Tip: If every paper you've turned in thus far has been rendered in English that might best be described as "incoherent," it's not a good idea to turn in a final paper where the prose is not only elegant, but is also generously salted with phrases in Latin and Koine Greek, plus references to obscure eleventh-century texts.
And especially not when most of the passages come from a book on your professor's shelf, dealing with an area that you know she is conversant with.
Just sayin'.
15 comments:
Well, it's good of the plagiarist to make it easy for you to catch him/her.
My theory is that at some level plaigiarists and data fakers *want* to be caught, because they can't be *that* stupid.
For example, one physiologist got caught faking data in a published article because he took a trace--a squiggly line on a graph--and used Photoshop to expand it, and then copy-pasted that expanded trace onto the exact same graph as the original to represent a different experimental condition. You look at the graph, and you can see all the little squiggles that are derived from noise and thus unique in real non-fake data are exactly the same in the two traces, except expanded three-fold in the Photoshopped one.
All this fuckeasse had to do was pick a different motherfucken trace--one not shown in the paper--to expand in Photoshop. And everyone who does these kinds of experiments has literally thousands of traces on their computers that never end up in published papers. I don't think it's plausible that he was *that* stupid.
I swear they (and by they, I mean students in general, not just plagiarists) don't give any thought to how we do what we do. You know, like, read stuff and think about it in our fields of study. Or any thought to the fact that people have very different styles of writing. These both frustrate me; they *should* know these things; and not just as a primer "how to cheat", but because its about learning and thinking long-term, not just for a particular assignment/course. When I'm back teaching, I need to think about how to work this stuff in.
At least they didn't plagiarize you to yourself (I know someone it happened to...)
I have to thank Google, especially Google Books, for making it so much easier to catch plagiarists. Before the internet was so well-developed, they had to go to the library, pick a book or journal off of the shelf and copy things out. Sometimes that meant they actually typed material into the midst of a half-written paper or otherwise worked to hide their copying. Now they search, cut-and-paste and BAM!, we've got 'em with the whole damned thing.
Note to students: copying the Wikipedia entry on a subject, formatting and all? You're better off taking the zero for not handing anything in as I will not only catch you and report you, but I will also make fun of you inside my head.
Janice, here's the thing: this plagiarism actually came from a book. It just happened to be one I knew well. Otherwise, I would have been days finding this thing.
But I WOULD have found it. Lying, cheating, and stealing all rolled into one. It's just wrong.
BWAhahahahaha!
Idiots. Just send that student a link to my plagiarism posts.
Contra CPP, I don't think student plagiarists want to be caught. But plagiarists by definition don't want to work all that hard, not even at plagiarism, which is why they're so easily caught. (I'm guessing that students are thinking that if they just don't turn in a paper, there's a 100% chance of an F, but if they plagiarize something and get away with it, there's maybe only a 50 or 70% of an F.)
Historiann, I'm with you, except the gamble is a little higher in my class: F for the course. Not just the paper.
And I caught a second one just an hour ago. Same class. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Possibly your student thought you'd assume that a second pentacost had occurred and given her the gift of tongues (including English).
That sure is going to make it hard for them to insist that they wrote it. ;)
I have little to add, except to second Historiann's laughter.
The Greek is what really pushes it over the limit, even if it weren't lifted from an easily found source. Even most educated native Greek speakers I know couldn't deploy koiné in a paper like that. Chances that an incoherent Anglophone student could do that: nil.
Sometimes I think that Stupid Plagiarism should get an extra F, just for good measure.
Yes, as Dr. S. says: This paper is rated FFF.
Ugh, I had one as well. The students had to write a guided historiography paper, and I was reading one--a student who had been struggling inordinately all semester--where hir summary of the book was reading more smoothly than I had expected. And then the red flag: the student used a word that I haven't read in years in anything, let alone in student work. Sure enough typed in the sentence in question and what should pop up but the very text the paper was centered around. Lovely.
I was a very lazy student but it never felt like stealing the words of another was worth the risk. I was there for my own growth on some level and even though my ideas were never great I always tried to create them. To hear of these students being this lazy (and disrespectful) makes me wish this were a time of gladiatorial games: thumbs down!... P.S. Reading the experiences of professors is fascinating to an outsider like myself.
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