I had a good one. For my course in 1950s American literature (note the subject) a guy turned in a paper on the most important breakthrough in the 1950s -- the polio vaccine. No attempt to link it to the books we read, just an essay on the polio vaccine. I'm reading it thinking, well, this guy's getting an F, when he gave me a reason to check for plagiarism: his "cut-n-paste" job was so half-ass that on page 4 he included a picture (complete with a caption) of Jonas Salk looking at a beaker. I did an image search on Salk and found the page from which he took about 60% of his paper verbatim. The result: F for the course, and a series of unpleasant encounters with a string of administrators in the not-too-distant future.
Would you have given him a better grade if he had at least known that the Cocoa Puffs bird's name is Sonny?
I hear you... I taught before the internet, so the kids actually had to take pen to paper to plagiarize, which didn't make them any smarter. I always loved kids who'd copy something from an encyclopedia, writing without knowing what they were reading, and they'd go onto the next subject entry in the encyclopedia. My favorite: for a French lesson in World Civ, each student had to write 1 page on a french city, and one kid copied the entire entry for Toulouse and then went straight onto to Toulouse Lautrec...
It's a dying art to be sure. Kids today are just lazy. My freshman year in college I took on an extra advanced class that I probably shouldn't have. Because of it I found myself not reading a lot of the books for a basic English course. I've always found English easy and actually wrote a 12 page paper on the book after having read only 10 pages out of 250. Got an A on the paper and was personally praised by my professor as we left class that day. I saw her again three and a half years later just before graduation and she mentioned how that paper was still one of the best she'd ever received. I almost told her it was utter bull****, but I didn't have the heart.
More awesome-ness. My student who turned in a final that had perhaps 2 original sentences in it sent me an email saying: I hope it is killing her slowly and with great pain.
a teacher thought i was plagiarizing and it was his intent to get me suspended. i had to prove my innocence therefore i described in detail and had to read every note to make it think i didnt plagiarize....they kept asking my what website i got this info from and it seem like it was taken from a book or something anyway they had no conclusive evidence since i handwrote it. i plead my innocence til this day i wrote the damn thing. but teachers these days either have a grudge on some kids or they think that now that everybody is using the internet to find some info that it is comforming to cheating. some students are just lazy like it or not/so are teachers? its a doublestandard that will go on and on. btw when i graduated the same teacher came up to me and kept insisting that i should apologize for what had transpired....what a moron im off school and now i know it was a grudge on me for some stupid reason.
******** you. ******** you again. I hope you get crushed by a plane sliding off of the runway. Even though you won't understand the satire in my post, I'll not explain it.
Footnotes or bibliography? One of my lecturers will not accept an essay or assignment without them. No, if you follow the rules and clearly state what you have read, who said what, and what point this is atributed from etc, then they have no reason to suspect you. Trust me, trying to write a bibliography for soemthing you have plagrisied must be the hardest thing in the world, and even if zed assignment had a pre-packaged bibliography, then it would be quite evident from the scope of what's on it - whether or not a student has cheated. The internet is an invaluable resource, but we are told clearly to mark down the url, the author and the date of access if we use the info. Tbh, kids are lazy. Someone with half a brain could write soemthing meaningful on something they know little about. And if you can't, what the fvck are you doing in education? I wouldn't dare plagrize any work, I'd rather fail than cheat. You are only kidding yourself, especially when you leave and realise that you learnt fvck all skills that will be useful to you in the outside world.
Was it a grudge, or was it really a teacher who was trying to get you to write better? You've got a lot of fractured prose in the above post.
I gave the post a D on the basis of the text-message-ese alone. It was the lame conclusion that pushed it into the failure zone, however.
thats nice.... but im just sharing a story that happened to me a while ago.... if you think that deeply of me being crushed by a plane wouldnt sound that bad these smartass teachers have no sense or sympathy.
if that was the problem why didnt he confront me about this? trust me this teacher was a little tempermental about things.... maybe because i was the only one in the classroom that stood up to him or critizize his views.... i thought that year was torture cause i didnt want to go to his onesided teachings so i skipped some classes. but having me accountable for something i never did hurts....cheating. i must say that there are some teachers that are balloon heads you know hollow in the inside and really i have had supply teachers who have better knowledge and assetments then regular teachers.
if so i had a fractured prose whos fault is that?at least he could agknowledge that my skills or prose was not intact or didnt make sense.
Gee, I wonder why anyone would conclude that, if something you "wrote" flowed smoothly, you probably plagiarized it.
Geez, I skip out on the board to grade exams for a day straight, and miss this? Fun times. I should allow myself a visit after every hour of grading. To be fair, I wish some of my colleagues weren't "lazy teachers" when pursuing academic integrity questions. I have never confronted a former pupil at graduation and demanded an apology, but understand the motivation. I put a good deal of myself, my time and effort into effective grading - the type with learning and improvement in my and other classes as the goal - and feel personally insulted by plagiarism. Submit the paper a day late, or not at all (life happens), but be honest with me. And, jec1, don't go onto a board composed of people in academia and teaching and insult teachers in a blanket manner ("teachers these days"). Nor should you head over to the Quakes board today to support the move of the Quakes to Houston. Back to exams - for an hour, then back I take a BS break!
I don't have a lot of faith in your judgement. Did you not notice that everybody else on this forum writes in proper sentences, with punctuation, capitalization, and so forth? If you didn't catch on to that--if you couldn't be bothered to meet the standard, in other words--then I don't find it surprising that your teacher had concerns about your work.
Two ways that teachers can cut down on plagiarism somewhat: 1. Give out very specific paper topics and guidelines, and make it clear that they must be followed. Allow students to create their own topic if they choose, but only if they come discuss it in detail with the teacher a week or more in advance. 2. Have a fairly lenient (but strictly enforced) grade penalty for late papers. A fair amount of plagiarism probably results from a combination of procrastination and last-minute panic.
i can assure you thats not how i wrote it after all this is a public forum, it doesn't have to be dead on. i admit i came to strong on your guys and for that im sorry and i apologize to you all. my point of target was this specific teacher who i just learned is not with the school board anymore for various reasons unknown.i can assure you that what i did was clean slate and i was not subjecting myself to cheating though alot of kids are pressure to plagarize and some will get caught some wont thats life. i have since moved on with my life enrolled myself into a academy and doing the best that i can to place myself being the best student i can be. any advice you teachers you can give me for breaking down the barriers to being a better student and conducting myself without blaming someone from the outside would be greatly appreciated. ps:NGV is right if you place those standards today it would cut back on plagiarizing but i still think students will get around after all teachers are human to.
Letting students choose their own topic is a way to increase plagiarism, not decrease it. Only in smaller advanced classes do I recommend letting students have that freedom, and even then you have to watch them, though. A better solution is to require students to meet with you with outlines and talk about their papers before they are due. This is incredibly time-consuming and only works in small classes. I'm not sure that's true either. You can really fairly easily gauge a student's interest in your class. And you can make assignments well in advance. I don't think the deadline is the problem. Where I teach we now have a way to force students to submit their papers electronically to a system that scans them for probable plagiarism. I didn't use it this time, but I will in the future. Now that's a solution.