Plagiarism
Saturday, May 19th, 2001 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerWhy oh why do students plagiarise? More to the point, why do they do it so ineptly? One of my students (name withheld for reasons of professional ethics) has just submitted a paper which has nothing to do with the subject he originally chose and discussed with me twelve weeks ago and is written in a flawless academic style (apart from typos, words missed out etc., e.g. "A worker who refuses to fallow the rules can leave the pickles or special souce off a hamburger"). This is from a first-year undergraduate whose native language is not English. Do they really think we are that stupid? I mean, we academics are past masters at plagiarism - all those little things that slip imperceptibly from the "Review of the Literature" section to the "Discussion". I once got caught unintentionally plagiarising, having referred to a book out of a sense of obligation without bothering to read most of it - it turned out that many ideas expressed later in the book were actually worryingly close to some of my own theories.
However, that is a million miles from the cut-and-paste jobs my students come up with. My favourite case was a few years back, when I was presented with a photocopied paper which actually still had the original author's name at the bottom. Another classic came from a student who, in her next tutorial, was unable to answer the question "What is a wood-thrust?", which was what she had typed when copying "wood-thrush" (needless to say, she didn't know what a wood-thrush was either).
None of these, though, come close to rivalling a story I heard when I was at university - apparently some student had submitted a plagiarised paper without noticing that the author of the paper was the same person she was submitting it to.
However, that is a million miles from the cut-and-paste jobs my students come up with. My favourite case was a few years back, when I was presented with a photocopied paper which actually still had the original author's name at the bottom. Another classic came from a student who, in her next tutorial, was unable to answer the question "What is a wood-thrust?", which was what she had typed when copying "wood-thrush" (needless to say, she didn't know what a wood-thrush was either).
None of these, though, come close to rivalling a story I heard when I was at university - apparently some student had submitted a plagiarised paper without noticing that the author of the paper was the same person she was submitting it to.
