• New here? Register here now for access to all the forums, download game torrents, private messages, polls, Sportsbook, etc. Plus, stay connected and follow BP on Instagram @buckeyeplanet and Facebook.

Plagiarism -- how much?

Jump to latest Follow Reply
Sort by date Sort by votes
OSUsushichic

OSUsushichic

Fired up! Ready to go!
This post is for the educuators on this board. I realize some of you teach younger kids, so this might not be an issue, but how often do you catch your students plagiarizing? Manfred has been seeing it a lot lately, and I just wondered if other teachers/profs are having the same problem.
 
I see very few cases of out right plagarism in the classes I teach where large portions of text have been shared between students. What I see quite often however, are papers which do not properly cite sources of information because they either don't know how OR they don't when/what they should be citing. The later of these is particularly scary given that I teach college level biology laboratories.

Although these problems are technically plagarism, I'm sure this is not what you were referring to.
 
Upvote 0
My favorite was one time when a colleague of mine was teaching an entry level college psych class. She assigned a paper they all had to write, a few pages, you know, standard stuff. So, she gets this paper turned in...now, there were just a couple of things odd about it: number one, it was done on an old-time typewriter (somewhat rare in the computer age), number two, it was clearly photocopied, and it was a bad photocopy, and number three...because of the crappy copy, you could see the whiteout marks over the space where the name was.

Turns out the guy was in a frat, and they had a filing cabinet full of papers, for all classes...you need one? Just take it out, white out the name, and copy it. Gotta love it.
 
Upvote 0
I catch kids every once in a while, but not very often. Our English department makes kids use turnitin.com, a sort of on-line plagiarism checker-it cross references virtually everything on the web, and says what % of a paper is the same/plagiarized,etc. Usually at my school it will be kids doing a bad cut and paste job from some web site.
I think the cheating really depends on the nature of the student-I was talking to a group of former students after the spring game, and one of them said that she cheats as a frosh at Sinclair CC all the time, others said that they just didn't do it out of personal integrity/wanting to learn something.
I think citation errors and plagiarism are two separate things, but one of the English teachers at our school gave a very bright student-who is not the type to cheat-10 demerits and a zero for plagiarism on a major paper, due to a very minor citation error-something w/ punctuation I believe. Everyone(myself included) thought the teacher was being an anal retentive bitch.
 
Upvote 0
I catch kids every once in a while, but not very often. Our English department makes kids use turnitin.com, a sort of on-line plagiarism checker-it cross references virtually everything on the web, and says what % of a paper is the same/plagiarized,etc. Usually at my school it will be kids doing a bad cut and paste job from some web site.
I think the cheating really depends on the nature of the student-I was talking to a group of former students after the spring game, and one of them said that she cheats as a frosh at Sinclair CC all the time, others said that they just didn't do it out of personal integrity/wanting to learn something.
I think citation errors and plagiarism are two separate things, but one of the English teachers at our school gave a very bright student-who is not the type to cheat-10 demerits and a zero for plagiarism on a major paper, due to a very minor citation error-something w/ punctuation I believe. Everyone(myself included) thought the teacher was being an anal retentive bitch.

That being said I don't think many people do it. :wink2:
 
Upvote 0
I had a class in grad school where the prof wanted a 50-60 page paper about some bullshit. The best thing is that he didn't even bother to read anything that we turn it. He just made sure that we stuck to his Nazi format and gave us a grade based on nothing more than length and appearance. That is the only time that I have directly cut and pasted from anything. I'd say well over half of that paper was directly off of the web.
 
Upvote 0
In the most recent case the kid copied and pasted directly from a NY Times theatre review. He didn't change a thing, and had the balls to list a "Works Cited" at the end (of course, none of the sources were cited). The sad thing is, this kid was supposed to graduate next month. He won't be now.

Hawg, was it a history class? I took a History of Vietnam class that required a 50-page paper, and that was the only grade in the class. When the insane prof announced that to the class on the first day, all but 5 students left immediately and dropped the class. Luckily as the class went on, we talked the prof into assigning two 25-page papers instead. In retrospect, I really don't know how I survived that semester.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0
OSUsushichic said:
In the most recent case the kid copied and pasted directly from a NY Times theatre review. He didn't change a thing, and had the balls to list a "Works Cited" at the end (of course, none of the sources were cited). The sad thing is, this kid was supposed to graduate next month. He won't be now.

Hawg, did you go to OWU? I took a History of Vietnam class that required a 50-page paper, and that was the only grade in the class. When the insane prof announced that to the class on the first day, all but 5 students left immediately and dropped the class. Luckily as the class went on, we talked the prof into assigning two 25-page papers instead. In retrospect, I really don't know how I survived that semester.
Click to expand...

One class about the history of Vietnam? I understand why people would drop it. I had 2 history classes about the history of the US, but luckily neither required anything like that. Actually the second class was the only time I ever used a crib sheet to help me ace an essay exam. I kept screwing myself up in that class because I would watch a lot of WWII stuff on the History Channel and I never knew what I learned in class and what I learn from TV. Besides those 2 times the only cheating I ever did was TI-82 based. Thank god for programmable calculators. :p
 
Upvote 0
exhawg said:
One class about the history of Vietnam? I understand why people would drop it. I had 2 history classes about the history of the US, but luckily neither required anything like that. Actually the second class was the only time I ever used a crib sheet to help me ace an essay exam. I kept screwing myself up in that class because I would watch a lot of WWII stuff on the History Channel and I never knew what I learned in class and what I learn from TV. Besides those 2 times the only cheating I ever did was TI-82 based. Thank god for programmable calculators. :p
Click to expand...

No one asked why you were using a calculator for a history exam? :p

I got accused of plagiarism once in the 7th grade on a short story assignment. I wrote an original story that took place in the setting from a book I had read, and got called in to the principal's office, where I was accused of plagiarizing it.

Copyright infringement, maybe. Not plagiarism. :)
 
Upvote 0
MolGenBuckeye said:
I got accused of plagiarism once in the 7th grade on a short story assignment. I wrote an original story that took place in the setting from a book I had read, and got called in to the principal's office, where I was accused of plagiarizing it.

Copyright infringement, maybe. Not plagiarism. :)
Click to expand...

Fictional short story? Nah, that's just artistic license. :biggrin:
 
Upvote 0
I think part of the problem anymore is professors/TA's are varying from person to person what they consider plagerising. I was always taught for the purpose of a class that if it was a direct qoute/ idea from an outside source or a book in the class it needed to be cited. If it was something that was talked about in lecture then it could be considered public domain (lectures, discussions, etc). All the sudden this past year I had teachers telling me that if they said it in lecture it had to be cited as which lecture it came from to be in the paper. That really threw me off.
 
Upvote 0
I did it once in college for a history class. It took me several hours to find a book review for one of the books that we were "supposed" to read. Changed about 3 words and got an 81%...highest grade in the class. Damn TA that you would never want as an instructor. Can't imagine that they ever read the book in the first case, it was obviously professionally written because the vocabulary used was way out of my league. Tough grading scale I must say. Not proud of it, but I guess that is what you get for taking 7 classes at a time (21 semester hours) and working full-time. College was supposed to be fun wasn't it?
 
Upvote 0
exhawg said:
The trick is if you are going to copy and paste something, don't cite it.
Click to expand...

That won't cut it. Manfred has caught tons of students doing this very thing. All he has to do is a Google search, and he can usually find the original source. He starts to recognize the student's writing style, so if he suspects it's a different style being presented, he will Google it. Perhaps a few have slipped past him, but students overall are pretty stupid to think that they won't get caught. :wink:
 
Upvote 0
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top