I simply gurgled with delight when I read this. What a treat after a stressful day! Thank you, Anne.
I'm sitting on a hearing panel in an academic dishonesty case later this week. Talk about timely!
Thanks Anne, for the laugh. I think that it's a really good idea to introduce humourists to plagiarists on every oportunity - it spices up the mountains of marking.
Well, I didn't think it was a "laugh" any more than I think it's a laugh when any person errs and is punished. I did a google search and it appears to me that it was probably a sophmore level theology class at a Catholic university (not Anne's). Okay I admit that I chuckled a little, but this is still sad.
When I was a graduate student in physics, most of the classes included incredibly difficult homework. One class might require 15 pages of calculations per week. As a beginner, one doesn't know which direction a calculation would take so one could easily generate a hundred pages of writing before one found the 15 pages that were the required answer. One class had calculations that were so difficult that I received an "A" grade for a calculation that had a final answer that was wrong by a factor of 4. The professor (Marc Sher) told me that "in these sorts of problems it is easy to lose track of powers of two".
Naturally the graduate students asked each other for hints on how to do the homework. I did not want to hear any hints because I felt that the searching was a good part of the education, and I liked the challenge. I quickly got tired of providing other students with hard-won clues that would save them time on their work. The end result was that I quit working on homework as soon as it was assigned, and began putting it off until the last day. Then I stayed up all night.
Carl
Out-plagiarizing the plagiarizers--what a brilliant idea! I'll think about this whenever I start taking my plagiarism cases too personally...
During my years in chemical engineering, we basically all sat in hunched, sad little groups helping each other with the homework. In our case this was encouraged, because as engineers we were expected to learn how to collaborate, and working out as a group how to solve stuff was a Valuable Life/Career Skill. You still did the work because you still needed to understand the topics, but it was less of an "Every Man For Him/Herself" approach.
I read the comments at Nate's blog and could not believe the people who were getting seriously bent out of shape because he'd done such a cruel thing. Um?
she bought herself that misery, that's all i can say.
I will admit to chuckling over it. I mean, if you e-mail some random person and ask them to write your paper for you, you've gotta expect that you have a fair chance of getting a joker. (if someone were to email me a similar request, though, I'd probably go all pucker-faced and tell them they need to do it themselves. I don't have that good of a sense of humor about plagiarism)
I've caught a few plagiarised papers in my day, and usually the student accepts the 0 and lets it drop at that. (I can't say I've ever had anyone actually cry, but then as I remember all my plagiarism cases were male).
I will say, though, I'd not put it past one of my students to insert a sentence like "I made a doody" into their papers - somewhere in the deep middle - just to check to see if I read the whole thing. (I will admit to having been tempted to do such a thing as a student, but never having had the guts to. And having been too much of a grade-grubber to take such a risk).
Oh. My. God.
Love it.
This is what I like about aviation. You do it yourself or you die.
I've been teaching for 6 years, and plagiarism still upsets me. I should probably try to get over it - and take a humorous attitude to it - because it's certainly not going away. Thanks for the link to the Gulliver paper and the snippet from the Antigone paper - those were great!
This is so, so brilliant. I just forwarded the link to your blog to my family, most of whom are teachers. I love it.
As a high school English teacher, I laughed out loud at this story. I battle the internet every year when I have my seniors turn in research papers. This is the first year I've had a kid submit one in a full from a pay site, but I found it, and he flunked. The kids never believe me when I say that I will find out if they cheat.
Every term I catch at least one serious case of plagiarism per section. My favorite was the student who turned in a paper a colleague uses in a faculty development workshop on how to prevent plagiarism
You. Are. My. Idol.
A friend of mine (Fred Ahrens) tells a story of teaching a course in an MBA program, and a student was so intent on sucking up that he learned all of Fred's interests then bought a paper containing them. Apparently people who sell papers strip the identity of the true author from them, otherwise the student would never have turned in one of his professor's past papers as his own...
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