Kieran Healy

Copycats

Looking at my referrer logs, I find an uptick in people who find this blog through searches like these:

• marx human nature
• emile durkheim’s main themes
• sociology exam simmel stranger
• weber vocation
  
• what is the protestant ethic?

This is because right around now, all over the country, undergraduates are writing final papers or taking final exams in sociological theory courses like the one I teach [pdf].

Some of those searching are doing legitimate research and some are looking for material to plagiarize. I don’t know what the relative sizes of those groups are, of course. I usually get at least one open-and-shut case of plagiarism each semester. Like hepatitis, plagiarism comes in several varieties.

1. Google Plagiarism. Find a paper or discussion online. Pros: Copy. Paste. Done! Cons: Professor may also know about Google.
2. Paper Mills. Online databases of papers, either for free or paid. Free ones have the same pros and cons as Google. Paid ones may provide better papers, but cost money. Parallel services for faculty like Plagiarism.org may catch you out.
3. The File Cabinet. Located in the Fraternity House or equivalent. Pros: instant library of papers. Cons: someone has to write them in the first place. Possible need to co-ordinate submissions.
4. The Library. Pros: thousands of obscure books on your topic, with obscure paragraphs to copy. Cons: Faculty may have read books. Not sure where the library is.

Few things annoy faculty more than plagiarism, particularly when it’s poorly executed. (That doesn’t mean well-executed copying is better, just that it’s a different sort of insult.) Because people who plagiarize are usually also poor students, they tend not to realise that it’s obvious when a paragraph of bumbling prose suddenly rises from its own ashes to become lucid and flowing, or even just moderately coherent.

The most annoying sort of plagiarism is the low-expectations variety. To my mind, plagiarism ought to be about copying something really good in order to get a better grade. But for many students, it’s just about turning in something that will help them scrape by. Plagiarism is hardest to spot if the student’s highest ambition is a C and so doesn’t mind copying something that’s already a poor piece of work. That’s why the File Cabinet method is the most insidious variety. It’s hard to spot (the work’s already bad) and hard to prove (it’s not published or online).

Thanks to the Lazy Web, though, I think most plagiarism is now Google-based. This gives me a fighting chance. Because I have a blog, it also lets me contribute to the base of copyable texts. Perhaps some of my posts—like this one, for instance—have already been cannibalized by someone, somewhere. My ambition, naturally, is to have a student quote my own words back to me without attribution in a final paper. That’s an office hour I’d look forward to.

“My ambition, naturally, is to have a student quote my own words back to me without attribution in a final paper. That’s an office hour I’d look forward to.”

The secret (or, I guess, no longer secret) ambition of anyone who’s ever had to “google” a student paper.

I have to give you credit: plagiarism is tedious and dispiriting, but you’ve made it funny.

My all-time favourite: a paper on Luther lifted directly from the Catholic Encyclopedia. The student never quite got the point that the article damned Luther by faint praise.

Where I teach, we are not allowed to use turnitin.com. Fear of lawsuits. Use of the service requires entering text of the student’s paper into some sort of database: the concern seems to be that a student might argue that his/her words had been published/made public without permission.

Where I teach, we are not allowed to use turnitin.com.

I’ve never used it myself, either. But I don’t think we have a policy against it.

Fear of lawsuits… the concern seems to be that a student might argue that his/her words had been published/made public without permission.

Ha! Oh, the irony.

My wife was once handed a paper with the links in it still underlined. I thought that was hysterical; she was pissed; the student couldn’t figure out how he’d been caught.

Plagiarism dot com

With this post, Kieran Healy has achieved the impossible: he’s made plagiarism funny. I spent two semesters (never again!) teaching at a place where plagiarism was rampant. At the end of each paper grading session, I would have a small…

“My wife was once handed a paper with the links in it still underlined.”

Been there. I’ve also received a paper with the URL printed at the top of each page.

“That doesn’t mean well-executed copying is better, just that it’s a slightly different sort of insult.”

Ugh. I’ve received identical submissions from multiple students, with only the font differing between them (to be fair, in this case we allowed students to work together on a specific assignment – but requested they submit their own write-up). It was depressing to have to explain – to very bright graduate students – that making cosmetic changes doesn’t qualify as “doing your own work.”

“My ambition, naturally, is to have a student quote my own words back to me … ”

A friend of mine at a prestigious university had her own words quoted back to her in a doctoral proposal (!). When she pointed this out, it was revealed that the doctoral candidate’s advisor had recommended simply copying my friend’s text since, naturally, she’d approve her own design. I’d never heard of such a thing, but, needless to say, it put my friend (a somewhat junior faculty member at the time) in a rather awkward position.

Does no one take pride in flunking anymore?

Now that I type it, I realize you almost never even hear the word “flunk.”

Google is my best friend in teaching. No matter how many times I remind students that if they find material on Google, I’ll find it, too, there’s that ten percent who still cheats. I use TurnItIn.com only when I absolutely cannot find anything through Google or if I need something formal for my chair.

I’ve only had one student protest his zero. He actually demanded a grade review on the assignment, accusing me of racism because he would never cheat. When I gave his two plagiarized papers to the composition director, heavily highlighted in bright yellow, with the original source material, she agreed with my decision. The student quickly switched to audit my course, and I’m going to guess he’s still cheating nearly a year later.

My favorite plagiarized submissions include papers with obvious font differences and papers with sudden shifts from mediocre to sophisticated vocabulary. The biggest clues (outside of physical differences) that gave away plagiarism for me focus on sentence structure and vocabulary. When a student can’t spell “cosmopolitan,” but uses “myriad” properly, my Spidey-sense starts tingling. Sometimes I get really excited about nailing plagiarism, and other times, I’m really depressed about it.

I had a student who “borrowed” a friend’s paper, but she couldn’t figure out how to get her friend’s name out of the header at the top of every page, so she tore off the right-hand corner of every page.

It almost worked, but while I was in a conference with her and another student, the other student kept subtly (and then not-so-subtly) pointing to the torn corners.

I guess I’m not at the (fortunate?) level of having to teach, where trying to catch these bozos is just part of the job. To long for the days when I was in college, when the internet was so new and relatively unconnected that research online was mostly a waste of time, if you even had access (which I didn’t). Research done the old-fashioned way (books! egads!) always made me appreciate the effort that much more.

“I had a student who ‘borrowed’ a friend’s paper, but she couldn’t figure out how to get her friend’s name out of the header at the top of every page, so she tore off the right-hand corner of every page.”

You are a strong contender for first prize in the plagiarism horror stories contest that someone should sponsor.

A member of our faculty had a portion of a joint-authored journal article turned in by an undergraduate last year as his own work. The faculty member is not a “Smith” or “Jones,” but has a very distinctive name.

This semester, one of my graduate students caught someone who thought she was using the file-cabinet, but was in fact using a paper mill. She had gotten the paper from someone who had turned it in the previous year, but he had gotten it from a paper mill.

And ogged: So far this year, I’ve flunked 7 people for academic dishonesty, and had one (a graduate student) expelled. The problem is not that it doesn’t happen, but that the perceived risk is so low. Last year, I asked a class of about 150 students how many had intentionally plagiarized during their time in the university, and nearly half raised their hands.

“My ambition, naturally, is to have a student quote my own words back to me without attribution in a final paper.”

It wasn’t a final paper, and the student didn’t know it was me, but I had this happen:

http://www.yarinareth.net/caveatlector/archive/week_2003_03_09.html#e001411

I love how students seem not to understand that if they are writing in pidgin english one minute, and then lapse into Harvard-sounding prose the next, that I’m not going to notice.

I love how students seem not to understand that if they are writing in pidgin english one minute, and then lapse into Harvard-sounding prose the next, that I’m going to notice.

Sorry about the double-post. I thought I had stopped the first one in time.

Plagiarists?

Kieran Healy finds a lot of searches in his referral logs for things like “marx human nature” and “emile durkheim’s main themes” and smells plagiarism. Me, I’d noticed that things like “german bombings walzer,” “okin nozick libertarianism” and “utilita…

Plagarism story for consideration:

A student turned a paper into my father that was a copied email. Apparently, the student’s brother had taken the class a few years earlier and had sent his brother the paper.

Problem was, instead of copying just the paper, he copied the entire email, including the messages at the top of the email.

Those messages (paraphrase):

Can you send me your Congress paper? This class blows.

Reply: Yeah that class blows. Here’s the paper.

Great way to start your paper.

A different kind of plagiarism: I was the editor for my university’s literary journal, and it was my job to give the final one-over on each of the pieces that was being heavily considered by the genre staffs for publication. Generally I browsed stories and poems for typos, but once I caught a writer who submitted a story that was actually just an amalgamation of Hunter S. Thompson excerpts, coming from at least half a dozen different sources. I took extraordinary satisfaction in writing his rejection letter.

It took me all of about ten minutes to track down three different plagiarized papers this year. Google is glorious indeed!

I’m thinking that on next year’s syllabi I may add something about just how easy it is to discover these papers to my comments on the plagiarism policy. Preemption, ya know.

For now, I’ll be warming up my browser for the round of papers that students will be handing in tomorrow.

It took me all of about ten minutes to track down three different plagiarized papers this year. Google is glorious indeed!

I’m thinking that on next year’s syllabi I may add something about just how easy it is to discover these papers to my comments on the plagiarism policy. Preemption, ya know.

For now, I’ll be warming up my browser for the round of papers that students will be handing in tomorrow.

Opps, I thought the first one didn’t take. Sorry.

The Lighter Side of Plagiarism

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF PLAGIARISM….Professor Kieran Healy of the University of Arizona doesn’t like plagiarism:Few things annoy faculty more than plagiarism, particularly when it’s poorly executed. (That doesn’t mean well-executed copying is better, jus…

When I was a junior in college (the first digit of the decade is the product of two different primes greater than 1), a senior asked to “borrow” a paper from a religion class so he could get ideas (he needed to finish an incomplete with a paper or he would not graduate, and he took different section of the same course as I, from a different professor).

A few days later he came back furious: he had gotten a C (“little more than a bad paraphrase of [a well known popular book]”) while I had gotten an A.

As a student I’ve often wondered how good teachers were at catching cheating, plagiarizing etc. Every teacher, I’ve ever had has claimed a 100% success rate, based apparrently on the fact that they caught everyone that they knew was cheating. But, obviously that doesn’t mean that they actually have caught everyone. Certainly, a great many of my friends have claimed to have cheated, plagiarized etc. with no consequences, even with the most devoted, eagle-eyed teachers, but of course that’s not very reliable either. So do professors really have any idea whether they’re catching most cheaters or is it just wishful thinking?

Elsewhere on the Web

Things spotted today while surfing in between interludes of writing (or, more precisely, trying to write) the book of my dissertation … Both Helen Montana and Cosma Shalizi blog on a paper in Nature that uses self-replicating programs that perform…

Elsewhere on the Web

Things spotted today while surfing in between interludes of writing (or, more precisely, trying to write) the book of my dissertation … Both Helen Montana and Cosma Shalizi blog on a paper in Nature that uses self-replicating programs that perform…

“My ambition, naturally, is to have a student quote my own words back to me without attribution in a final paper.”

Just wait; it’ll happen. Back in the day when I was TA-ing for intro physics, I had a student turn in a (late) homework which was copied word-for-word from the solution set! Worse, I’d written the solutions myself! That student didn’t just deserve to fail for cheating, she deserved to fail for cheating so stupidly! (The professor let her off easy, unfortunately.)

It is the laziness in plagiarism that’s so dispiriting. At least try, for Christ’s sake.

The stupidest act of plagiarism happened to a colleague of mine. A student copied a journal article on the assigned topic, largely verbatim, and turned it in to my friend. The student failed to notice that the author of the article was, in fact, his professor.

It takes a lot to flunk a class these days, but plagiarism is the surest bet. And rest assured, faculty members do take pleasure in flunking plagiarizers. A friend of mine flunked one of these guys, and the student demanded to know why he got an F on the paper, when he’d obviously done some of the work himself. My friend answered, “You don’t think you deserve an F? I would’ve given you a G if I could go that low on the alphabet.”

Back when I was an undergrad, the worst story I heard was about a PoliSci prof who received a paper that was plagiarized from a book by another professor in the same department. (“Did you not suspect a connection between the Gary Jacobson who wrote the book you were copying, and the Gary Jacobson who has the office next to mine??”) A close runner-up was the guy who submitted identical papers to two different classes, taught by professors who happened to be married to each other… (“Honey, you should see this great paper I just got…”)

But these were blown away in my first year at my current job, when a colleague teaching a Web-based course had a student turn in a paper that was copied word for word from the course web site. The student’s shifting defenses included the argument “Well, yes, I copied it, but it wasn’t malicious…”

A year or so ago, Slate had a shopping guide to online term paper sites that was pretty amusing (none of the papers got a grade above B). I had it tacked up outside my office for a while, but I doubt any of the students saw the humor.

===So do professors really have any idea whether they’re catching most cheaters or is it just wishful thinking?

I suppose we miss some, but the thing is plagiarism is primarily laziness and generally to do it well takes about the same amount of work as doing the actual work well.

A couple favorites are a professional paper at a conference by a grad student who stole whole sections from the mentor to three of the panel members. Without even looking up the source they each identified the original paper separately.

The ‘best’ plagiarizing is when they can barely write and one starts to mark it up in bright red ink. Then, suddenly, the next paragraph transitions into flawless prose. They always seem to have this confused look as to how you figured it out, but have developed such poor writing skills they can’t tell the difference themselves.

Has anyone heard of the reverse happening – student work being plagiarized by their professors?

Sometimes the students think it’s a matter of numbers. This isn’t exactly a plagiarism story, but it has a similar feel. I was part of a team (3 profs & 5 grad students) teaching a required ed class on computers. One of the assignments was to write, over the course of the semester, 4 short (200 words, more or less) reactions to chapters from the book and post them in the class WebCT environment. Very small in terms of overall effect on grade (maybe 5%).

Now, there were 360 students in this class overall (6 sections of 60 students each), so, while the students couldn’t google a response, you can guess what the lazy would be thinking. How likely is it that the same person would read all the papers? Who’d be crazy enough to do that?

As it turned out, me. I read all 360. For the first paper I caught about a dozen people who “shared” identical reactions, right down to the formatting. As we put it later to the classes, you share the work, you share the grade: copiers split the points right down the middle. (for the other three there were no more, um, shared reactions)

The reactions from the guilty were interesting. Some said, “all right, you got me.” One girl claimed her roommate (in a later section) had copied her without telling her. But the funniest was a pair of sophomore twins in the same section who’d turned in identical papers. Their response? “But all our other professors let us work together!”

I had such a hard time explaining to them what that meant in practical terms.

They are all bold faced! I prefaced my class this year by saying, “I’m a librarian. I’m the person your professor will come to to find out where you copied a paper from. So don’t copy anything. I’ll find it.” I call it up online while they’re sitting there and I silently point to their very words online. I say, “Gee, did you write the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine?” Know what? They totally don’t get it!

I don’t have opportunity to see much plagiarism, since the nature of my classes (undergrad music theory) doesn’t require many papers. I had one student who, when asked to outline the “typical” form for sonata and compound ternary forms on a final exam, whipped out the formal-outline worksheet that I’d given them a month prior (and had drilled into their heads again and again—everyone else had these things committed to memory backwards and forwards). I caught her a minute or so later and had her put it away. When I checked the exam, she didn’t even copy the correct formal outlines into the right locations—or even copy them correctly. Mind, these were not complicated diagrams.

A year later, I had the same student in another class for upperclassmen. The class had to do a final analysis paper, and hers was more than a bit suspect. I handed out an incomplete and came to meet with her at the beginning of the next semester, during which she actually brought me copies of all the articles she’d copied and pasted from in order to generate the paper. She didn’t seem to understand what she had done wrong and, in fact, kept handing me the same excerpts when I repeatedly asked her to re-write the paper as her own work.

I once worked with a professor who had a student turn in a paper on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. She assumed that she was in the clear, because how could the professor have ever read that dusty old book in the library called “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”!

Okay, so chuck and Dakota might win in terms of pure stupidity, but I think mine wins for sublime weirdness.

This was a math class so (most of) the homeworks were handwritten. This means that students can’t cut-and-paste or copy a file, but one of the students did it the old-fashioned way: he went to the effort of copying someone else’s homework by hand. Now when I say “copying”, I really mean it. No shuffling things around, no cosmetic changes, it was copied exactly. And when I say “copied exactly”, I really mean it. Words were written and then crossed out, just as in the original. Random scribblings were faithfully copied from the margins. Every single mark on the page was precisely transcribed.

I can’t even imagine what was going through his mind as he was doing this.

“the first digit of the decade is the product of two different primes greater than 1”. Hate to be pendantic, but all primes are greater than one. see http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/lists/small/1000.txt

===She didn’t seem to understand what she had done wrong and, in fact, kept handing me the same excerpts when I repeatedly asked her to re-write the paper as her own work.

I have had this as well where it really appears they don’t understand the concepts of attribution and paraphrasing. Perhaps they were fooling me, but is so they played dumb pretty well. They still take a hit on their grade, but they don’t get introduced to the university judicial system.

Has anyone heard of the reverse happening – student work being plagiarized by their professors?

The closest thing I can think of to this is that when I was in college a professor put a note at on the last page of my paper asking me to make him another copy so he could have it for his files.

As a TA in a humanities field for three years at one of the nation’s largest public schools, I had the, er, privilege of seeing a few “unoriginal works” come down the pike.

For cracking down on plagiarism, even more important than being an effective Googler, is making sure that you are extremely explicit about how plagiarism can be handled. Apparently incoming students had to sign some sort of “I agree to the code of conduct” statement so we could reference that in syllabi and say “ignorance will not be accepted” – this didn’t guarantee that a committee would back us up, but it removed the #1 loophole students use.

I never took anyone up on misconduct; I just handed out a small number of zeroes on papers, and, alas, nobody ever appealed. Biggest tipoff that someone was plagiarizing: the paper was not addressing the question(s) asked, but was instead rambling off on completely irrelevant topics. Unique essay assignments make it much harder to plagiarize effectively.

Other side, sorta. Some years back, high school English class, we were assigned randomly into groups of two for some project. I got stuck with loser dropout girl. We arranged to each do our parts, she’d get her sections to me a couple days before deadline, and I’d do whatever synthesis was required. (And I wanted a chance to edit her bits to be vaguely literate) She couldn’t manage that, and, in fact, I found her on the day it was due in the computer lab, typing up, word for word, appropriate sections of one of the sample projects the teacher had shown us as examples.

I ended up saying, as I turned the thing in, “Um, I, uh… I kinda have the feeling my partner didn’t exactly do original work.”

I didn’t do the best job ever on my half, but at least I got my B- honestly.

“Has anyone heard of the reverse happening – student work being plagiarized by their professors?”

Yes. A friend of mine managed to get appointed Chair of his department (he was ABD at the time – long story) as a consequence of a professor copying a student’s work in a journal.

My favorite plagarism case was when a TA in my wife’s office caught a guy who copied a paper from the web. His defense: “I didn’t know it was copied off the Internet; my frat brother gave it to me …”

As a student who does not cheat, I report people who I see cheating or trying to cheat whenever I can. It pisses me off that my hard work is getting graded agaisnt work done by cheaters. Sometimes the teacher has done nothing, even when shown proof the person was trying to cheat.

Laughing About Evil

Laughing About Evil

For a bit of fun and as an added example, I recommend reading the beginning of the second chapter of Stephen Fry’s novel ‘The Liar’ – at least Adrain Healey is cheating with an effort… (And what a topic! I would have been sorely tempted, too!)

= As a student who does not cheat, I report people who I see cheating or trying to cheat whenever I can. It pisses me off that my hard work is getting graded agaisnt work done by cheaters. Sometimes the teacher has done nothing, even when shown proof the person was trying to cheat. =

It may only be academics that dislike plagiarizers and the RIAA that dislikes copyright violators, but no one likes a snitch.

Teehee!

As a student, I got busted for plagiarism. It was the most horrible thing. I had made a mistake in citation. I’d paraphrased a long quote, cited the author before the quote and after, in MLA style, but I hadn’t put the quote in quote marks. The author and the source were also in my works cited list.

The professor called me in to her office, told me I’d been flat busted commiting plagiarism, said that all my other work was suspect, and on and on.

I tried to explain that I thought since I’d slightly changed the quote that it shouldn’t go in quote marks, and I pointed out that I’d referenced the author before and after the quote—and in my works cited. No avail.

SHe did let me re-write the paper. I got a B-.

But what really pissed me off was that I knew for a fact (they’d BOAST about it) that over half the class had simply bought their papers online. They got A’s.

As a new professor, i have to agree that attempts by students to talk their way out of assignments and into better grades is by far the most annoying part of the job. A strategy I wasn’t prepared for, but have seen a fair bit, is that students who get a (relatively) poor grade walk into your office and claim outrage/extraordinary circumstances for why they have done so poorly in your class despite their “3.9 GPA.” Usually they try to shame a prof (especially new profs may have some uncertainty on fair grading) into a better grade/redoing a paper. What students don’t realize is that our university allows us to check student transcripts on-line. On every occassion, i found that the student vastly exaggerated his/her GPA, often by a full point or more. The internet does make life easier.

During freshman year of college, a friend of mine once discovered a fellow student’s plagiarizing as well. This student had magnanimously loaned friend his A+ philosophy 101 paper so she could get a few pointers about how to make her own papers better. As she read it she kept coming back to a paragraph with this striking image about triangles (or something like it), and realized that it was lifted word for word from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A quick pow wow among friends led us to overlook the crime, although we were pissed off (he was super smug about his grades). We couldn’t be sure he actually knew what he was doing was plagiarism, and at UVa the sanction for this sort of thing is supposed to be expulsion even the first time. But we were amazed that if we baby freshmen could find the source the TA hadn’t (the TA had written in the margin next to this paragraph something like “really insightful image.”) Maybe students today don’t even work hard enough to cheat well.

As a grad student in mathematics, I wonder whether one could plagiarize a proof as well. Our professors usually recognize one “best way” to form any particular proof, and often encourage students to model this proof for their own—whether it be on a quiz, test, or an assignment. Professors also encourage students to work together and develop proofs together, which usually is a learning experience. I find that proofs are a fine line between plagairizing a composition and citing a fact.

In fact, most of my work as an undergraduate, and now a graduate has been recreating the work of others (Cauchy, DeMorgan,Lorenz, et al). It is what is expected of us. I wonder if students in other disciplines might become confused on this point as well, and tend to plaigarize when they thought that their source was a legitimate source of “general knowledge”.

Hell, when you get down to it, every idea one has is simply a combination and re-hashing of everything one has been exposed to—with only the occassional genuine insight (which is built upon other ideas that are not original to oneselve).

If I’m writing a research paper on J.P. Morgan, should I qoute my mother for explaining to me what steel is? Should I qoute my professor for facts brought up in lecture?

Or if I’m writing a philosophy paper, and I remember this really great imagery about triangles (see barabara’s post), but I don’t remember where it came from or even if it was an original idea, should I actively find a source that mentions it so that I can qoute it? What if I can’t find the source, do I omit it so I don’t plagairize?

What if I mention Plato’s Cave, while writing a paper. Do I need to quote it since it is generally known? Is saying it’s “Plato’s” Cave enough? But what if I was first introduced to the idea from a particular reference book. Should I not give credit to the reference?

If I’m writing a paper about communism, and talk about the idea how in Capitalism either a product is sold for more than what it is worth, or the labor to produce it is not justly compensated… do I qoute Das Kapital? Or is this idea now generally known, and I could be safe not quoting it?

If I do quote these well-known ideas, does this make me look uninformed? As if I had to look in a reference to know them?

Are there particular forms of writing that are more lax in citations than others? Certainly we wouldn’t expect citations like this in a personal essay or a weekly column. How about a philosophy paper? Historical research?

Certainly, we may have very definate ideas about where a source should be quoted, and where it shouldn’t. The difficultly is that the student and the professor may have very different idea on the subject (or perhaps marginally different, and if the professor is a real stickler, the student can find their entire academic career ruined). This, in turn, can literally ruin a students life.

I admit that most cases of plagairism that get called out are blatant. Now, I’ve never intentionally plagiarized, but I’m afraid that I’ve plagiarized on nearly every piece of writing I’ve ever had (including this one—note that I didn’t quote the source for Plato’s cave… to be safe I’ll just mention The Rupublic here and heave a sigh of relief…). Though it isn’t in proper form. Oh well.

I know professor often tell students that if they are unsure when to cite a source they should approach the professor (particularly if the professor is the type to hit you with a plagiarism allegation). However, I find these professors to be the most unapproachable…the prospect of sitting in their office asking an inane question is a daunting prospect indeed. The student who would be unsure what to cite would also likely want to remain as invisible as possible, to not “give themself away” as being inept (whether or not this is an accurate judgement on their part).

I, personally, would never ask a professor whether a citation was appropriate unless the material in question was very exotic. I would flat out hate to come across as stupid. I would probably opt to omit the material instead.

“My ambition, naturally, is to have a student quote my own words back to me without attribution in a final paper.”

I had it happen!

I suspected 2 students were turning in the same homework. For some scheduling reason, the assignments weren’t all due at the same time. So, on one assignment, I photocopied student A’s paper, corrected it and returned it to him. Student B then turned in his paper, which was word for word the same as Student A’s paper. The kicker: as part of my comments on Student A’s paper, I had written “perhaps” in the margin. Student B inserted my “perhaps” into the text of Student A’s paper: “Athena was perhaps the …”

I wish you the best in your noble ambition! This occurred during my second semester of teaching.

Students aren’t the only ones who make dumb mistakes.

In one class, when I handed in my term paper, I included with it a paper I’d written for another class that would also have been relevant for this one, and which I thought my prof might like to read. Of course it had the other prof’s comments written on it. I explained this when I gave it to him, but despite the presence of the other, entirely new paper, to this prof ever afterwards I was “the student who was so stupid that he turned in an old paper with comments without even bothering to retype it.”

So I take some of these other stories of dumb students with a grain of salt.

Coincidentally (?) last Saturday’s SNL episode (starring Ashton Kutchner and his underpants) featured a sketch in which an exasperated high school teacher tries to get students to ‘fess up to cheating.

Curiosity: What is the worst academic honor offense (as it is termed at UVA) in the eyes of a professor?
Would it be straightforward plagiarism?
taking extra time on an assignment without permission and with an attempt to pretend that this was not done?
using legitimate resources illegitimately (i.e. using the textbook on a closed-book exam)?
or some other variation on cheating?

I just finished putting together the documentation for a cut-and-paste plagiarism case in which the student combined a huge number of wildly incompatible web sources. To try to paper over the few contradictions he noticed, he changed various words—with rather peculiar results. The most striking was changing “matriliny” to “materiality” in a book review written by a friend of mine, leading him to claim that “the attack on materiality [in Ghana] stemmed not from Christianity and missionization but from individualized cocoa farming…”!

After my last quarter teaching at [Lesser branch of Univ of California] I flunked three students (of the same ethnic group) who had sat next to each other on the final and obviously copied. (Same calculation errors, etc.)

As they were B students going in to the final, one of them wrote to me at my following gypsy scholar position at [Another branch of major state school] protesting. So I sent in photocopies of all their papers to the dean and suggested she could raise their grades (snicker, suspended them instead).

Whenever my wife or I turn these people in (and we do), they are usually flagrant repeat offenders. A few more expulsions would fix this up.

ref Dakota on May 8, 2003 01:56 PM

“A student turned a paper into my father that was a copied email”

Dakota’s story, including the line “this class blows” was on an old SNL repeat that aired a few weeks ago. Ironic…

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a topic that has been disucssed on a number of Weblogs lately. Kieran Healy’s Weblog has a post that considers the copycats to be a pest. They are of course. The invisible adjunct is just plain angry. Plagiarism really is

Although I agree with most of the posts here that plagiarism is a terrible scourge on modern academia, the obvious glee that most of the posts express at catching a plariarist is a little sickening, in fact the post by Andrew Lazarus seems almost racist. While (mostly college) educators have a duty to expose plagiarism I would think that they would see it as a necessary evil not something to be happy about or wish for so you can “get” a student. If you are so miserable in your job that finding plagiarists so you can screw them is the only satisfaction you can find, perhaps you should find another profession.

Lanic,
As a high-school student, the brother of a college student, the son of a person beginning a possible second career in academics, and as the son of another parent whose closest friends are respected academics I have only the following to say:

In academics, it is never a happy occasion to find that someone who you have worked very hard to educate, spending many hours speaking to them and reviewing their work, has been plagiarizing. It is a violation of the trust of that teacher and it is also a violation of a silent agreement that a student signs when taking a class. This agreement states that the student will do his/her best to learn the material and to improve him/herself by it.

When a student violates this silent contract, it is heartbreaking to teachers. If other students discover what happened they are often either overly hostile or overly accepting of the person.

Now, if you will notice carefully the results of all of these stories you might notice that most of the teachers here are fairly lenient towards cheaters/plagiarizers. If an honest student were given the option to punish any of these examples then the result would almost consistently be immediate expulsion. Other students might not have this strong reaction, but that is often due to either a shared “understanding” (ie they’ve cheated before) or they may just be uninvolved enough to not care about the course (ie friends who do not have to face the difficulties of the course). Instead, the most common result seems to be an ‘F’ or a zero on the paper.

The “excitement” that you see is laced with a sad recognition of the foolishness of plagiarism. It is a common occurrence in social studies on the nature of cheating and the public response for people to penalize the attempted cheaters, even at a good cost to themselves. It is never fun to see when someone has completely disregarded your work and efforts for personal benefits.

To attempt to cheat does not just indicate an attempt to “stay afloat” in a course—it is an attempt by that individual to claim an advantage over his fellows. I, for one, feel that cheating and plagiarism are terrible things in academics. I know that many of the papers that I spend hours and hours on were pulled together by someone’s tutor in 20 minutes.

In one history class that I had, my teacher suggested to another student that she ask me for help preparing for a unit test after (apparently, I did not hear much about the conversation, though it was a small class and I knew what type of student she was…) several big failures on tests. She contacted me the day before the test, asking me to help her study for it. The first thing that I did was to explain to her that I couldn’t possibly give her all of the answers and that I didn’t have any greater knowledge about what the test was going to cover than she did. I pointed out that any real improvement would require a reformation and refinement of how she looked at the material that might take 3 or 4 sessions over a few weeks. I think that was the point that she decided to not meet with me again. I went on to explain to her the “associative” model of note-taking (from I forget which book, it was one of the “left/right brain power”-type of books, please excuse my lack of a source). While I never bothered to read much of that book myself, as I already used the system when I first was shown the bubble diagrams, I was using a similar system and it was a nice confirmation of my personal theory.

So, as I began to draw out diagrams and to point out some parts of the method that are critical for a basic understanding I was greeted with a simple phrase that explained everything to me: “Oh, that’s just like what my tutor told me.”

In my mind at least, I went slack-jawed.

It was not pleasant to realize that someone would bother with this, but it made my understanding of the tutor papers much more in depth. I realized that plagiarism and the whole method of using tutors is bunk—it is a simple, self-assuring method of escaping from the reality of the situation. To the people that do this, it is often not to make the paper better but rather it is just to make it so that the teacher will give them a good grade.

Teachers do not like to see a lack of motivation, but they like it even less to see that that lack of motivation has meant that the student actually copied someone else’s work rather blindly as a substitute for his/her own. This disrespect for the teacher is saddening to the point that, when they’ve become experienced enough to expect and recognize it, it becomes a personal game against those who try to cheat the “system.” My dad, in his first semester of teaching, faced two suspect papers in two classes. He was annoyed by this but instead of summarily dropping their grade to nothing he went and read through their previous papers—each of which bore the same quality and technique. He was ecstatic to realize that they were just REALLY GOOD writers. I have no doubt that he will have to deal with some real cases in the future, but I know that he was really overjoyed to find this reality. He is a dedicated teacher and his syllabus was, to put it nicely, one of the most detailed and comprehensive (yet clear) syllabuses I’ve ever seen.

Teachers go after plagiarizers because they love their work and because of a dedication to the students that have enough self-respect to NOT cheat. I’m sure that there is at least a little bit in each teacher that secretly hopes that they are terribly wrong and that the person is just uneven or was really tired for one section, but in the end, the reality demands an acceptance of success against the cheaters.
——Otherwise:
I don’t have much to say about your perception of Mr. Lazarus’ post other than to say that the UC system has one of the most racially diverse student populations that I know of. It isn’t an Ivy League where you have 40 people from 40 foreign countries (who are the children of the leadership there), it is where you have 1st and 2nd generation immigrants from all over Asia, Russia, Africa, South America, and Central America seeking an education. While it may indeed demonstrate some prejudice, it seems much more likely to indicate the close and obvious connection between the three students. He did not point out a particular group and he did not make any stereotypical comments, so I’d assume that he meant it as an additional detail in the sparsely-detailed account—an odd point that makes the idiocy of the cheating clear to the reader. That’s rhetoric in my book, not prejudice.————Sorry for the long post, but when you have a lot to say….

This isn’t quite plagiarism, but it’s funny enough to justify including it. A friend of mine handed back a set of exams, and was met by an irate student on his way out the door.

Student: I think you graded this wrong
TA: [explanation of Adorno snipped]
Student: no, I’m sure you made a mistake
TA: (re-explanation of Adorno snipped]
Student: Look, I got an old copy of this test from my frat files—this is the right answer.
TA: I changed the test from last year—see, I added a “not” to the question.
Student: THAT’S NOT FAIR! You’re not allowed to do that!

I’m not making this up.

This isn’t quite plagiarism, but it’s funny enough to justify including it. A friend of mine handed back a set of exams, and was met by an irate student on his way out the door.

Student: I think you graded this wrong
TA: [explanation of Adorno snipped]
Student: no, I’m sure you made a mistake
TA: (re-explanation of Adorno snipped]
Student: Look, I got an old copy of this test from my frat files—this is the right answer.
TA: I changed the test from last year—see, I added a “not” to the question.
Student: THAT’S NOT FAIR! You’re not allowed to do that!

I’m not making this up.

Why Plagiarism Matters

In the light of a recent discussion of plagiarism initiated by Kieran Healy’s Copycats and picked up by Calpundit for its entertainment value (while Kevin Drum accused himself of plagiarising comments from Healy’s blog, Kieran allowed that this was “re…

Mitch: Sure, it sometimes happens that a prof plagiarizes a student. My uncle was an engineering grad student whose advisor forced him to write a paper that was published under the advisor’s own name. My uncle wrote the paper, planting several subtle errors in it, got his doctorate, then wrote his own paper exposing the errors in the advisor’s paper. Revenge is sweet.

Once during a class lecture I noticed that my professor quoted, verbatim & without attribution, some remarks I had made in a paper I had turned in to her two weeks previously. I wouldn’t have minded except that she gave me an A-minus in the course. Hey, Goddamnit, if I’m good enough to be plagiarized for the class lecture, I’m good enough to deserve an A in the course.

Mitch: Sure, it sometimes happens that a prof plagiarizes a student. My uncle was an engineering grad student whose advisor forced him to write a paper that was published under the advisor’s own name. My uncle wrote the paper, planting several subtle errors in it, got his doctorate, then wrote his own paper exposing the errors in the advisor’s paper. Revenge is sweet.

Once during a class lecture I noticed that my professor quoted, verbatim & without attribution, some remarks I had made in a paper I had turned in to her two weeks previously. I wouldn’t have minded except that she gave me an A-minus in the course. Hey, Goddamnit, if I’m good enough to be plagiarized for the class lecture, I’m good enough to deserve an A in the course.

Blog Awe

Some of the best blog posts I’ve read recently: Wacky Israeli Minister on MidEastLog: “It’s clear that Islam is on the way to disappearing,” Elon asserts with certainty. “What we are now seeing across the Muslim world is not a

While I haven’t had my own words turned in to me, a friend of mine did while he was TAing. He got his BA, MA, and Ph.D. at the same university, and one of his undergraduate papers was copied by his then-roommate without his knowledge; the copy found its way to a fraternity file. Several years later a student turned that paper in as his own in the same course. My friend had the joyous experience of saying to the idiot: “This is an A+ paper, and the reason I know that is that’s what I got on it when I turned it in for this class seven years ago.”

I don’t take “glee” in catching plagiarists. Maybe I’m still too young and idealistic, but there’s a certain sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I think “this is good….wait, it’s too good…wait, I’ve seen this somewhere before.”

I have had a couple instances where Google helped me out. I typed in the suspicious phrase and “bam”, there was the paper.

What I did was make a copy of the student paper and print a copy of the website for my files, and then attach a copy of the website to the student paper and put a 0 on it with the legend “if you don’t understand why, come talk to me.”

I’ve never had anyone come in and talk to me, and there were no “obvious” (that is, catchable by me) instances of plagiarism in that class this term.

I’m sure there are some that slip through. I look for the “easy” ones but I tend to take the opinion of “it’s their education and their souls if they choose to do it” for what might be more cryptic cases.

And a plagiarism story: one of my officemates (when I was in grad school) had a wife who taught high school science. She required her students to turn in short research papers a couple times a semester. One evening while I was working in the lab, she was sitting in their grading (waiting for hubby to get out of his night class). All of a sudden, she held a paper up to the light and said something like “Damn! I can’t believe it” and started scratching at a whited-out area on the paper.

turns out a kid in her class copied the paper STRAIGHT from MS Encarta encyclopedia, and whited-out the “hyperlinks” (the “see this other subject” links) that came out on it.

(she handed it in to the principal, and I’m happy to say the kid’s parents were called in and they said they were moving his computer to a place where they could monitor him while he did his homework).

Fascinating, but, sadly, not remotely surprising. A couple of years ago in college, in an Introduction to Business class, the subject of ethics came up. A question was asked: “If you caught a fellow employee scamming your employer or otherwise stealing from the company, what would you do?”

Out of a class of 40, two of us (two!) said we would inform the employer. The rest of the class was divided almost evenly between not doing anything and trying to get a piece of the action. The arguments for getting a piece of the action were made without shame, and, even more telling, with a sense of genuine surprise and wonder that where still jerks in the world who would do something so obviously stupid as want to make life difficult for a fellow employee. The teacher was not appalled. This is absolutely a true story.

What it speaks to, of course, is that our is a culture that increasingly promotes dishonesty and basic weaselness as positive traits: What matters are grades – honesty and ethics (read: morality) mean nothing because they don’t have normative power in the “real” world, or so the assumptions of the cynics we have raised go.

CCW

mg: That’s horrible – didn’t your instructor know the difference between actual plagiarism and a mistake in citation form? (I mean, Jesus Christ, it can’t be passing off someone else’s work as your own if you explicitly cite it as someone else’s, even if you leave off the quotation marks!)

When I was an engineering grad student, I taught a couple sections of a fluids lab. One guy handed in a late lab report that seemed both strangely familiar and unusually good (for him). Fortunately, he included the plagiarized report—which I had graded and handed back a week prior—within his own report.

Re: Professors copying students. When I was in college I had a professor copy a term paper of mine and use it as a submission for a conference he was attending. He did have the good sense to edit it a bit and make the writing sound a bit more academic. But, the thesis of the paper was the same, the ideas were the same, the structure was the same, and many sentences and paragraphs were the same. The idiot then passed out the paper he “wrote” the last week of class as something relevant to what we were learning. When I saw that it was a copy of my work I confronted him. He admitted it and claimed that his copying was entirely legitimate – that it was no different than having a grad student do work for him (which he thought was perfectly OK). After our discussion he did give me attribution in a footnote but that was pretty minimal considering that “his” paper was simply an edit of mine. It never occurred to me to complain to school authorities.

In graduate school I once discovered a book from a well-known professor (in a fairly obscure and narrow field) that was a copy of an earlier work. The only difference was the order of the chapters. I brought this to the attention of my professor who said that he knew about this, that he had assigned the topic partially to see whether a student would catch it. He also said that he preferred not to publish his awareness of the plagiarism because the “author” in question was a distinguished professor with an established career and a family. He didn’t want to hurt him.

Re: Professors copying students. When I was in college I had a professor copy a term paper of mine and use it as a submission for a conference he was attending. He did have the good sense to edit it a bit and make the writing sound a bit more academic. But, the thesis of the paper was the same, the ideas were the same, the structure was the same, and many sentences and paragraphs were the same. The idiot then passed out the paper he “wrote” the last week of class as something relevant to what we were learning. When I saw that it was a copy of my work I confronted him. He admitted it and claimed that his copying was entirely legitimate – that it was no different than having a grad student do work for him (which he thought was perfectly OK). After our discussion he did give me attribution in a footnote but that was pretty minimal considering that “his” paper was simply an edit of mine. It never occurred to me to complain to school authorities.

In graduate school I once discovered a book from a well-known professor (in a fairly obscure and narrow field) that was a copy of an earlier work. The only difference was the order of the chapters. I brought this to the attention of my professor who said that he knew about this, that he had assigned the topic partially to see whether a student would catch it. He also said that he preferred not to publish his awareness of the plagiarism because the “author” in question was a distinguished professor with an established career and a family. He didn’t want to hurt him.

A few comments, for what they’re worth, stemming from several years as a junior and senior high teacher.

First: it is not only rude, among other things, to quote a student in class without attribution, it’s not smart. Anytime it was possible I would saysome like, “Well, Robbie brought up a good point in his research paper that I think helps us understand this,” or, “Jennifer wrote something interesting in her book report about this.” The kids love it and you’re their friend for life.

Second: I don’t know how much of an excuse this is in higher education, but I got a few kids who simply did not get (could not or would not) the idea of how to do a research paper and never grasped that it wasn’t simply copying. If I believed that this was not deliberate obfuscation and the student did something that looked original, I’d give a D-.

I did once have pleasure—with this kid, believe me it was a pleasure—of saying, “I don’t think you deserve an F either, Sam, but that’s the lowest grade the computer will accept.

And I’m sure similar things happen on the college level: If I assigned a term paper, say, I would read all the encylopedia articles on that topic in the school’s sets and stop at the local public library and do the same. And I still got papers cribbing from the encylopedia, occasionally citing the article itself.

I don’t know how useful this is in universities, but one often revealing ploy was to circle some of the words and ask the student to define them for me or use them in a sentence.

This may not be applicable in a college, but sometimes if I thought the paper was unusually well written I’d take it to the student’s English teacher (I taught history) and ask if this bore any similarity to the student’s other work.

The depressing thing was that when I downgraded or flunked a project I’d often have the parents of my generally overprivileged students storm in.
Faced with inarguable proof of malfeasance, I’d be told it was my fault because I was too tough a grader, I was spoiling the angel child’s chances of getting into Harvard, or I gave too much homework and the student just didn’t have time to fit in these long papers the teachers demanded.

One mother told me that she’d appeal to the school board or whatever because at minimum she wanted her son to go to [fairly prestigious state university] and not wind up at [perfectly decent but non-prestigious school], which was the one from which I’d graduated.

Fortunately I had supportive school administrations.

An entry in the plagiarism hall of fame:

In order to minimize plagiarism on research papers, I usually require outlines or drafts a few weeks early, and then a final version that reflects my comments on the outline/draft. A couple years ago, a student submitted an outline to me that was both sophisticated and incomplete; a series of excellent and clearly related points, but no connecting content. When we met to discuss the outline, the student was unable to supply the connections, so I assumed nervousness or confusion, and spent a good 30 minutes trying to help out. A few weeks later I received a fantastic final paper, one that followed the outline exactly. However, it did not at all reflect the direction of our office conversation and seemed like work well above the student’s level of comprehension. The paper came up on google right away. Turns out the student had decided to plagiarize well before the due date (no panic plagiarism here), and had used the subheadings of the already selected article as the outline. While I am normally either sad or despairing when I catch someone, this incident just made me furious. I think of it as the paradigm for first-degree plagiarism—intentional, willfull, and carefully planned. And exacerbated by the willingness to feign interest in a paper conference!

A funnier story. I found similar language in the papers of roomates. I called the first one into my office and asked if they had plagiarized by exchanging papers. The look of fear that had been on the student’s face was replaced with one of great relief, as the following was said: “Oh, no, no, no. We didn’t cheat. We were just using the same website!” It took me a few minutes to explain that this admission was actually worse…

Apologies if this is a double post…

When I was in high school, I worked on the school newspaper. One day, I was in the publications office (newspaper, yearbook and lit mag), and I saw something that had been turned in for the lit mag. It was, almost word for word, a humorous essay I’d seen in “Seventeen” magazine a while back. I asked the teacher if it had already been published, and she said not as far as she knew. Then a couple days later, she asked me to go to one of the English teachers between classes. He said, “You looked over Ms. M’s shoulder and said, ‘This looks like something that was printed in a magazine…Could you bring the magazine in, please?” I did, and a few days after that, he returned it to me, warning me urgently to put in my knapsack and not let anyone else see me carrying it. No, that’s all I know.

Re: CCW’s Business Ethics Story. Your reading is right-on. What we see here is the cumulative impact of decades of moral relativism in the academy—there is no right and wrong, so whatever students do to get through the system must be OK. That students blithely sail along plagiarizing & cheating is hardly surprising, given the lack of a moral center to our academic culture.

As a college instructor I’ve seen lots of this stuff, and I basically agree with most of what’s been posted here. It seems to me that we have to do at least two things if we’re ever to stem the tidal wave of plagiarsm & cheating:

(1) Articulate explicitly to students a defensible rationale for grading in general, and for rules against plagiarism in particular. Grades and norms of academic honesty are, perhaps, so ubiquitous that they’e lost any real meaning for most students. Connecting these rules to higher normative principles might help inspire faculty and administrators, if not students. I guess the point is that we have to keep in mind why the rules are there in the first place.

(2) Crack down, and crack down hard. At two universities where I’ve worked (1 Ivy League, 1 big-time, high-falootin’ state university), I’ve observed undergraduate plagiarists receive stunningly mild slaps on the wrist for egregious violations. I don’t know how schools with “honor codes” do things in practice, but it seems that severe & public punishment would both motivate through fear and demonstrate institutional commitment to academic integrity. I think stopping just short of putting cheating students (or professors, for that matter!) in the stocks on the quad for public ridicule would be about right.

sigh.

Actually, I’m an undergrad at a college that lives by an honor code, Harvey Mudd. It’s a huge deal here, and it works pretty well. When students are trusted not to cheat (including on take-home exams) they tend not to.

We do get occasional cheaters, of course, a few that are caught each semester (we’re a tiny school, less than 750, so we don’t get too many). Punishments range from an F on the assignment to an F on the course and writing a letter of apology to the student body (anonymously). The worst thing we’ve had was just recently, when a graduated student’s thesis research turned out to have falsified data. After a lot of debate, they decided to rescind the student’s degree and expel him/her from the school.

I don’t know how other places with honor codes work, but I love having one here. We have timed, closed-book, take home exams regularly, and people don’t cheat—we simply get to take them on our own time. I’m always surprised by the fact that other people are surprised when I tell them that. It’s a wonderful system, when it works.

Actually, I’m an undergrad at a college that lives by an honor code, Harvey Mudd. It’s a huge deal here, and it works pretty well. When students are trusted not to cheat (including on take-home exams) they tend not to.

We do get occasional cheaters, of course, a few that are caught each semester (we’re a tiny school, less than 750, so we don’t get too many). Punishments range from an F on the assignment to an F on the course and writing a letter of apology to the student body (anonymously). The worst thing we’ve had was just recently, when a graduated student’s thesis research turned out to have falsified data. After a lot of debate, they decided to rescind the student’s degree and expel him/her from the school.

I don’t know how other places with honor codes work, but I love having one here. We have timed, closed-book, take home exams regularly, and people don’t cheat—we simply get to take them on our own time. I’m always surprised by the fact that other people are surprised when I tell them that. It’s a wonderful system, when it works.

I have taught history as an adjunct. In the last course I taught, despite the unique and specific paper topic I set, one student turned in a paper that (a) did not address the topic and (b) was a book review (the book had not been assigned and was above the class’ level) taken from a well-known on-line review journal. Only the review’s title, book title, author and ISBN had been deleted. I found the review immediately by Googling and confronted the student. He/she claimed well into the plagiarism review admin. process that he/she had turned in his/her notes for the paper, not the paper itself. He/she had not indicated this at the time. This student also played the racism card, which instantly made me feel very guilty (revived when the Jayson Blair story broke). But if he/she had been of any ethnicity whatever, I would have confronted him/her. I do not believe that plagiarism is increasing because of “moral relativism” in the leftist academe. This is a canard. Plagiarism is increasing (a) as a crime of opportunity (Web sources); (b) because high schools often no longer assign research papers (see recent LA Times article), so that students never learn how to write them before college; (c) privileged students are terrified that they will not reproduce their parents’ socio-economic level; (d) REAL moral relativism in the business (Enron) and political (Bush Administration, Bill Bennett) world.

Sara, I can identify with your plagiarism case—I had a similar one a couple years ago, race card & all.

However, I respectfully disagree on the moral relativism point and the roots of this phenomenon. It seems that regard for academic honesty is a central aspect of the growth in cheating. The advent of the Web seems an inadequate explanation, since the very technology that makes plagiarism a “crime of opportunity” is the same technology that makes plagiarists easy to catch. You, I, and several others posting here have nailed cheaters with the same search engines that produced the fraudulent work. The Web also makes it much easier for instructors to check bibliographic references. Still, the most clever cheats will always be one step ahead of the most vigilant instructors; I suspect that’s always been the case.

That high school students don’t write research papers may be true—it’s been a good long time since I was in high school. This still seems an inadequate explanation for the phenomenon. Most high school students also don’t know matrix algebra, or the Freudian interpretation of Ulysses, or how to write a sonnet, or how to calculate net present values. The point is that students learn these skills, and most students know when they’re cheating. Certainly in the egregious cases discussed on this page there was little confusion on the students’ part about the nature of their crimes.

Your third point, that students are driven to achieve financial success to the point of terror, is right-on and perfectly consistent with my argument. There was a time when our culture (both within & without the academy) prized moral character over grades/pocketbook. Certainly my parents would have been more proud to see their children grow up to be honest paupers than a cheating millionaires. The point here is that in embracing a mushy, gray morality, academic institutions feed a kind of nihilism that too often gives silent assent to cheating.

Finally, I’m not sure what the distinction is between the phenomenon I’m describing and the “REAL moral relativism” you cite. It seem’s that they’re one in the same: without a moral center, winning (grades or money) is all that matters. I suspect that most of those Enron executives got very good grades in college.

I don’t really understand your pot-shot at Bush & Bennett. However, as a yellow-dog Democrat I’m generally pleased to see Dubya slammed, so I’ll assume your point was a good one.

I hope what I’m about to introduce to this discussion IS discussed, as I feel it’s important to the subject and not a mere attempt to be a “troll”.

First, let me say that while I hold no teaching degree, I spent several years at Northeastern Junior College (in Sterling, Colorado) assisting with Adult Basic Education. This was done to help my own mother, who was going for her own teaching degree.

So I can claim SOME - if not a lot – familiarity with teaching, and with college life at the community college level.

Having said that, here’s my point.

For the most part, everyone here has stated (or at least infered) that cheating involves using an unfair advantage, and/or is intellectually lazy. Riding on the backs of other people’s work. And that a student who never learns to really STUDY and THINK will never be a great success in life.

(I know, I’m playing fast and loose with the accounts here. Bear with me, if I went into obsessive detail, we’d all die of boredom before I could finish…)

But while that’s true today, who says it will remain true tomorrow?

Remember, thirty years ago, teachers mocked the pocket calculator. I distinctly remember one teacher saying “What happens if it breaks? It’s not like there will be a a calculator available on every street corner!”

I made a wager with this teacher that within 20 years, a basic four-function calculator would be on sale everywhere in the US for $5, max. She took the bet gleefully.

When I reminded her of the bet some years later (still within the stated time limit, mind you), she sniveled, and refused to pay up, saying that it wasn’t right for me to bring up such an embarrassing event.

Folks, like it or not, technology creeps up on you, and it becomes a PART of you. I’m wearing a four-function calculator on my WRIST, now. And I won’t be surprised if, in a few years (say, 20 or so), such calculators will be available for surgical implantation.

What are you going to do when human abilities begin to become available for anyone to just “slot & run”, as some of my role-playing-game friends like to put it? The world’s moving on to just that sort of future, you know. Want to speak Japanese? No problem. Buy a Japanese language ROM chip and stick it into your skulljack. poof, you now speak and read Japanese.

An extreme example, granted, and not likely to happen until 2050 or later. But it IS pretty much inevitable. (We COULD just have a nuclear war, or some other dark-age inducing event, but barring such, this sort of thing will happen.)

I’m not an advocate of cheating. The question I’m putting to you is, when the human/computer interface moves from the “eyes on the screen, fingers on the keyboard” level and advances to “surgically implanted cybernetic boosters”, where do you draw the line? What’s cheating, what’s not cheating? Is using a chip to “learn” something really learning? For that matter, is using ANY piece of software (which is really nothing but a preserved piece of human thought and experience) learning?

The teacher I’d wagered with pointed out that any artificial aid can be taken away, and argued that if you didn’t understand the basics, you’d be helpless. She was right, I grant her that. But what of when you reach the point where “removing” the artificial aid cripples – or even KILLS - the person using it? When does an artificial aid stop being an “unfair advantage” and starts being just another part of your body?

shrugs Having 20/400 eyesight and being entirely unable to function without my glasses means I’m rather sensitive to this question.

Do you consider it cheating if a student wears reading glasses to see the page?

Like it or not, artificial mental enhancements will gradually take on the same status as eyeglasses, artificial limbs and pacemakers.

What does a teacher do then?

I honestly don’t know. I hope some of YOU, do.

And I hope it stirs up some thought on the subject. It’s something that does concern me, and I’d like to see other people’s views on it.

Ed Becerra

Ed, I’ll take you up on your comments.

There have been two major points discussed here – cheating (getting around the assessment structure in place) and plagiarism (taking another person’s words and representing them as your own).

The first is a pure fairness issue. The long and the short of cheating is that it’s getting around the “point” of setting an exam or essay – and that is to assess the student’s knowledge of a topic. You’re trying to find out what they know. Handing in something they got from the web isn’t showing you that they can think and reason on the topic at hand – which is what, ultimately, you’re trying to work out.

As for plagiarism, that’s a slightly different point. That is denying an author the right to be associated as the creator of a work. No different to me taking the Mona Lisa and saying “painted by Matt Palmer”.

Now, handing in someone else’s work as my own is both cheating (I didn’t really think up those thoughts) and plagiarism (I’m pretending that I wrote that when I didn’t). Cheating is getting a leg up over those you are assessed against, while plagiarism is a matter of academic honesty. Plagiarism is, effectively, theft from the original author.

Personally, any aid you can get to answering the point of the question is fine in my book. I advocate open book exams for technology subjects (where the right answer is the right answer, no ifs or buts, and what is being tested is your ability to get the right answer). For essay-based exams, and most papers, what’s being tested is your ability to reason logically on the topic at hand – which can be simulated by merely parroting other people’s words.

Artificial enhancements, IMO, are fine, as long as they’re within the rules of the game. Assessment isn’t real life, it’s an artificial construct meant to restrict the variability so as to gauge your ability in a particular situation. Taking away certain “crutches” is part of the game.

On another topic, I think a large part of the outrage which academics feel at plagiarism is because it’s a form of theft. You’re pissed because it could have been (or was) your hard work and ideas being nicked for someone else’s benefit. That is what gives me the shits when my students copy – not because they’ve “cheated” (in my opinion, anything that gets the job done is fine – I tutor programming, however, which is a little more pragmatic than most) but because they’ve misrepresented the source of their work – and it could be my blood, sweat, and jolt cola that they’re ripping off next.

I was an undergraduate at a prestigious Ivy League University.

During my Freshman year, I did all my own research and wrote papers based on actual observations. I got C’s. One of my Biology TA’s had the audacity to ask me why I wasn’t going to the library and using the papers on file like everyone else was. My lab partners got A’s and I asked them how, since they observed the same things I did. They also said they copied papers from the library. I was horrified and refused to do this. I continued getting C’s while those around me got A’s in Bio 101-102 and Chem 103-104, 4 of the largest weeding out courses.

During my 2-year tenure as an Animal Science major, 3 of my research papers were plagiarized. The most offensive incident was the paper returned to me with a grade of “C”, which the professor then submitted as his own work and received a grant to work on this new project. I read it in a Journal, copied almost verbatim. Strange that he would think it worth only a C. This paper was an extrapolation of the relatively common use embryo transfer and transplant of rare deer/cattle embryo’s into uterus’ of more common deer/cattle to increase the numbers of of the more rare animals. I showed how this same procedure was possible, also, to increase the numbers of rare/endangered large cats in the world. The grant he received was to use embryo transfer/transplant to increase the numbers or rare/endangered tigers.

I no longer remember what the other 2 plagiarized papers were. I am grateful for this.

Just stumbled on this site while trying to find some explanation of the increase in cheating I’m seeing over the past year or so.

I teach a senior/graduate computer science course, so these people should know a) when to cite, b) how to cite and c) how Google works.

Every semester I’ve taught, I’ve had obvious cheating pushed into my face. I didn’t go looking for it. It was obvious. Everything you’ve all mentioned above; random off-topic paragraphs, world-class papers from people failing the class, “marketing” white papers couched as “analysis”, and other obvious tip-offs.

And this is after I reminded them at least 3 times “I can fly Google better than you can.”

And the excuses…

Oh well, I hope the medical schools are not seeing this kind of stuff.

I know that some of the engineering schools recognize the danger. When I was in school and when visiting e-schools since then, the idea of “You had better learn this for real, or you could kill someone. You cheat, your’e out.” seems to be holding steady.

The last thing we need is another Therac, or Ford Pinto, etc.

I understand the reasons for using technology to seek out dishonest people who use technology to do dishonest things, but one of the most used systems, ‘Turnitin.com,’ at the Bellevue School District #405 is pretty flaky to me. They’ve a policy where your submitted work becomes their property; I didn’t like that. I was aware of their policy when I licensed an assignment under the GPL, and submitted my document. Now it says I never did submit that document.

Plagiarism dot com

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Variability in plagiarism

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I just stumbled over this wonderful post by Kieran Healy on the various types of plagiarizing, familiar to anyone to have ever graded term papers and essays. What I wonder is…

[...] A couple of years ago I wrote a post about kinds of plagiarism by college students: [...]