Cheater Cheater

Pretty 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've been pretty disastrous for the university. In the end, we had to punish the most egregious plagiarism with no marks, and give partial marks for the rest, trying to identify and give credit for the original work.

I had not one, but several students come and argue they should get their full marks back, "for fulfilling the requirements of the assignment".

I 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 plagiarism going on there (most engineers are pretty bad authors it seems :P). One major problem they had was the huge section of Asian students who all hung out together (across years) and basically shared/co-wrote all their work... I know one lecturer rejected about 35% of the drafts in one course during the second year!

When 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.

I was accused of plagiarism my freshman year of college but it was completely original. The prof believed me after I met with him and explained my thought process.

    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”)

My essays would always concentrate on resolving ambiguities... this glib comment sort of makes me wonder

I post all of my papers online on my blog or other locations where they are quickly picked up by Google and various other sources.

Turnitin is used by my professors and each and every time my papers would come up as 100% plagiarised, if they then attempted to Google it they would come across my website where I had posted the paper. After the first time of being accused of plagiarism and me pointing out that the license attached to my work did not allow Turnitin to use it for commercial purposes they started checking by hand, never heard about it again.

what a bunch of fucking crap. Plagiarism is theft, pure and simple. You know when you're doing it, and it means you suck.

I am getting really sick of the moral relativism building up around cheating and grades. It's a fucking nightmare. Schools should just flunk out the 40% or 50% who do this shit for a couple years, and people will get straight.

It completely devalues the work of people who actually do the work. Welcome to the mediocratization of civilization.

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"?

re: the plagiarism in king's thesis, it might be interesting to note that this often happens among those who are gifted with speech-making. lincoln echoes so clearly the ideas of pericles in thucydides' retelling of it -- perhaps the most famous speech in america, but also the most famous speech in athens. nor in his lifetime did he ever offer the connection as a basis. even obama a couple of months ago was making that wayne gretzky quote about skating to where the puck is going to be. did he or one of his speechwriters get this from steve jobs? i don't know. but it happens all the time. harold bloom argues that all great writers are essentially rewriting other great writers (a map of misreading, etc.).

that's what's so vexing about plagiarism, esp. in teaching essays which are mostly practices in rhetoric. on the one hand, yes, intellectual honesty is very, very important. the cornerstone of reason, etc. but it's also not the only cornerstone. and arguably, it isn't what's learned first.

in any type of broad stroke, it's much smarter to borrow from others' rhetoric, and even ideas. in a way, you're giving yourself more to the ideas. e.g., imagine if all metaphors were replaced with similes. similies are more correct, have more of a 'cited' feeling, but they're also more limiting; they give themselves less to the comparison.

and also some people are better at being synthetic with their thoughts rather than analytical, scientific and precise. and frankly, this soft massaging of sources is often more important in a leader, because they are leading a group of people with more than one idea.

the problem with intellectual dishonesty is that you can lose everything. your reputation, all of the energy in your work, etc. most people don't figure this out until experiencing it first hand at some point in school. but that is because, i think, we don't properly impress upon people what can happen. if they had a better sense of the risks, i think the majority of cases would disappear. as it is, it's usually touted in some boring handout or pamphlet about an 'honor code', etc., in comic sans.

though some schools get it. the thing is to teach a student that it is always better to never give up their honor in doing the right thing, no matter how tired, etc. most students are insecure, because they don't know anything yet, so they don't really think they have much to lose. so again, you have to build up their commitment to themselves first...

I read all of that. I have no idea why. The single paragraph on different types of plagiarism and great writers who have plagiarized was nearly though provoking, if I hadn't heard those examples before or been a student.

typical, williams.