Plagiarism in the Age of Google (NRR)
hogginthefogg
6,098 Posts
So my wife is grading papers (she's a grad. student instructor) and I hear her say, "Oh shit--look at this!" One of her students (who's not the most gifted writer) pulled off a few sentences that were a little too well-written. So she typed them into Google with quotes around 'em and--sure enough--they came from an Amazon review.
How you gonna be that stupid?
How you gonna be that stupid?
Comments
Yeah, but wouldn't you at least have changed ONE WORD so that you couldn't be busted via a simple Google search?
Yes, your wife owes them a slap for the foolish arrogance.
I think the Da Vinci Code author is about to do SERIOUS talk show time for just this offense
Technically, I think the kid could be expelled or, if nothing else, immediately flunked. Ouch!
but plagiarizing from an amazon review...that's priceless!
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cut and paste is your friend... but yeah, that's stupid
I caught a student who did this once too. His whole paper was an amalgamation of about three different articles. It actually took some work to piece together which made me wonder why he didn't bother to just write the damn thing himself to begin with.
I gave him the option of either taking an F in the class (in which case, he could repeat the class and have the F expunged) or taking a C-, which would be permanent on his record. He took the C-.
So I'm a journalist. My first job out of school was working for a shitty small-town daily paper.
I was promoted to copy editor after a few months.
One of the reporters, who was beyond awful, always turned in crap. This one time, she turned in her usual horseshit, this time it was about some charity marathon that had nothing to do with our coverage area.
I started typing sentences into google with the quotation marks. Found like three or four paragraphs hijacked from various sites.
I questioned her and she said the woman she interviewed -- who was organizing the race because her kid had cancer -- must have plagarized.
I confronted my higher-ups and they sided with her.
kid goes through twelve years of school in which the most important thing is the grade, which can only be yeilded by the right answer.
for example
when i took algebra 2 in high school, the teacher didn't have us do every problem. he say something like do "every other odd problem until 30 or whatever" and everytime there would be kids in the class hung up on what the answer was to number 2 or some other even numbered problem that we weren't doing. it never failed.
even in college kids are thumbing through books and looking for keywords rather than key concepts.
An even worse look was being forced to do group work with an idiot kid in my major in college. As a junior and senior enginering student he would turn things in collected from like 3 different websites and he would not even change them all to the same font or size. Sadly plenty of professors don't even check for this.
they have this system for colleges now called turnitin and it's some kind of web-based electronic plagiarism detection service. i thnk it's turnitin.com. Not sure how it works, I think you submit the paper and they do the searching to see if it matches anything. My job uses that. I don't know if they've caught anybody yet. That is a serious offense in college. You can get kicked out of the school permanently for that.
I should've clarified: my wife is a graduate student instructor, meaning that SHE'S a grad student who instructs undergrads (mostly freshmen).
But thanks for the turnitin.com link!
ive taken 3 classes at my university that use this option. pretty crazy concept. turnitin.com is right. each of the three classes found atleast one student by the end of the semester who plagarized on a paper... failed the course, reported to the dean, and ridiculed infront of the whole class.
Turnitin is a huge debate in my school. One student says its her right not to get looked at through a machine and has won her case after a year hiatus.
McGill btw
Man, there was somebody like that at my first full-time copy editing job. She was quite possibly the worst writer I have ever come across. She made my job way harder than necessary because it was typically up to me to turn her semi-literate drivel into something worthy of publication. No small feat. But we could always tell when she had lifted directly from a press release without attribution because all of a sudden, in the midst of all this abuse of the English language, there'd be a perfectly coherent, linguistically sound, well-written paragraph or two.
The plus side is we eventually got rid of her.
When i was in 7th grade i think i jacked like a whole friggin paper on the chaos theory off the web. And once that same year i just printed out the sars research thing from the library and cut the top part off.
Homework sucks.
I don't know if you're familiar with Journal Register Company, but they only person I ever saw get fired was axed because they found a loaded gun in his desk.
They never cared about quality, just the getting work done in the cheapest way possible.
Off topic, this thread reminds of this time in 11th grade spanish class this kid type his entire essay into AltaVista's translator.
Well he obbviously clicked the wrong button.
Teacher hands it back to him and says, "This is in German."
I remember TAing an electronics course with a semester-long lab project that required regular reports and then a final year-end poster presentation where the TAs would ask them questions directly. It was great! You'd have people who turned in nice, well written (and plagiarized) status reports for months, and then you'd ask them a simple opening question about a control signal that they would've used over and over and they'd have to turn around and read their poster to try and figure out the answer! Comedy! It was by far the best method of figuring out how much the students actually knew.
That said, I remember taking a math class (don't remember which one now) during a really busy semester during my undergrad and so I was blatantly copying a 2nd generation photocopy of someone else's assignment and since I hadn't been paying attention at all I couldn't tell whether certain marks on the page were dirt, or intentional... I remember wondering in my head if a section mentioned x', or just x and a photocopy mark!
ohhhh ok i got ya. well hey maybe that turnitin joint will come in handy for her then.
by the way, good looks on the mixtapes, both are dope. i like the 2nd one slightly better. i hope you keep this going. killin it with the bay tracks! peace.
i don't get it? whats her argument? couldn't the teacher make that a requirement on the syllabus, and require it as a part of the class, forcing her to hand in papers through this service? how can the student disagree?