I read all of that. I have no idea why. The single paragraph on different types of plagiarism and great writers who have plagiarized was nearly though provoking, if I hadn't heard those examples before or been a student.
I wonder - is there an English class out there that focuses on "rewriting, rephrasing, riffing, and appropriation as real tools of the writer’s trade"?
Well obviously. I mean unless you literally copy every page of all those authors, you are going to be picking and choosing sections, the action of picking one sentence and not another is creative.
When I was teaching information security, I literally had more than half of my students turn in heavily plagiarized papers. It was pretty easy to spot suspicious phrases, and Googling would always turn up the sources quickly.
It was actually quite overwhelming figuring out how to deal with it all - the problem was if we gave no marks for that paper, or failed all the students, it would've been pretty disastrous for the university. In the end, we had to punish the most egregious plagiarism with no marks, and give partial marks for the rest, trying to identify and give credit for the original work.
I had not one, but several students come and argue they should get their full marks back, "for fulfilling the requirements of the assignment".
A friend of mine is in the same situation you describe. She teaches for a fairly well known for-profit online school, and is in a position where she has to ignore plagiarism or lose her job.
A huge percentage of her students turn in plagiarized papers; so many that, if she were to follow the school's guidelines on them all, would result in 1/2 to 3/4 of her students failing. The teacher's pass/fail percentage is one of the criteria used to determine whether a teacher gets any more classes, and does not take into account students failed for plagiarism.
So, if she were to fail those students, she would not get any more classes to teach, thus she'd be out of a job. She's forced to keep track of who she's failed what paper for, to spread the bad grades across as many of the plagiarizers as possible, to cut down on the number that outright fail (and thus impact her).
She has gotten absolutely no support from her superiors about this issue. However, another teacher I know at the same school has a slightly milder version of the same problem, but her superiors are more supportive of her, meaning she's not always worried about her position.
> The teacher's pass/fail percentage is one of the criteria used to determine whether a teacher gets any more classes, and does not take into account students failed for plagiarism.
That is fucked up; all the schools I've ever attended require expulsion, not failure, for proven cases of plagarism. Expelled students are basically immediately expunged from the records of any classes they were enrolled in at the time, as if they had never registered for them.
Did you ever see this policy actually trigger, though? Hard to tell since they may not have made it public, but as other people are saying, if that was taken seriously you'd see an awful lot of expulsions.
I can't speak for all of Michigan State University, where I got my degrees, but the computer science departments took it pretty seriously. One 101 course got roughly 1/3rd of the people in it failed one semester for copying. All homework assignments went through a turn-in system that examined the programs for plagiarism; details were sketchy for obvious reasons, but I had heard that a simple variable rename would not get past it. (Home-grown and based on what I heard, I believe it existed and worked roughly as described, since I could now write such a tool myself if I had need.)
Take some examples of varying severity. In front of the class say,
I have identified many examples of plagairism on the last assignment. Let me show you some...
Then say, "I have identified more than X cases. If you think you may have been one of them, let me know by email, and I'll let you redo the paper and ignore your first submission.
Anyone that I have identified as a plaigairist who does not offer to redo your paper will be failed. If you think you may have quoted too liberally from an unacknowledged source, I would strongly recommend playing it safe and redoing your paper.
Then on the next class come in, pick a random name out of the list of people who have not reached you yet, call that person by name, and ask him or her if he or she wishes to fail the course. After the kid says no, say, "Then are you going to be redoing your paper?" Then to the rest of the class say, "If you should redo the paper and haven't talked with me yet, I suggest doing so soon."
I believe that once expectations are clearly enough set, most of the problem will disappear fairly easily. As for the rest? I have absolutely no problem with failing cheaters as fast as possible.
Part of the problem is the time spent on administration (marking them, tracking them, etc) for all the redone papers. Definitely the worst part of teaching.
I think a good approach would be to give a low-value assignment at the beginning of the course. Don't mention that it's low-value. When people plagiarize, give them zero credit on the assignment and explain way. I suspect the rates on subsequent assignments would drop quite a bit.
Good idea. To heighten the perceived tension even more, make it the second assignment: make both it and the first have obvious scoring boxes on the front, with a regular total for the first (e.g. "_/6"), but a ridiculously large total (that will get normalized away) for the plagairized one (e.g. "_____/392".)
I was accused of plagiarism my freshman year of college but it was completely original. The prof believed me after I met with him and explained my thought process.
I got accused of plagiarism in my first year of university. Turned out that I had somehow left my computer account signed in and one of the class (basically a dropout seizing the opportunity) grabbed a copy and submitted it.
It took me an absolute age to fix; at one point the tutor basically admitted I must be telling the truth and "offered" me half the papers marks.... bah.
Also, I did an Engineering degree; lots of plagiarism going on there (most engineers are pretty bad authors it seems :P). One major problem they had was the huge section of Asian students who all hung out together (across years) and basically shared/co-wrote all their work... I know one lecturer rejected about 35% of the drafts in one course during the second year!
From my limited observations there seems to be a culture of work sharing among foreign students. Some of it can probably be put down to lesser English language skills, they feel a lot safer following anothers lead rather than attempting to write something themselves from scratch.
re: the plagiarism in king's thesis, it might be interesting to note that this often happens among those who are gifted with speech-making. lincoln echoes so clearly the ideas of pericles in thucydides' retelling of it -- perhaps the most famous speech in america, but also the most famous speech in athens. nor in his lifetime did he ever offer the connection as a basis. even obama a couple of months ago was making that wayne gretzky quote about skating to where the puck is going to be. did he or one of his speechwriters get this from steve jobs? i don't know. but it happens all the time. harold bloom argues that all great writers are essentially rewriting other great writers (a map of misreading, etc.).
that's what's so vexing about plagiarism, esp. in teaching essays which are mostly practices in rhetoric. on the one hand, yes, intellectual honesty is very, very important. the cornerstone of reason, etc. but it's also not the only cornerstone. and arguably, it isn't what's learned first.
in any type of broad stroke, it's much smarter to borrow from others' rhetoric, and even ideas. in a way, you're giving yourself more to the ideas. e.g., imagine if all metaphors were replaced with similes. similies are more correct, have more of a 'cited' feeling, but they're also more limiting; they give themselves less to the comparison.
and also some people are better at being synthetic with their thoughts rather than analytical, scientific and precise. and frankly, this soft massaging of sources is often more important in a leader, because they are leading a group of people with more than one idea.
the problem with intellectual dishonesty is that you can lose everything. your reputation, all of the energy in your work, etc. most people don't figure this out until experiencing it first hand at some point in school. but that is because, i think, we don't properly impress upon people what can happen. if they had a better sense of the risks, i think the majority of cases would disappear. as it is, it's usually touted in some boring handout or pamphlet about an 'honor code', etc., in comic sans.
though some schools get it. the thing is to teach a student that it is always better to never give up their honor in doing the right thing, no matter how tired, etc. most students are insecure, because they don't know anything yet, so they don't really think they have much to lose. so again, you have to build up their commitment to themselves first...
Yes, but King's _thesis_ was not a speech, rather a paper of many pages on Paul Tillich. (The religion departments will tell you that Tillich was influenced by Heidegger; the philosophy departments will tell you that Tillich copied great quantities with trivial alterations.)
True. And although it took me like 3 days to respond. I would say that while you're right about scholarship and a thesis, etc., it's funny how many, I would consider, 'great' people end up not being scholars. How that dynamic works.
On the other hand, Heidegger is probably considered to be a scholar. And he plagiarized from Husserl like it was his business. So I guess in the long run, truth crushed to earth will rise again. It's best to be honest as much as possible. Always comes out in the end...
When reading comments on articles like this, I wonder if I'm in the minority, or whether people just don't want to get caught publicly supporting a social taboo in front of potential customers and employers.
There's something degrading about it, and I've never done it, but I don't particularly care if others cheat on homework. Many good teachers know that grade systems cheat students out of serious educations. (And incentivize them to become cheaters.) Yet few win enough power to teach as they think best and neutralize this whole class of problems.
Coincidentally, I'm taking an ungraded class. Though I didn't really notice until now. There is homework, but doing it is completely at our discretion. It could only possibly work if we're self-motivated, and it works fine.
Come to think of it, it's unlikely that my viewpoint is shared by only a tiny minority. After all, commenters here cite astonishingly high rates of plagiarism, like "literally... more than half". (Not to mention the papers which are so unoriginal that they might as well have been plagiarized.) Maybe some enterprising hackers here wrote emacs plugins to help rephrase text, in order to maximize the time they have to pursue important studies and projects.
I saw them baffled by what teachers said they wanted ([snip]), which often seemed
to mask what they really wanted (“elegantly analyze these stories and compose,
in formal prose, a well-supported argument that will not only engage the
ambiguities without resolving them but delight and surprise me”)
My essays would always concentrate on resolving ambiguities... this glib comment sort of makes me wonder
I post all of my papers online on my blog or other locations where they are quickly picked up by Google and various other sources.
Turnitin is used by my professors and each and every time my papers would come up as 100% plagiarised, if they then attempted to Google it they would come across my website where I had posted the paper. After the first time of being accused of plagiarism and me pointing out that the license attached to my work did not allow Turnitin to use it for commercial purposes they started checking by hand, never heard about it again.
what a bunch of fucking crap. Plagiarism is theft, pure and simple. You know when you're doing it, and it means you suck.
I am getting really sick of the moral relativism building up around cheating and grades. It's a fucking nightmare. Schools should just flunk out the 40% or 50% who do this shit for a couple years, and people will get straight.
It completely devalues the work of people who actually do the work. Welcome to the mediocratization of civilization.
Well, it's helpful to keep in mind the main goal here, which is providing young people with an education (and providing society with educated young people), not having the students produce brilliant original work (it's just a school assignment, after all). Being a little more pragmatic, rather than flunking half the students for a prolonged period, probably gets you further.
Of course students need to be thought that plagiarism is not ok, again the question is how to teach them best. The threat of big punishment is not necessarily an effective mean towards reducing "crime". The article also hints at the fact that the cause of the plagiarism is not so much malice, as difficult surcomstances, and a lack of knowledge/skill in students (though the main example around which the article centers, may not give a strong argument for this)
Ok, how about one warning (with 0 credit for that assignment) then expulsion? Come on, college is supposed to be work, not just a frigging party. I get the feeling people just don't care because they figure who gives a fuck, when I get a job I'll just surf the net and cut & paste my way to a paycheck anyway.
Meanwhile, we are losing ground every year in the worldwide competition to produce an educated workforce. You can't just assume every asscrack should get a degree regardless of talent or even the willingness to try, just a little.
I still say the situation is pathetic, and we are right on track to become another deposed colonial power like France or Britain.
27 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 75.3 ms ] threadWhen I was teaching information security, I literally had more than half of my students turn in heavily plagiarized papers. It was pretty easy to spot suspicious phrases, and Googling would always turn up the sources quickly.
It was actually quite overwhelming figuring out how to deal with it all - the problem was if we gave no marks for that paper, or failed all the students, it would've been pretty disastrous for the university. In the end, we had to punish the most egregious plagiarism with no marks, and give partial marks for the rest, trying to identify and give credit for the original work.
I had not one, but several students come and argue they should get their full marks back, "for fulfilling the requirements of the assignment".
A huge percentage of her students turn in plagiarized papers; so many that, if she were to follow the school's guidelines on them all, would result in 1/2 to 3/4 of her students failing. The teacher's pass/fail percentage is one of the criteria used to determine whether a teacher gets any more classes, and does not take into account students failed for plagiarism.
So, if she were to fail those students, she would not get any more classes to teach, thus she'd be out of a job. She's forced to keep track of who she's failed what paper for, to spread the bad grades across as many of the plagiarizers as possible, to cut down on the number that outright fail (and thus impact her).
She has gotten absolutely no support from her superiors about this issue. However, another teacher I know at the same school has a slightly milder version of the same problem, but her superiors are more supportive of her, meaning she's not always worried about her position.
It's pretty fucked up, and kind of depressing.
That is fucked up; all the schools I've ever attended require expulsion, not failure, for proven cases of plagarism. Expelled students are basically immediately expunged from the records of any classes they were enrolled in at the time, as if they had never registered for them.
I can't speak for all of Michigan State University, where I got my degrees, but the computer science departments took it pretty seriously. One 101 course got roughly 1/3rd of the people in it failed one semester for copying. All homework assignments went through a turn-in system that examined the programs for plagiarism; details were sketchy for obvious reasons, but I had heard that a simple variable rename would not get past it. (Home-grown and based on what I heard, I believe it existed and worked roughly as described, since I could now write such a tool myself if I had need.)
Take some examples of varying severity. In front of the class say,
I have identified many examples of plagairism on the last assignment. Let me show you some...
Then say, "I have identified more than X cases. If you think you may have been one of them, let me know by email, and I'll let you redo the paper and ignore your first submission.
Anyone that I have identified as a plaigairist who does not offer to redo your paper will be failed. If you think you may have quoted too liberally from an unacknowledged source, I would strongly recommend playing it safe and redoing your paper.
Then on the next class come in, pick a random name out of the list of people who have not reached you yet, call that person by name, and ask him or her if he or she wishes to fail the course. After the kid says no, say, "Then are you going to be redoing your paper?" Then to the rest of the class say, "If you should redo the paper and haven't talked with me yet, I suggest doing so soon."
I believe that once expectations are clearly enough set, most of the problem will disappear fairly easily. As for the rest? I have absolutely no problem with failing cheaters as fast as possible.
But the hope is that if you do it right, you only have to do it once.
It took me an absolute age to fix; at one point the tutor basically admitted I must be telling the truth and "offered" me half the papers marks.... bah.
Also, I did an Engineering degree; lots of plagiarism going on there (most engineers are pretty bad authors it seems :P). One major problem they had was the huge section of Asian students who all hung out together (across years) and basically shared/co-wrote all their work... I know one lecturer rejected about 35% of the drafts in one course during the second year!
that's what's so vexing about plagiarism, esp. in teaching essays which are mostly practices in rhetoric. on the one hand, yes, intellectual honesty is very, very important. the cornerstone of reason, etc. but it's also not the only cornerstone. and arguably, it isn't what's learned first.
in any type of broad stroke, it's much smarter to borrow from others' rhetoric, and even ideas. in a way, you're giving yourself more to the ideas. e.g., imagine if all metaphors were replaced with similes. similies are more correct, have more of a 'cited' feeling, but they're also more limiting; they give themselves less to the comparison.
and also some people are better at being synthetic with their thoughts rather than analytical, scientific and precise. and frankly, this soft massaging of sources is often more important in a leader, because they are leading a group of people with more than one idea.
the problem with intellectual dishonesty is that you can lose everything. your reputation, all of the energy in your work, etc. most people don't figure this out until experiencing it first hand at some point in school. but that is because, i think, we don't properly impress upon people what can happen. if they had a better sense of the risks, i think the majority of cases would disappear. as it is, it's usually touted in some boring handout or pamphlet about an 'honor code', etc., in comic sans.
though some schools get it. the thing is to teach a student that it is always better to never give up their honor in doing the right thing, no matter how tired, etc. most students are insecure, because they don't know anything yet, so they don't really think they have much to lose. so again, you have to build up their commitment to themselves first...
On the other hand, Heidegger is probably considered to be a scholar. And he plagiarized from Husserl like it was his business. So I guess in the long run, truth crushed to earth will rise again. It's best to be honest as much as possible. Always comes out in the end...
There's something degrading about it, and I've never done it, but I don't particularly care if others cheat on homework. Many good teachers know that grade systems cheat students out of serious educations. (And incentivize them to become cheaters.) Yet few win enough power to teach as they think best and neutralize this whole class of problems.
Coincidentally, I'm taking an ungraded class. Though I didn't really notice until now. There is homework, but doing it is completely at our discretion. It could only possibly work if we're self-motivated, and it works fine.
Come to think of it, it's unlikely that my viewpoint is shared by only a tiny minority. After all, commenters here cite astonishingly high rates of plagiarism, like "literally... more than half". (Not to mention the papers which are so unoriginal that they might as well have been plagiarized.) Maybe some enterprising hackers here wrote emacs plugins to help rephrase text, in order to maximize the time they have to pursue important studies and projects.
Turnitin is used by my professors and each and every time my papers would come up as 100% plagiarised, if they then attempted to Google it they would come across my website where I had posted the paper. After the first time of being accused of plagiarism and me pointing out that the license attached to my work did not allow Turnitin to use it for commercial purposes they started checking by hand, never heard about it again.
I am getting really sick of the moral relativism building up around cheating and grades. It's a fucking nightmare. Schools should just flunk out the 40% or 50% who do this shit for a couple years, and people will get straight.
It completely devalues the work of people who actually do the work. Welcome to the mediocratization of civilization.
Of course students need to be thought that plagiarism is not ok, again the question is how to teach them best. The threat of big punishment is not necessarily an effective mean towards reducing "crime". The article also hints at the fact that the cause of the plagiarism is not so much malice, as difficult surcomstances, and a lack of knowledge/skill in students (though the main example around which the article centers, may not give a strong argument for this)
Meanwhile, we are losing ground every year in the worldwide competition to produce an educated workforce. You can't just assume every asscrack should get a degree regardless of talent or even the willingness to try, just a little.
I still say the situation is pathetic, and we are right on track to become another deposed colonial power like France or Britain.