's a memorable one from my past...

I had a student who cited a dissertation as one of her sources.  She lifted big portions of the dissertation abstract.  One of the reasons why it was so easy to catch the plaigiarism was that she actually cited it properly in her references page.  So, yeah, you read a dissertation hundreds of pages long for this paper?!  I calmly informed her that we academic types are pretty familiar with the whole dissertation thing.  I honestly think she had no idea...

[rowan1]

Last spring - student has to write an opinion paper on the spring production.

Talks about some of the action the main character does in the beginning of the play, then discusses a scene in a restaurant.

Problems - the action described were not in the play, I know, I directed it. They were however in the Broadway revival, the review of which student pasted.
There was no scene in a restaurant - oh there is in the movie version, just not on stage.  But the BBC review of the film discusses the restaurant scene - word for word the same as the student's discussion, right down to the British slang.

Hmm . . .

[jack0034]

My favorite was the time students were to write a brief review of a novel or the movie version of the novel that they watched in class.  Seven students copied various parts of the same film review they found online.  One of them was even brilliant enough to say he was reviewing the book, while pasting this review that referenced actors, direction, etc.

[prytania3]

I had a paper that had come from the internet word for word from a free paper site.

When I confronted the student, he got furious and yelled, "Do you know what I  paid this guy to write a custom paper? And you're telling me he copied it off the net?"

SUCKER.

[jack0034]

When I confronted the student, he got furious and yelled, "Do you know what I  paid this guy to write a custom paper? And you're telling me he copied it off the net?"

SUCKER.

An unscrupulous purveyor of academic dishonesty?  I'm shocked!

[ms_collegiality]

Several years ago, I had a student ask me at the beginning of the semester if he could use an older edition of the textbook I was teaching.  We looked over the old and new edition side by side to make sure that all the essays I was assigning were still in the old edition.

He plagiarized an essay straight from the old edition later that term, probably thinking that I didn't have it.  Unfortunately for him, I had at least the last four editions of that book.  I've been using it a while. 

I photocopied the essay from the book, attached it to his essay, and wrote a huge letter "F" on the first page of his essay.  I do believe it's the biggest F I ever gave.

[trystero49]

Back in spring I was reading the take-home finals and started to have a weird feeling of deja-vu. Two little best friends, who had always sat next to each other and were giggly, had turned in their papers right after another and were still in that order on my stack. So I turn back one essay to GG1's paper and notice that ---- voila! ---- GG2 has lifted sentences word-for-word, but to make sure that I wouldn't catch it, has spread them out so that only every _third_ sentence is the same by interspersing incoherent platitudes between them. And then they turned them in right after another!

To top it all off I got (of course) a snotty email from GG2 about how she thought she had done well enough to pass the class Pass/Fail, and why had it come up Fail on the online grade system?

[loboc]

Several years ago I had a colleague come to me and ask me about the schools Honor policy.  The policy, pretty simple, stated that anyone involved in cheating, either the provider of content or the user, automatically received an F for the first offense.  My colleague had 2 papers that were, while reformatted, identical.

He wanted to know which student had originated the material.  After telling him it didn't matter, I suggested he look in the Properties section of the MS Word file as it would provide the originator of the file.  Moments later he came back and....you guessed it, now had 3 students cheating.  The third (originating) originating student's paper hadn't been graded yet, but once found in MS Word my colleague checked the students submittal and sure enough, 3 copies!

[astrogal]

In my gen astroclasses I have students give an astronomy poster topic - usually on some "bad astronomy" to dispell a myth.  I had a fellow who downloaded an entire website to do a "Venus - Earth's Twin" poster.  I was cued off by the student's repeated use of terms such as "atmospheric opacity" and "optical depth".  When I called him in to discuss the plagarism he said:  "You never told us we couldn't download material.  I did cite the web page." 

Upon showing him the plagarism clause in the assignment he responds with
"Copying off the web is plagarism???"


He got a zero.

[cc_musician]

A student who was supposed to submit a report over a musical event instead submitted the article that appeared in the student newspaper the day before the event, complete with quotes about what the event was going to be like (all in future tense).

[voxprincipalis]

A student who was supposed to submit a report over a musical event instead submitted the article that appeared in the student newspaper the day before the event, complete with quotes about what the event was going to be like (all in future tense).

Oh, yeah, I used to get those too. Once I had someone submit a concert report on a concert that didn't happen. He cobbled together reviews from other performances and said that it was a performance in our city. So I sat down and looked up the touring schedule, and amazingly, they were not on the road and had not been for nine months.

In a different course I let students out of class one day to attend a campus wide academic festival. They had to turn in a report on one session they attended. One student wrote a lovely article describing a session on binge drinking and its effect on college campuses. Super -- except that no such session took place at this festival. She totally made it up, with some help from online sources (uncited, of course). How dumb did she think I was?

Don't answer that.

VP

[larryc]

Not Hall of Fame material, but I got one today that used the 1-1-1 model: 1 sentence from Wikipedia, 1 sentence from Sparknotes, 1 sentence of his own, repeat.  He gets an F for the course and a visit to the dean of students.  Merry Christmas you little weasel.