In the age of Google, people really need to stop plagiarizing.

[Goliath]

Also, I find it absolutely shocking how many people, even the good writers in my graduate courses, cannot properly format a footnote.

I don't understand it either.

Like I said: those drill assignments are basically free marks; you can keep handing them in, and handing them in, until you pass.

And yet, every time I teach that course, 25-33 per cent of the class just don't pass--and I find myself thinking: "Don't you people have any shame? Aren't you ashamed of the fact that you either can't or won't pass such a simple assignment?" I guess not.

On the plus side--I have noticed an improvement among those students who do actually complete these drills. And I've even had a couple of my colleagues comment on the difference between students who take my course, and those who don't. So I guess it's not all for nothing.

 

[JoeZhang]

Like I said: those drill assignments are basically free marks; you can keep handing them in, and handing them in, until you pass.

Seem a bit odd to me - isn't that a complete time sink?

 

[wew]

My seminar students aren't taking their history course seriously here. I've begged, pleaded, and almost threatened them about acquiring either the Turabian Guide of the Chicago Manual of Style.

However, neither of them is willing to pay 17.95 for the book, check it out of the library, or even look up the material on the web.

Their bibliographic/footnote exam was disastrous, and sadly they seem to think its funny.

Unless they make major changes in attitudes, we will see how funny it is to fail the course and having to repeat it.

 

[Goliath]

Like I said: those drill assignments are basically free marks; you can keep handing them in, and handing them in, until you pass.

Seem a bit odd to me - isn't that a complete time sink?

Not for me--they're quick and easy to mark. Just scan down the page--if you find a mistake, mark F; if you don't find a mistake, mark P.

For the students--the only way they'll learn to document their sources properly is by doing it. And if they've already learned how to do it, these assignments should only take them a few minutes to complete.

 

[JoeZhang]

Their bibliographic/footnote exam was disastrous, and sadly they seem to think its funny.
.

You guys have a lot of weird courses - you give people exams in footnoting?

 

[Goliath]

Their bibliographic/footnote exam was disastrous, and sadly they seem to think its funny.
.

You guys have a lot of weird courses - you give people exams in footnoting?

Documentation is extremely important in history--it's the historical equivalent of describing your procedure so that others can try to duplicate your experiment.

If you don't document your sources properly, there's no reason for anyone to accept your research results, or even believe a word you say.

 

[Drake]

Historiography, I vaguely remember the course well.

 

[Bears Discover Fire]

I always put forth the effort to write original papers, and kept my direct quoting from sources to a minimum. I always tried to extrapolate my own ideas from my sources and not just "put it in my own words". Ergo, I found writing papers difficult, because I actually used my brain to formulate my own damned ideas (lame as they often were).

Once I got to photography school I had very few papers to write, but some of the laughably bad attempts of my fellow students to plagerize photographs were pretty funny...one guy took a picture of a picture from a magazine laying on his desk without bothering to crop out the desktop or fix the glare from his on-camera flash. This was one of the advanced courses, too! I never saw him again after *that* critique. All of our critiques were public and often scathing, so he got called out in front of the entire class by the screaming instructor. The instructor was like, "Damn dude, if you're gonna go that route at least be smart enough to scan the fucking thing!"

 

[TheBrew]

My Sister, the College Professor, sent me most of all my papers for courses that weren't math and science related. Of course I was in the Service, took 14 years and over 180 credits to finish a degree in Structural Engineering. That too was my Sister's doing. She sorted every thing out, sent them to a friend at Purdue University and zap, there it was.

I never plagiarised though.

Not doing your work.

Passing off someone's work as your own.

Sounds like plagiarism.

 

[JoeZhang]

I did my sister's post-graduate cert in Human Resource Management for her - It was fairly easy, I use to knock the assignments up in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.

 

[Gepard]

I use to knock the assignments up in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.

How does one impregnate a school assignment?

 

[wew]

The course is a senior writing seminar, the exam on footnoting/bibliographic citations is to see how well they grasp the principles of proper citations. I made it an exam since the school reqiures I give a mid-term exam. I decided to find out how much work they had done on learning basic citations. The majority of their grade is based on their paper, with 10% of the paper grade focusing on proper citing/bibliography.

One citation of an Meeting Agenda ended up with the student literally including every point of the agenda, rather than the information about the agenda- date, location, etc. On other items they failed to put publishing date, publishers, copyright dates, page number for articles, etc.

It was sad.

 

[Daneel]

I was a TA for a first-year undergraduate film analysis class a couple of years ago. As you might guess, it's a pretty popular elective -- there were hundreds of students enrolled in the course. In an attempt to curb plagiarism, the professor used turnitin.com, which analyzes each essay and compares it to others on the internet. It finds essays written on the same subjects and calculates a "similarity percentage". Anything that rates a 0 - 25% (or thereabouts) is fine; most of the similarities in such cases are passed off as coincidences. Anything higher might be a little suspicious, but fortunately, the vast majority of essays rated below 40%.

It amused me, though, to find that there were still a few people who submitted an essay that rated in the high 90s on turnitin. Often, they just copied an essay from a friend or relative who took the course a year or so earlier. How they expected to get away with that one, especially since the course curriculum hadn't really changed, is beyond me. Fortunately, none of my students were among those caught plagiarizing, so I didn't have to deal with the issue (although the professor probably would have dealt with it personally, anyway).

Some people apparently have strong opposition to using turnitin, however (I guess they feel it's a privacy issue, or doubt the reliability of the software). If a student felt that way, they would have to hand in extensive rough notes with their essay to show their work (and prove that it's original).

So, that's my own personal experience on the issue of plagiarism. Personally, I had no problems with turnitin.com (both as a student and a teaching assistant), but I know not everyone feels that way.

 

[Goji]

I've never plagiarized, nor have I been seriously accused of it. I only ever had a brush with it once, my freshman year of college. I had an English class with a particularly unpleasant teacher. Every time I wrote an essay I had to have a conference with her, and she kept telling me the same thing every time. I didn't use enough quotes from the material we were reading in class. So every time I would consciously use more and more quoted material in an effort to please this person and her irrational desire to see half my paper be quoted straight from stuff I'd read in class. It was never enough, it would seem, until the final paper, where even I thought I really went overboard. But that's what she TOLD me to do, so... anyway, during the conference on that paper, she made a quick, off the record and somewhat jovial comment saying that if I had used any more quotes than I did, she might take me to task for plagiarism. I was not amused.

I really hated that woman.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

I find it ironic that the ultimate plagiarist is now going to law school!

 

[RoJoHen]

The course is a senior writing seminar, the exam on footnoting/bibliographic citations is to see how well they grasp the principles of proper citations. I made it an exam since the school reqiures I give a mid-term exam. I decided to find out how much work they had done on learning basic citations. The majority of their grade is based on their paper, with 10% of the paper grade focusing on proper citing/bibliography.

One citation of an Meeting Agenda ended up with the student literally including every point of the agenda, rather than the information about the agenda- date, location, etc. On other items they failed to put publishing date, publishers, copyright dates, page number for articles, etc.

It was sad.

If I were to take a test on citations, I probably wouldn't do that well. I would certainly fail any section on footnotes, since I have literally never had to footnote a paper in my life. Footnotes are generally done in the Chicago-style, right? I've never had to use anything other than MLA.

I can do an MLA-style Works Cited page if my only sources are single-volume books and websites. Otherwise, I would have to look up how to do it properly.

 

[JoeZhang]

I have no clue on how to format citations - I've always used endnote, when I submit to a journal (or did my Master's or my PhD), I just select the required style and blam it does it automatically. Keeping a track of that stuff manually would be a real pain. Handy as well as you can just download the reference information directly and know that it's correct.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I find it ironic that the ultimate plagiarist is now going to law school!

Well, at least she's cute

 

[Neeka Keet]

Their bibliographic/footnote exam was disastrous, and sadly they seem to think its funny.
.

You guys have a lot of weird courses - you give people exams in footnoting?

Every undergraduate in my university has to take an investigation course and footnoting is one of the things you learn in said course.

 

[Danoz]

I think it's a big problem, but a sharp teacher or professor will catch it. If I were teaching high school civics or social studies, I would honestly require sourcing from peer reviewed articles with limited use of online "factbooks" and encyclopedias. I don't need you to recite the information back to me, I need you to process it.

And, yes, I think that failing a student for the class is the only fair punishment for plagiarism. It may seem tough, but it has to be the way this is dealt with for the student to really learn the consequences of cheating and getting caught.