More plagiarism!

[robinturner]

To combine the academic and geeky themes that have been occupying this journal of late, here's a lovely case of plagiarism I found today, in a term paper on hackers. I quote:

And, of course, there are the perennial {holy wars} -- {EMACS} vs. {vi}, {big-endian} vs. {little-endian}, RISC vs. CISC etc., etc., etc.

Obviously the first suspicious point is the curly brackets. Elsewhere in the paper, there are words underlined for no obvious reason except that they might once have been hyperlinks; these may be too, but it could also be a case of SGML fouling up a text editor.

Secondly, there is the fact that this was written, or at least cut-and-pasted, by a first-year university student whose native language is not English, and would be extremely unlikely to use phrases like "perennial holy wars", let alone "big-endian" (for that matter, how many native speakers these days have read Gulliver's Travels?).*

What really tickled me, though, was the implied assumption of knowledge. Amongst the students in this particular class, two or three knew what UNIX was and one had (with my encouragement) installed Linux. This student was not amongst these. He's not a complete computer-illiterate, but his knowledge of computing probably extends as far as downloading MP3's, and he's referring to emacs and vi! For the uninitiated, these are UNIX/Linux text editors of fiendish complexity. vi is a program which is so user-unfriendly that even my brother, who is a professional computer programmer, complained about it, and emacs, while an excellent program if you want to write C++ while having a chat with an ELIZA-type therapy program and downloading a few files on the side, is about as intuitive as quantum physics. As I recently said on an e-mail list, "Life is too short for emacs."

A final point, which I would like any student readers who are tempted to plagiarise to consider, is that if a lecturer has asked for an essay on a particular subject, it is probably a subject with which they are familiar, and have read the standard literature. In this case, if memory serves me correctly, the literature in question is to be found on Eric Raymond's homepage. In other words, don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs, especially if she's going to be grading your paper.

* Of course, "big-endian" doesn't mean the same in the computing world, but what does? For a technical explanation, see www.support.compaq.com/amt/freeport/whites/endian.html

Comments

[asteriskhere.livejournal.com]

Just curious...what do you do to those students who plagiarize? Do you fail them, get them expelled, let it slide...?

Plagiarism penalties

[solri.livejournal.com]

It depends on the type and extent of the plagiarism, and the kind of writing in which it occurs. The policy of our unit (which I generally agree with) is that if a first draft of a paper contains plagiarism, we simply return it to the student, point out the conventions of academic writing regarding acknowledgement of sources, and ask them to resubmit. In the final version of a paper, major plagiarism (e.g. whole paragraphs copied directly, or the whole thing being lightly paraphrased from a source) results in a mark of zero for the whole paper, cancelling out any other marks we may have given for outlines, drafts etc. (we're an academic skills unit, so we hold the students' hands through the whole writing process, and allocate marks accordingly). In practice, this usually results in their failing the course anyway. Minor plagiarism (i.e. inadequate referencing) just results in a lower mark.

The ultimate sanction is to take the student to the university's disciplinary tribunal, who can suspend them for up to a year, but I'd only want to do that in a case of of persistent extreme plagiarism, e.g. a student who kept buying his or her papers from other students. Generally a nice fat F is the best deterrent, coupled with a serious talking-to.

Re: Plagiarism penalties

[kristian.livejournal.com]

In the case of buying/selling papers, are there repercussions for the seller?

Re: Plagiarism penalties

[solri.livejournal.com]

Well, it's usually impossible to catch the seller, but the same penalties would apply.