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[galactic_hedgehog]

These stories get me wondering. Does anyone show the students just how easy it is to catch plagiarism when giving the usual schpeal? They seem to think that a cut a paste job from Wikipedia is like a Holmesian mystery to the professor.

Ha!  Reminds me of a student who turned in a paper containing three examples of cut & pasting from a Wiki entry.  When confronted, the student claimed innocence on the grounds that he may have lifted from Wikipedia but doing so did not mean he plagiarized.  I could not wrap my head around this argument, but got a second bite at the apple when hu appealed.  At the AJ hearing, he insisted we ignore the part where he took another author's words and passed them off as his own.  Instead, we needed to take note of the fact that the content of what he copied could be found in other sources.  Care to guess how this hearing ended?

I sure hope that the student got the book thrown at him.

In a manner of speaking...  At the outset of the hearing, the panel chair explained we would each present a case, respond to questions from the panel, and a decision would be given in 48 hours.  Two hours after the hearing, the chair sent a panel to both the student and myself explaining he had been found guilty and the F (course grade) would stand. 

Two hours?  Did everyone go out to lunch first?

[karmann]

I tell mine that the quality of the plagiarised passage's English is going to give them away: the crappier their own English (not their native tongue), the more the cut-and-pasted phrases will stick out ... So I usually don't catch them out on the content but on a particularly elegant choice of phrase.

While I agree that this can be useful, as someone with a strong accent I would caution you to be sure you separate the accent from the actual words before you compare a person's written and spoken English.  I've had three professors comment that I write so much better than I talk, and several others make obvious attempts to discern whether I actually wrote a paper based solely on their assumption that someone who sounds like me couldn't possibly write like me.  It's annoying, and it's really hard as a student to respect or want to work with a professor once you know that he or she is judging you by your accent rather than your work.

[airball]

I also don't think that students realize that they have a distinctive voice, not perhaps individually but the vast majority of freshpeep essays sound like they were written by a freshpeep.  It's when they start sounding like grad students that my antennae go up.

[melba_frilkins]

I tell mine that the quality of the plagiarised passage's English is going to give them away: the crappier their own English (not their native tongue), the more the cut-and-pasted phrases will stick out ... So I usually don't catch them out on the content but on a particularly elegant choice of phrase.

I had one clever student copy-paste and then make an attempt to translate it into student-ese, replacing some of the higher level vocab words with simpler words. Nonetheless, alarm bells went off and Google helped me to find the original passages. The student's defense: "My mother is a school teacher who has access to plagiarism detection software. She said it passed through just fine, so it's not plagiarised". Ok.

[ls410]

The last few bits of plagarism I've gotten have not been from Wikipedia.  Perhaps students think if they move further down the google hits that I won't catch them.  Another major give-a-way from my students is the proper use of the semi-colon.  I get it used as a comma or sometimes just thrown in for fun in the middle of a sentence but rarely used correctly.  When it is, my antenae go up.

[profxfiles]

If this was the Gary Hart of plagiarism, I got an e-mail last month from the Marion Barry of plagiarism. A student that I caught (and failed)  AND a colleague in my department caught (and failed) for plagiarism  wrote us BOTH to....





wait for it....





...ask us for letters of recommendation for LAW SCHOOL!



In both mine and my colleagues cases, we had the student in multiple classes and he only got CAUGHT plagiarizing in his senior year when he claims he got senior-itis and just wanted to graduate. Thus, he was hoping we would overlook that minor "issue" and write about him based on his work in our other courses.

 I suspect, of course, that he plagiarized his way all the through his degree, but it is not worth going back and digging through his work now. I told him I would certainly write him a letter that would encompass all of his accomplishments during his time here as soon as he sent me the form from the Law School Admissions Council. Oddly, I have not heard back from him....

[mssnvrnchtngsmtl]

A couple posters have commented that students don't think they have their own distinct voice when they write.

It reminded me of an experiment one of my (new) professors tried my first year at a community college. She was telling us the same thing, that we sound like ourselves in our papers, and one of the students didn't believe her, so for our next paper, she let us submit them with numbers instead of names. We chose the numbers randomly in class while she stepped out of the room and gave her a sheet with the names and numbers on it after the papers were handed back to us so she could record our grades in her grade book. I don't know about other students, but I got margin comments like "is this mssnvrnchtngsmtl?"

I wonder now what that experiment was like for the professor, because I could see it was a huge eye-opener for a lot of us in the class. It seems like a good idea to get freshmen up to speed with the idea that, yes, your writing style is like a thumb print and your professors will know if you steal someone else's words. On the other hand, probably not worth it if it's too much of a logistical nightmare.

[annedonneundone]

"The epistemological difficulties facing this view are insuperable" are dead giveaways.

A number of years ago, the appearance of "salubrious overflow" in a first-year paper started me on the trail of a plagiarist who had plagiarized EVERYTHING he had submitted, including diagnostic, not-for-credit assignments.

Since then, I've used that anecdote to scare potential plagiarists straight.

[anthroid]

Many years ago I had a student write that "The walls of the church were falling down."  He had used a thesaurus (this is before the ubiquity of the internet) while copying Tocquiville in The Catholic Church and the Ancien Regime (I think that was the title of the book).  The actual sentence was "The ediface of the Church was crumbling."  Since every sentence involved word replacement, the essay made no sense and the student was called on his cheating.  He failed the course, of course.

I can always tell.  Always. 

[hulkhogan]

A student who was caught plagiarizing in one of our Master's courses has just applied to our doctoral program. Guess what my decision on admitting her will be?

[generic_handle]

My favorite blindingly obvious case was when a student, whose work usually read as if it had been written in blunt crayon on Wal-Mart bags submitted a paper that included the sentence, "Tennyson's personification of death serves a twofold purpose." When I asked the student if this was someone else's work, hu's indignant response was, "No. I paid for it myself."

An activity I use with my frosh involves a short paper that I composed almost entirely from plagiarized sources. I think I may have written a four-word transition -- beyond that, it's all cut-and-paste. I tell the class that there are plagiarized bits in the text, and that they are to find the sources. At the next class meeting, they invariably talk about how easy it was to catch the stolen sections with search engines. I nod, and say, "By the way, I have Google too."

[tee_bee]

I tell mine that the quality of the plagiarised passage's English is going to give them away: the crappier their own English (not their native tongue), the more the cut-and-pasted phrases will stick out ... So I usually don't catch them out on the content but on a particularly elegant choice of phrase.

I had one clever student copy-paste and then make an attempt to translate it into student-ese, replacing some of the higher level vocab words with simpler words. Nonetheless, alarm bells went off and Google helped me to find the original passages. The student's defense: "My mother is a school teacher who has access to plagiarism detection software. She said it passed through just fine, so it's not plagiarised". Ok.

Thanks, mom! I wonder if she knew that junior's paper was plagiarized, or if she was one of the legions of the clueless that inhabit public "education." Why would she run Junior's work thru the Plagiarism Machine anyway, if it wasn't plagiarized? Dope.

[plebeian]

Maybe this will shed some light on the Wikipedia offenses:

A student explained to me, after I pointed out the Wikipedia-style bracket citations in his paper*, that professors don't use Wikipedia. Since they're always discouraging students from using it, they themselves must not ever use it, so he's safe to use Wikipedia as an essay bank.

* Why anyone in their right mind would take a plagiarized paper to a writing tutor, I'll never know. It happens all the time, and it's astonishing every damned time.

[toothpaste]

Maybe this will shed some light on the Wikipedia offenses:

A student explained to me, after I pointed out the Wikipedia-style bracket citations in his paper*, that professors don't use Wikipedia. Since they're always discouraging students from using it, they themselves must not ever use it, so he's safe to use Wikipedia as an essay bank.

* Why anyone in their right mind would take a plagiarized paper to a writing tutor, I'll never know. It happens all the time, and it's astonishing every damned time.

Brilliant.

[big_giant_head]

Maybe this will shed some light on the Wikipedia offenses:

A student explained to me, after I pointed out the Wikipedia-style bracket citations in his paper*, that professors don't use Wikipedia. Since they're always discouraging students from using it, they themselves must not ever use it, so he's safe to use Wikipedia as an essay bank.

* Why anyone in their right mind would take a plagiarized paper to a writing tutor, I'll never know. It happens all the time, and it's astonishing every damned time.

Oh, sigh.  And because we recommend that they not drink themselves into drooling unconsciousness, we must never have had a drop ourselves.  And because we suggest that they not drop trou for EVERY cute thing who winks at them, we must be asexual.  And when we say, hey, you know, it's good to get more than 4 hours of sleep each night, they hear, "I sleep 10 hours per day and have never met anyone who tries to slide by on 90 minutes the night before a test."

I do tell my students that Wikipedia is great if you can't remember the name of the main character from Lord of the Rings, or if you just want to get a quick overview of some idea before doing actual research.  I tell them this because I want them to understand that I use it the way it--and ANY--encyclopedia was meant to be used, but that THIS IS NOT RESEARCH.

But really?  They bring these papers to a writing tutor?  That IS astonishing.