I wonder - is there an English class out there that focuses on "rewriting, rephrasing, riffing, and appropriation as real tools of the writer’s trade"?
"If you copy from one person it's plagiarism; if you copy from many it's research."
Cheater Cheater
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: Cheater Cheater
#12Pretty self-righteous article. When I was teaching information security, I literally had more than half of my students turn in heavily plagiarized papers. It was pretty easy to spot suspicious phrases, and Googling would always turn up the sources quickly. It was actually quite overwhelming figuring out how to deal with it all - the problem was if we gave no marks for that paper, or failed all the students, it would'…
I think a good approach would be to give a low-value assignment at the beginning of the course. Don't mention that it's low-value. When people plagiarize, give them zero credit on the assignment and explain way. I suspect the rates on subsequent assignments would drop quite a bit.
Re: Cheater Cheater
#13Pretty self-righteous article. When I was teaching information security, I literally had more than half of my students turn in heavily plagiarized papers. It was pretty easy to spot suspicious phrases, and Googling would always turn up the sources quickly. It was actually quite overwhelming figuring out how to deal with it all - the problem was if we gave no marks for that paper, or failed all the students, it would'…
A friend of mine is in the same situation you describe. She teaches for a fairly well known for-profit online school, and is in a position where she has to ignore plagiarism or lose her job. A huge percentage of her students turn in plagiarized papers; so many that, if she were to follow the school's guidelines on them all, would result in 1/2 to 3/4 of her students failing. The teacher's pass/fail percentage is one…
> The teacher's pass/fail percentage is one of the criteria used to determine whether a teacher gets any more classes, and does not take into account students failed for plagiarism.
That is fucked up; all the schools I've ever attended require expulsion, not failure, for proven cases of plagarism. Expelled students are basically immediately expunged from the records of any classes they were enrolled in at the time, as if they had never registered for them.
Re: Cheater Cheater
#14Pretty self-righteous article. When I was teaching information security, I literally had more than half of my students turn in heavily plagiarized papers. It was pretty easy to spot suspicious phrases, and Googling would always turn up the sources quickly. It was actually quite overwhelming figuring out how to deal with it all - the problem was if we gave no marks for that paper, or failed all the students, it would'…
Here is a modest proposal. Take some examples of varying severity. In front of the class say, I have identified many examples of plagairism on the last assignment. Let me show you some... Then say, "I have identified more than X cases. If you think you may have been one of them, let me know by email, and I'll let you redo the paper and ignore your first submission. Anyone that I have identified as a plaigairist who d…
Part of the problem is the time spent on administration (marking them, tracking them, etc) for all the redone papers. Definitely the worst part of teaching.
Re: Cheater Cheater
#15Pretty self-righteous article. When I was teaching information security, I literally had more than half of my students turn in heavily plagiarized papers. It was pretty easy to spot suspicious phrases, and Googling would always turn up the sources quickly. It was actually quite overwhelming figuring out how to deal with it all - the problem was if we gave no marks for that paper, or failed all the students, it would'…
I think a good approach would be to give a low-value assignment at the beginning of the course. Don't mention that it's low-value. When people plagiarize, give them zero credit on the assignment and explain way. I suspect the rates on subsequent assignments would drop quite a bit.
Good idea. To heighten the perceived tension even more, make it the second assignment: make both it and the first have obvious scoring boxes on the front, with a regular total for the first (e.g. "_/6"), but a ridiculously large total (that will get normalized away) for the plagairized one (e.g. "_____/392".)
Re: Cheater Cheater
#16Pretty self-righteous article. When I was teaching information security, I literally had more than half of my students turn in heavily plagiarized papers. It was pretty easy to spot suspicious phrases, and Googling would always turn up the sources quickly. It was actually quite overwhelming figuring out how to deal with it all - the problem was if we gave no marks for that paper, or failed all the students, it would'…
Here is a modest proposal. Take some examples of varying severity. In front of the class say, I have identified many examples of plagairism on the last assignment. Let me show you some... Then say, "I have identified more than X cases. If you think you may have been one of them, let me know by email, and I'll let you redo the paper and ignore your first submission. Anyone that I have identified as a plaigairist who d…
I've been in front of a class... and I must say this is brilliant.
Re: Cheater Cheater
#17When reading comments on articles like this, I wonder if I'm in the minority, or whether people just don't want to get caught publicly supporting a social taboo in front of potential customers and employers.
There's something degrading about it, and I've never done it, but I don't particularly care if others cheat on homework. Many good teachers know that grade systems cheat students out of serious educations. (And incentivize them to become cheaters.) Yet few win enough power to teach as they think best and neutralize this whole class of problems.
Coincidentally, I'm taking an ungraded class. Though I didn't really notice until now. There is homework, but doing it is completely at our discretion. It could only possibly work if we're self-motivated, and it works fine.
Come to think of it, it's unlikely that my viewpoint is shared by only a tiny minority. After all, commenters here cite astonishingly high rates of plagiarism, like "literally... more than half". (Not to mention the papers which are so unoriginal that they might as well have been plagiarized.) Maybe some enterprising hackers here wrote emacs plugins to help rephrase text, in order to maximize the time they have to pursue important studies and projects.
Re: Cheater Cheater
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend of mine is in the same situation you describe. She teaches for a fairly well known for-profit online school, and is in a position where she has to ignore plagiarism or lose her job. A huge percentage of her students turn in plagiarized papers; so many that, if she were to follow the school's guidelines on them all, would result in 1/2 to 3/4 of her students failing. The teacher's pass/fail percentage is one…
> The teacher's pass/fail percentage is one of the criteria used to determine whether a teacher gets any more classes, and does not take into account students failed for plagiarism. That is fucked up; all the schools I've ever attended require expulsion, not failure, for proven cases of plagarism. Expelled students are basically immediately expunged from the records of any classes they were enrolled in at the time, a…
Did you ever see this policy actually trigger, though? Hard to tell since they may not have made it public, but as other people are saying, if that was taken seriously you'd see an awful lot of expulsions.
I can't speak for all of Michigan State University, where I got my degrees, but the computer science departments took it pretty seriously. One 101 course got roughly 1/3rd of the people in it failed one semester for copying. All homework assignments went through a turn-in system that examined the programs for plagiarism; details were sketchy for obvious reasons, but I had heard that a simple variable rename would not get past it. (Home-grown and based on what I heard, I believe it existed and worked roughly as described, since I could now write such a tool myself if I had need.)
Re: Cheater Cheater
#19 I saw them baffled by what teachers said they wanted ([snip]), which often seemed
to mask what they really wanted (“elegantly analyze these stories and compose,
in formal prose, a well-supported argument that will not only engage the
ambiguities without resolving them but delight and surprise me”)
Re: Cheater Cheater
#20I got accused of plagiarism in my first year of university. Turned out that I had somehow left my computer account signed in and one of the class (basically a dropout seizing the opportunity) grabbed a copy and submitted it. It took me an absolute age to fix; at one point the tutor basically admitted I must be telling the truth and "offered" me half the papers marks.... bah. Also, I did an Engineering degree; lots of…
From my limited observations there seems to be a culture of work sharing among foreign students. Some of it can probably be put down to lesser English language skills, they feel a lot safer following anothers lead rather than attempting to write something themselves from scratch.