I used to grade college papers at a time when the Internet was in its infancy. It was not yet especially useful for plagiarists.
I also used to spend a good chunk of time at the beginning of every semester explaining the school’s academic dishonesty policy, what constitutes plagiarism, what doesn’t, how to attribute properly, when to use quotation marks, what constitutes a paraphrase. The works.
Always, the heads would nod, people would assure me yes, they get it, yes yes, why are you wasting our time with this? We already know this stuff!
And then they’d go and plagiarize. Sometimes they’d just be confused: they’d give references with page numbers but not quotation marks, thinking that was good enough, and they didn’t do it twice. Others would lift passages from published work. Not necessarily extremely well-known stuff, but not far enough off the beaten path that a well-read grad student couldn’t track down the original quite quickly, without the benefit of the internet.
What really irked me about it was not so much the brazenness, as knowing some of them did it because they knew they’d probably get away with it. And not just by being careful about it: I know I had many colleagues who were either not as vigilant as I was, were afraid to jeopardize a student’s career over something seemingly minor, or simply didn’t care. And maybe some on the take.
It’s an old problem, and arguably the internet is really only incidental. Makes things a little easier on both sides, but the fact is that plagiarists are rarely clever enough to seek out really obscure material to copy, and that is true in any era. If they were, they wouldn’t be plagiarizing in the first place.
This. Colleges have such a hard line on plagiarism that it’s hard to call them out and report them on it when you know the rule is they get no class credit or kicked out or whatever. If there were steps to being kicked out or just someplace that professors could be made aware of previous transgressions you guys would have better knowledge about individuals to know if it’s a pattern or if they learned their lesson.
I mean, I don’t want to hire the guy who plagiarized through college, what would stop them from borrowing the opinions of others when it is my company’s logo at the top of the letter?
Not really, nor as easily as back in the good old days of 2006, say. For-profit sites like Turnitin take a lot of student papers out of easy circulation, i.e., you could copy if you wanted to, but your paper would be checked against Turnitin’s ever-growing, always-monetized database, and those aren’t good odds if your friend is at the same school. Students use teh Google too, and are smart enough to adapt things they find there. Also, there’s the time-honored paying to have someone write your paper, which is a lot easier now via the Internet: add to this the implosion of the academic marketplace and you actually have some struggling academics turning to such work, along with other smarty liberal-arts writer types, whose skills have never been at a premium. Myself a teacher, I’m planning to square the circle, as it were, by providing these paper-writing skills to my own students, but don’t tell anyone! Ethics, you know.
Like anything, the folks doing Practice X are ahead of those folks trying to stop Practice X, at least in some of the fine details. What never ceases to amaze me is the O NOES PLAGIARISMUS that goes up every time someone gets caught, as if each and every time, I dunno, the Lindbergh Baby got kidnapped, or something. Colleagues, the public, everyone takes it so personally, almost viscerally, as if Dame Truth had had her ivory gown besmirch’d by the Rabblement. What’s the big deal for all of you? Most of the actual cases are so sad and needy, most of the time, something a William H. Macy character would do, and, so doing, screw up: royally, comically, inevitably.
I just don’t get how copying the wording for his “apology” that he was making for committing plagiarism in the first place wouldn’t strike even the most thoughtless person as rather stupid. I suppose you may be correct that he just doesn’t even see what the problem is.
We did have various disciplinary measures starting with a grade of zero on individual assignments (rarely enough to cost a whole course), and of course there was nothing stopping graders (rarely an actual professor) from dealing with first offences outside the system. In my experience, people usually just didn’t bother for whatever reason. It’s true though that there was nothing centralized until you were talking about major offences leading to loss of credit, etc.
And those chickens came home to roost here in Canada this year with a couple of high-profile cases.
One was “journalist” Margaret Wente, whose job description appears to be “reading the New York Times so you don’t have to.” Even after being called out for repeated copy-paste jobs going back several years, she remains in place (apparently now with an assistant tasked with inserting appropriate citations and quotation marks), her only punishment two weeks off and the opportunity to write a nice, long front-page nonpology. (To paraphrase, “my critics are just doing this because they don’t like the truths I speak!”)
Even bigger was Chris Spence, who had risen to the position of education director for the Toronto District School Board. After somebody noticed a bunch of cribbed passages in an op-ed under his name, it turned out he’d been lifting unattributed material all the way back to grad school, including his PhD dissertation (and probably before, but I don’t think it’s really possible to check).
That these two could get away with it so long, and only one of them suffer serious consequences, speaks volumes. Our universities pay ample lip service to defeating plagiarism, but many of the people responsible for stopping it are really not trying very hard, if at all. Seems that no matter how much we say it’s wrong, deep down many people really don’t care.
Plagiarists’ rationalizations often include things like “I thought it was just common knowledge”, “I thought it was public domain”, and the like. Hey, copy 20 words from somebody who posted at Yahoo Answers? That must be “Fair use!” I mean, it’s only 20 words, right?
“I have a theory, Harry, that you can make any sentence seem profound by writing the name of a dead philosopher at the end of it” - Professor Dumbledore
The thought of trying to find something obscure enough to safely plagiarize from it makes me tired just thinking about it. Then, I always did have trouble keeping my papers under the max length.
My research adviser told me a story once about being on the (PhD or Masters) committee for a student at a school where he was some sort of affiliated faculty member. The kid plagiarized my adviser. How stupid do you have to be to plagiarize someone who you is actually on your committee?!
The astronomy class at the university where I went to graduate school had a lot of cheating. There was one lab where the students were supposed to observe the time when the sun set for some number of days over the semester. The students would copy the times off the internet not realizing that a person making the observation would see the sun set a few minutes earlier because of the mountains to the west. Students would also copy the answers from the previous semester’s homework solutions without realizing that the problems had changed. Their independent labs involved worksheets that they would tear out and turn in, so probably the best story involves a kid who took the torn out pages from a friend, Xeroxed them (you could clearly see the torn parts), and then used a pencil to write over the words that were already there (to make it look more real?!).
When students spend two paragraphs getting character names wrong and show spelling errors all over the place but their third paragraph masterfully pulls together deeper themes in a concise and clever way with larger words the students seem surprised that they get caught.
I remember grading group quizzes where I would see a bunch of random stuff, but then they would have the correct answer at the end. Students would be shocked when I told them it looked like they had just copied the group next to them. What made it even more depressing was that these quizzes were open book/note and then could ask me for help. They were also able to go over their work with me before they turned it in.
Here’s a great old Carol Burnett skit that, well, came to mind for me. In it, Alan Alda has issues with saying anything original.
I had forgotten how good Carol’s nonverbal humor was.
I figure it’s just the infinite monkey theorem. You could probably look at a lot of broad quotations and narrow them down to something identical in Yahoo answers.
Hmmmm, I hadn’t ever thought of writing papers for money. I flunked, but not for academic reasons. I could cruise writing papers, as I read fast, can paraphrase & know how to reference properly (which very few of my compatriots had a clue about). I reckon I could easily pull 60% for most 1st-year undergrad papers barring hard sciences. Be fun, too…
Students who are interested and engaged will quickly figure out that a great quote, properly cited, helps make the student look smarter in the professor’s eyes, and they’ll be eager to write down their own thoughts about the topic.
The plagiarist, on the other hand, is probably lazy and uninterested, so isn’t likely to take the time to seek out the obscure and properly cover their tracks. The few who do bother with those things are probably smart enough to do it the right way, so I assume they do it to satisfy some kind of con-man urge.
Joking, of course, it’s unethical and (I believe) somewhat illegal. And from a few things I’ve read here and there over the years, it’s extremely depressing work, prostituting one’s writing and critical-thinking skills to desperate undergraduates. I do rather love the Dickensian misery of it, though!
