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tinpraBy TRIP GABRIEL
Published: August 1, 2010
At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.
At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.
But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.
( Read the rest at the NYTimes.com )
I know at least two people on my f-list are teachers, and various ones of us are writers or have other creative interests. I think most of us are beyond college. What do you guys think of this? Beyond being lazy and not wanting to put in the hard work of writing, as is mentioned later in the article, I think a lot of the current college generation's apathy about plagiarism, and cheating in general, comes from having cheated for much of their academic lives. I know cheating was alive and strong when I was in middle and high school, and there were definitely mixed feelings about its immorality then.
Published: August 1, 2010
At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.
At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.
But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.
( Read the rest at the NYTimes.com )
I know at least two people on my f-list are teachers, and various ones of us are writers or have other creative interests. I think most of us are beyond college. What do you guys think of this? Beyond being lazy and not wanting to put in the hard work of writing, as is mentioned later in the article, I think a lot of the current college generation's apathy about plagiarism, and cheating in general, comes from having cheated for much of their academic lives. I know cheating was alive and strong when I was in middle and high school, and there were definitely mixed feelings about its immorality then.
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-03 11:31 pm (UTC)I've been grading the final exams for my online course today, and one of my students is someone for whom English is not her first language. Throughout the course, she has submitted assignments with mixed writing styles - obviously, some material was copied. Each time I reduced her points for the assignment and explained what plaigiarism is and why it's not acceptable. The instances decreased, and I saw more work in her own words.
Today, I opened her final and low and behold, one of the answers to an essay question based on comparing and contrasting two paintings reads as if I'd written it myself (or say, an art critic with equal knowledge about the two works had). It's in what I call professor-eze, complete with things like complete sentences, correct verb tenses and conjunctions - all things her own writing lacks. So, I did an advance good search for a random sentence in the essay and lo and behold, there is a perfect, verbatim match.
The student had posted the question and the images to Yahoo answers Malaysia and copied the answers she recieved into her final exam. O_O SHe then deleted the question, apparently unaware that it could be found in a google cache.
It is the most blatant use of plagiarism and cheating I have ever seen in my entire career.
As for rights and wrongs of the issue, I give each student a handout on plagiarism and proper citation methods on the first day of class. They know - they just don't care.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-04 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-04 01:16 pm (UTC)I totally agree, although I didn't realize your kids were quite so young. Better to learn at a young age how to think and synthesize for yourself. As they get older, properly teaching them how to site things seems to be the next step. The article mentions kids not knowing what to do with "author-less" content, but I remember going over that with my teachers.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-08 06:27 pm (UTC)