Friday, October 12, 2007

Plagiarism

I'm still at the conference, but I have papers to grade and so am skipping some events.

All I have to say is this: I hate it when they plagiarize. I hate it when they plagiarize. I hate it when they turn a not-fabulous but written-by-themselves paper into a plagiarism case by lifting a paragraph, changing a couple of words, and dropping it into the paper. Do they not know that they've just turned a C paper into an F? Do they think I wouldn't notice when their tortured sentences smoothed out all of a sudden?

Additional things I hate: printing out and highlighting the relevant sections. Telling the student that a meeting is necessary. Bracing for arguments and tears ("But I didn't copy the whole thing!") because the syllabus states that if the paper is wholly or partially plagiarized, it is a plagiarized paper.

They are juniors and seniors, many of them future teachers. They should know better.

But I still hate it.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I most hate it when it is someone I know well and I know they've done it out of desperation.

I am now trying to plagiarize myself.

Never trust the MVS/mainframe - our mainframe maintenance director died over the summer and in the transition my research directory got wiped out - not by me.

I thought what was there was written as if in stone, forever - silly. For some reason it was also where I was keeping the best version of my vita.

Anonymous said...

P.S. one of my senior colleagues had the funniest plagiarism case ever - a student plagiarized one of *his* articles! Yes - turned in an old article by *his professor* as his own work!

undine said...

That's why I'm always stunned when computer magazines advocate scanning everything and getting rid of paper versions, cero. I hope you're able to recreate the cv and everything without too much trouble.

Anonymous said...

Gracias Undine, and yes. Actually this gave me the opportunity to see some things I should revamp. So it's all good - :-)