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Comment by reso | Hacker News Reader

Holy crap. They let so many people get away with copy-paste assignments, and they call themselves a postsecondary institution? That's fucking horrific. Where I'm from, a single sentence similar to one of your sources is marks deducted. A paragraph puts you on academic probation. Anything bigger is a bus-ticket home.

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Yeah, I personally couldn't believe he had people copying entire articles into their paper and simply let it slide with a lecture on how to source articles.

I've always tried to agonize over drawing some unique conclusions from a variety of source material. Looks like the more efficient method would have been to just reword the wikipedia article.

All of the stories about education bubbles, unemployed graduates, etc, seem to make a lot more sense when you see data like this.

I think you are right in your comment about education bubbles. Cheating as blatant as this could be a sign that many of the "students" are either unqualified or there for the wrong reasons.

I remember doing some work on an essay with a friend of mine over the phone. There was one particular sentence he came up with that was absolutely stellar. I know it was original because we were working from the same text and discussing it over the phone - I was there when he came up with it.

When he got his essay back, this one sentence was circled in red with the comment "If you're going to plagiarise, be less obvious about it". He wouldn't go back and protest (he was pretty laid back) but I imagine that the rest of his essay didn't quite shine like this sentence did...

This happened to me in English comp. I decided to make the most of the class by really studying style. I turned in three papers utilizing different author's styles in my own way: H.P. Lovecraft, Hunter S. Thompson, and Henry Thoreau. I learned a hell of a lot but was told that I cheated. I told them I would sit after class and write a paragraph or two of each style for them. They said it wasn't necessary as they could 'tell', and that since they couldn't prove I cheated, the highest I could get was a C.

I almost quit college over it. That aside, the amount of cheating in my engineering courses was high. There was only a 10% grad rate within 4 years and 16% total. I think it was the top 10% and cheaters that could graduate.

There certainly is such a thing as being too aggressive in trying to detect cheating. It happened to my dad once but he cleared it up by re-doing the problem from scratch in front of the teacher.

I think it's absolutely critical that any accusation of cheating allow the student to respond, preferably to a different teacher if the original teacher still thinks they were cheating.

really studying style

I want to do this. How did you go about it?

Where I attended college, you get a year's suspension for getting caught copying a sentence without citation. Anything as egregious as this presented would've meant a class full of suspended students.

I'm sure that was the policy, but how often was it enforced? Most universities have draconian policies against cheating that are never enforced, except in the most egregious cases. It's extremely rare for any school to discipline as many people as this; when it does happen, it tends to be national news.

28 students last year (out of about 4,000) were reported. 17 were suspended, 7 got probation, 3 were found not responsible, and 1 had the allegations formally rescinded.

This is roughly consistent year-to-year.

Unless your school is dramatically different from other schools, you've just provided very strong evidence that only a tiny minority of actual violations are pursued.

The "were reported" is key. Who knows how many professors pulled a promising young student aside, gave them a stern lecture, and a second chance.

That's also the equivalent of saying "a single line of source code identical to other source code is copyright infringement". Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes there are limited ways to express obvious ideas, so I don't get how such a hard-line stance helps anything.

> Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

This isn't code, these are written assignments we're discussing. English is pretty damn flexible, and nobody gets suspended for "Abraham Lincoln died in 1865." There's no point invoking degenerate cases to argue against a policy. That's just silly.

When a nontrivial sentence appears both in an essay and in one of the listed sources, the Wikipedia page, or a top Google hit for the subject, you can draw inferences. If you can argue that you just happened to write:

> However, just six days after the surrender of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was shot and killed by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.

just as it appears on Wikipedia at present, and convince your peers it's more likely than not that you did, then you won't be punished. Not unsurprisingly, such pleas typically (but not always) fail.

Agreed. Anyone caught plagiarizing so blatantly should be expelled immediately. It is simply a waste of time to coddle people who should know better.

Yeah, standards seem to differ a lot.

There's also the whole grade inflation problem: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/93987

... perhaps a part of the problem is accreditation of higher ed schools?

Where I'm from, a single sentence similar to one of your sources is marks deducted

Sounds like the purpose of the class is to teach people to use a thesaurus.

It is a deterrent. It is often easier to come up with an original sentence then sit around with a thesaurus.

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