Disclaimer: Plagiarism is bad. A quick search for "plagiarism" on this blog will demonstrate that I've taken a clear stand against plagiarism.
That said, if one were, hypothetically, planning a little online-copy-and-paste plagiarism, and if one's instructor has earned a Ph.D., in Philosophy, from Stanford, one might reconsider using the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as the source of several uncited sentences.
There is a better-than-average chance that the instructor is familiar with SEP -- indeed, even with the specific entry you (hypothetically) are tempted to plunder.
Even if she's not, she's at least as handy with a Google search as you are.
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Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won't go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it…
From time to time I get emails asking for advice dealing with situations that just don't feel right. Recently, I've been asked about the following sort of situation:
You're an undergraduate who has landed an internship in a lab that does research in the field you're hoping to pursue in graduate…
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You've probably already seen this story. Loye Young, an adjunct professor at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, warned his students (as we all do) against plagiarism. Indeed, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, he included this…
This time around, we're talking to Janet D. Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science.
What's your name?
Janet D. Stemwedel. But you can call me Dr. Free-Ride, since that's the pseudonym I used when I launched my blog. (It came from a discussion with my ethics in science class about whether…
No volume of "d'oh" is enough for this one.
Oh, good, a fresh anecdote just in time for the plagiarism workshop that I am holding this Wednesday's as part of my university's annual Honors and Ethics Week! As I tell my students, "Anything you can Google, I can Google faster."
I'm with JM on this one, this is obviously NOT a student who has any intention of remaining in your class, right?
And if you are going to cut and paste from a paper commenting on the foundations of general relativity, make sure you don't repeatedly misspell "physics."
At a conference once, another prof told a story: her student had written a paper, extensively plagiarizing a book. Alas, the student hadn't realized that her professor was also the author of said book. Needless to say, the professor realized this.
Here we go again, it is plagiarism season!
I do a lot of work educating teachers about how to use Google to chase plagiarists.
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If your German is any good, you can check out my free E-Learning unit about plagiarism, including 10 papers that you can see if you can find the sources for to hone your plagiarism search skills.
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We have to spend time in the FIRST semester educating students about how to write scientifically. Yes, Wikipedia is a great point to start research. No, it is not a source for quoting. Yes, you can quote books and even the Internet - just use "....". No, teachers are not stupid, really. Even if we seem to be at least a hundred years old.
We have to watch out for the smart-alecks in Germany who take a text in English, shove it through Babelfish and submit the mess (usually without reading it first) to us. Sigh.
But I guess this is what education is all about.
Happy hunting!
Um, right, the URL: http://plagiat.fhtw-berlin.de/ff for the E-Learning unit. Sorry.
My wife's cousin is a lecturer and department co-chair in electrical engineering at a prestigious university in the UK. I was fascinated to hear the electronic lengths to which his department has gone to dectect plagiarism in term papers and even in MS theses. They have a program that can even detect when a source was used by copying then subsituting nouns or verbs for which adequate synonyms could be found. This was not some 2-year associates program for desperate job seekers. Maybe the market in education has changed [I love your essay on "what is a college education for"] and even 6 years of expensive education is primarily thought of as "training" by a majority of students. Either way, a disappointing number approaching 25% of the students get marked down for some extent and fashion of using un-cited material.
So, you see your posts on plagiarism and on the purpose of a college education are not unrelated. Well, ok, at least now I see it too.