Plagiarism Claims Are Brought Against University of Maryland's President | Hacker News Reader

Plagiarism Claims Are Brought Against University of Maryland's President

nytimes.com

49 pointsbookofjoe23 comments

Much better article about this showing side by side comparison of plagierism:

https://www.dailywire.com/news/university-of-maryland-presid...

That's damning and indefensible.

> Katie Lawson, a spokeswoman for the University of Maryland, did not deny that the language was copied, but suggested there would be no repercussions for the president.

Also damning.

Whoa that is insane if he faces no repercussions.

And I am an alumnus of UMD. If they really find him guilty and still do nothing, that’s going to be a stain on their reputation.

It is one of the worst examples I've seen. Just one solid block of lifted text -- with the spelling fixed to look American.

Does anyone know whether it could have been the co-author who did this alone?

>That's damning and indefensible.

without trying to raise a defense, a number of the minor changes to the copied text were distinct improvements. For example, "analysis was predominantly performed by looking at the details of the time domain waveform of the signal" is significantly tighter language!

"time waveform" in the original is somewhat questionable, but time domain, ok, now I get it! If you are going to have somebody plagiarize you, somebody from MIT is best! Then at least you can plagiarize them back.

They had better change their student conduct policies to not punish plagiarism.

The one thing college students love to do, consistently, is take a principled stand.

This seems like a no brainer loss for Maryland.

The mentioned comparison can be found here: https://archive.ph/l2paX/f59a3a222b688f000d8f4de2cbd343c773b....

https://archive.ph/B6UXf

> Katie Lawson, a spokeswoman for the University of Maryland, did not deny that the language was copied, but suggested there would be no repercussions for the president.

Hiring managers who come across resumes with degrees from this place, take note.

Same for MIT and Harvard I suppose?

Same for anyone who's ever worked for one of Bill Ackman's investments? After all, he's married to a plagiarist and we should conclude that he has low standards and spread that guilt by association all over.

Or we could stop fueling the outrage machine.

Did I miss their presidents get found to have blatantly plagiarized and then faced no consequences, still remaining in power? If so then yes

Irrespective of the merits of this claim, they are selectively digging into the backgrounds of minorities in prominent positions. It’s kind of disgusting given that if you look hard enough you’ll find dirt in anyone’s past.

Maybe, but that doesn't absolve this particular individual

Disagree. The kind of serious plagiarism that's alleged in cases like this, Claudine Gay, Marc Tessier-Lavigne doesn't happen by accident, it's deliberate. There are plenty of academics, both minorities and not, who are capable of original thought (and not resorting to plagiarism).

I can't wait for the day that AI is used to expose the fakers en-masse. Previously, they got away with plagiarism through obscurity - no longer. The sooner we can excise these freeloaders from our professional institutions, the better.

I did not go though the grueling process of writing an original PhD thesis, just to share a title with those who plagiarized their thesis.

AI will reveal all past plagiarism, while at the same time allowing anyone to fake it; get the LLM to write their papers or thesis, fabricate research with plausible methods and results, etc, undetectably.

Well, there’s a before-and-after cutoff here. The previous generation will be pilloried for their copying, but the next on is now armed with the tools to copy without detection.

“Chatbot, please rephrase this entire passage so that plagiarism detectors will consider it clean.”

It’s been happening from the moment ChatGPT was released, and after 15 years or so, all the leading young academic stars will have grown up with it.

"I did not go though the grueling process of writing an original PhD thesis, just to share a title with those who plagiarized their thesis."

Amen. No to excusing plagiarism of folks that have used it as a tool to climb the ranks of academia.

The Claudine Gay example was way, way different than this. She actually DID refer specifically to the authors she was pulling from, she just didn’t paraphrase significantly enough to avoid using quotation marks in doing so.

At least for every example I saw, there was no way a reader would think she was passing the ideas off as her own.

That's the sort of selective blindness that allows unethical frauds to succeed.

I'll tell you what: no matter how hard anyone looks in my past, nobody's going to find massive plagiarism. Why? Because I didn't commit plagiarism. You find plagiarism in the pasts of plagiarists. Let's save the defense for people who deserve it.

It doesn’t just have to be plagiarism it can be any aspect of your life.

Fine but, consider that in the cases of these university presidents it was always cases of plagiarism

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