Plagiarism

[Gin]

Originally Posted by Dr. Casey

Yeah... your teacher sounds like a dick.

"Hey guys, did I ever tell you about that one time that a student of mine got kicked out for plagiarizing? She spent thousands of dollars towards a college education and devoted years of her life to pursuing certification in her field, but all that was a total waste and she never got to achieve one of her primary goals in life because she made a stupid choice right at the finish line! LMFAO, isn't that hilarious? XD XD XD XD XD"

Regardless of whether you think she deserved to be kicked out, it's heartless and distasteful to talk about what happened in the same light that you might talk about that one time a friend of yours got drunk and fell down the stairs. It was an unfortunate event, and the only context in which that story should ever be told should be as a warning to students not to plagiarize.

That sounds pretty hilarious to me, if she blatantly copied something off of Wikipedia, she's obviously not smart enough to graduate. Why is laughing at your friend seriously injuring himself more acceptable to you than laughing at someone for doing something equally as stupid, presumably while not even intoxicated?

[Dr. Casey]

Originally Posted by Gin

Why is laughing at your friend seriously injuring himself more acceptable to you than laughing at someone for doing something equally as stupid, presumably while not even intoxicated?

Well, I was implying that the friend in question is perfectly fine after falling down the steps (Which isn't that uncommon an outcome; I know that my grandfather got drunk and fell down the staircase once back in the 80s and didn't have so much as a bruise to show for it, it just put him in a more silly and giggly mood). Obviously it's a different story if there's injuries that result. Basically, I just mean taking pleasure in what happened to that girl and recounting what happened as though it's some fun, harmless story.

[Gin]

Obviously the instructor is using it as a cautionary tale, but it still wildly hilarious due to the fact that she would have passed if she hadn't turned anything in at all. I feel no sympathy for her at all, you shouldn't commit crimes if you can't pay the fines. The thing about plagiarism punishments is that you can't assume that its their first time doing it, its just their first time getting caught. Who knows how much she plagiarized before she finally got caught? I do all my work myself, I'm glad that plagiarism is getting cracked down on, its not right that someone can cheat their way through college and get a degree while other people actually do the work. That person never actually learned anything and their degree is a lie, they are not actually qualified for the jobs they get.( unless its a business degree )

[felix]

Originally Posted by papermario13689

"The wrongful appropriation, close imitation, or purloining and publication, of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work."

Sometimes people accidentally plagiarize without intention;

Mind explaining how (logically) that's possible? Personally I read it as…

Sometimes people accidentally [intentionally copy someone else's work] without intention;

However, what it sounds like you're trying to say or is coming out is…

Sometimes people accidentally [ignore copyright] without intention;

Which sounds to me like you're talking about a licensing/trademark issue; in other words a law issue not a moral issue (ie. you botched the topic badly). It's not wrong to say the same thing, the same way. Language, as well as style, are only pseudo-random, and there's no criteria of freshness either. Legally however, there's a nice little line above which "the same thing" is illegal.

You can break copyright without "plagiarism" getting involved. Someone just has to beat you to it. You can also have plagiarism without copyright infringement; not everything is copyrighted, or the copyright has expired, or simply the copyright allow for distribution of copies with no mention of the author of said copyright. This means that even though it's plagiarism it's not illegal (from a copyright perspective). My point, the two worlds only intersect, they are not equal, nor the same thing.

I'm really not getting what this apple-orange thing we're suppose to talk about is, but everyone seems to have just taken it as "intentional plagiarism" (going by your classification) so whatever, "the show must go on" I guess

[xl_Legit_lx]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

It is so common in my school that I don't bother about it anymore. Anti-plagarism is so hard to enforce at a college/university level because the lecturers can't check every single piece of work for familiarity.

I don't know where you go, but my university doesn't take that shit. They enforced it ever since orientation (when we first got here at college) like no other. You get kicked out for pulling that shit, and people have been caught. No one dares test them, they'd rather not do the paper.

@Felix: A lot of people don't paraphrase or cite sources correctly, and it can be so minuscule that people overlook it, thus plagiarizing without noticing. A lot of that happened in High School, and we had a seminar on how to fix it. The best way to look at it, is that if it isn't yours, and you use it. Cite it. Purdue University's OWL shows you about that a lot. Just google it, if you need references on how to cite and source.

-Legit

[Vexx]

Originally Posted by Dr. Casey

Of course not, and I'd be favor of some kind of penalty in situations where the plagiarism is enough to hamper one's understanding of the material they're supposed to learn. Due to the general zero tolerance policy against plagiarism and the ease with which teachers can now detect such copied material, though, the usual stories seem to be more along the lines 'A Computer Sciences major got kicked out during the third year of his Bachelor's program because he copied three sentences in an essay about Huck Finn.' Plagiarism is a crime that's punished quite brutally to serve as a deterrent, but in many of the individual cases I don't think the punishment fits the crime. ...

Many of the 'zero tolerance' policies are asinine. Its like it never occurred to these drones that thoughts and phrases could re-invented independently all the time. Most major discoveries are 'race-conditions' rather than single bits of brilliance.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by xl_Legit_lx

I don't know where you go, but my university doesn't take that shit. They enforced it ever since orientation (when we first got here at college) like no other. You get kicked out for pulling that shit, and people have been caught. No one dares test them, they'd rather not do the paper.

Originally Posted by Vexx

Many of the 'zero tolerance' policies are asinine. Its like it never occurred to these drones that thoughts and phrases could re-invented independently all the time. Most major discoveries are 'race-conditions' rather than single bits of brilliance.

Some school that has been grilled because it once enforced what Vexx said. Now it has no idea how to enforce the rule other than on a case-by-case basis - and the enforcers have this "heck care" attitude and simply let even 90% copypastas go.

I had an entire analysis copied once word-for-word and they get away scot-free. But a group member of mine was almost barred from exam for plagarism - I helped him with his English so I know what work he is doing, and it isn't anything similar to someone else's. Seriously speaking, I don't know if the universities actually read our work or not.

[Hiroi Sekai]

Originally Posted by felix

Mind explaining how (logically) that's possible? Personally I read it as…

However, what it sounds like you're trying to say or is coming out is…

Which sounds to me like you're talking about a licensing/trademark issue; in other words a law issue not a moral issue (ie. you botched the topic badly). It's not wrong to say the same thing, the same way. Language, as well as style, are only pseudo-random, and there's no criteria of freshness either. Legally however, there's a nice little line above which "the same thing" is illegal.

You can break copyright without "plagiarism" getting involved. Someone just has to beat you to it. You can also have plagiarism without copyright infringement; not everything is copyrighted, or the copyright has expired, or simply the copyright allow for distribution of copies with no mention of the author of said copyright. This means that even though it's plagiarism it's not illegal (from a copyright perspective). My point, the two worlds only intersect, they are not equal, nor the same thing.

I'm really not getting what this apple-orange thing we're suppose to talk about is, but everyone seems to have just taken it as "intentional plagiarism" (going by your classification) so whatever, "the show must go on" I guess

Sorry fel, I definitely could have worded that better. What I meant was that people can read or hear something from way back, become inspired, and then forget about it. Later on, they unintentionally bring it up and end up stealing somebody's words. I definitely shouldn't have called it unintentional plagiarism, because that suddenly becomes an oxymoron.

[careph]

Originally Posted by Knightrunner

You also need to put into account why most professional journals are written. Most writers are force to keep writing professional journals to keep there "academic status." They say those who stop writing gets killed off so some of the professional stuff they teach you in college is bullsh*t.

Publish or perish

Two anecdotes that may be worth sharing:

I had that one lecturer who was always reading from papers. In addition, he showed slides containing the same, albeit abridged, content. It seemed eerily familiar to me. As it turned out, he was reading from a book I had previously worked through as part of my continued efforts to conquer the local library.
The next lesson, he read from another book. Unfortunately, I couldn't find out which.

Another lecturer was asked to publish his presentation aids and refused, reasoning that it was a work of progress he really didn't want to show us yet. Apart from the obvious issue of why he used them during his lectures despite their alleged inferiority, a little research revealed that he used rather significant portions extracted from wikipedia articles.

Though that's probably more laziness and disinterest than anything else.

[Vexx]

The entirely weird thing to some extent is that ALL human output is derived substantially from PREVIOUS human output. You wouldn't be able to even articulate a sentence without having spent a lot of time mimicking others. When you write an essay - it can't *really* be original as you have to cite references from which you got your ideas. "In your own words" really isn't entirely true, ever.

OTOH.... "dude let me copy your homework", "I'll check back on you're doing on *our* group project", and "$20 for term paper!!!!" are to be discouraged by wielding large frozen trout menacingly - its just a murky line as to when its one case or the other.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Many of the 'zero tolerance' policies are asinine. Its like it never occurred to these drones that thoughts and phrases could re-invented independently all the time. Most major discoveries are 'race-conditions' rather than single bits of brilliance.

That's why any half-sensible policy will include an appeals process: 15 minutes talking to the student about their work should be enough to determine whether they blindly and intentionally copied or came to the same conclusion through independent thought.

However, you could also take the hard-nosed perspective that the real world operates on zero tolerance: academic publishers and patent lawyers won't give you a second chance, so you'd better learn fast as a student to err on the side of over-attribution.

This thread is well-timed for me because I start Uni next week after ten years away from academia. I picked up my course notes yesterday and had to chuckle at this thinly-veiled warning in the blurb on plagiarism:

Lecturers normally have a thorough knowledge of the reference material in the field in which they assign student work. In addition, unusually perceptive or well-expressed ideas in an essay can provoke favourable comment from lecturers, with the result that the essay is shown to other lecturers to admire.

[Khu]

To be blatantly obvious,
high school mathematics and science is all plagiarism.

Think about it.

XD

[AnimeFan188]

"Germany's defense minister quit Tuesday amid persistent allegations that he
plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis, depriving Chancellor Angela Merkel's
conservatives of a man long rated the country's most popular politician."

See:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41844239...d_news-europe/

[Jinto]

Originally Posted by AnimeFan188

"Germany's defense minister quit Tuesday amid persistent allegations that he
plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis, depriving Chancellor Angela Merkel's
conservatives of a man long rated the country's most popular politician."

See:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41844239...d_news-europe/

Hm, it tells something about Germany in more than one way (using a little background knowledge of course). Without Springer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Springer_AG) he would not even be where he is today. I mean which newspaper does truely influence the average Joe, its not the FAZ or SZ its Bild (admittedly calling Bild a newspaper is an insult to the word newspaper).

This defence minister is not rated the country's most popular politician, because he is a good person. He is rated that high, because the press is writhing in the dust of his false front (rhetorical as well as behavioural). Sure he has a good PR team and good ghost writers, and can act better than other politicians. But that does not make him a good politician. The german people are so easily blended, if it was not for the inherent danger (to have a gullible electorate - which likes personality cults) I'ld just laugh... but its too serious to be funny.

I mean it basically tells, that you can cheat your way through life and even make it public, the people will still like you, not even questioning the integrity and moral adequacy of a person for a political post like being minister of defence (I mean who needs someone trustworthy at that position... yeah right).

[Malkuth]

@Jinto: About Guttenberg, and Germany in general, it's not really worse than anywhere else... the average Joe does not really have an opinion (does not even want to have one), so will assume whatever is more convenient... I think it's called conservatism

On plagiarism in general, I do not understand why they make it such a big deal. From my point of view to be effiecient, learned, skillful, etc. you are bound to copy and cite, there is no way around that, knowledge must be either based or come from somewhere. So as long as you do not present your work as the ultimate achievement of originality, it's fine in my book, even if you do not credit the source.

As for the situation in education and research it is even worse; because being original is more important than having substance in your work. I was until in the process of writting my thesis, and my supervisor insisted on including references from scientific papers, so after a quick search in google scholar, p2p to get the actual papers, and than a little cross-doc search with regexps I was amazed on how much copy/paste these geniuses do, to support the most poitnless assumptions.

[Hiroi Sekai]

There's no way around it, that's true. Even agreeable to a further extent, using one's words as a reference in your own writing is okay.

My biggest problem is when something is straight up stolen. Seriously, write a story. Somebody takes the exact same concept and puts their name on it. Then read it. If you love writing as much as I do, you might feel the same way.

[Tsuyoshi]

I think that so long as you reference the external works you used to write your own work (be it a report, essay, story, what have you), you should be fine. My university was very strict when it came to plagiarism and if you were caught, the least you'd risk is repeating the whole year if you were under exam conditions. I find it ok so long as you don't downright copy the external work and if you do, put it in proper citations or quotes and reference it and give it proper credit. Otherwise, it's not your work at all.

[LusterFlare]

In this Philosophy course I'm taking, we have to submit our papers here to check for plagiarism.

[AnimeFan188]

Beware the plagiarism-bots! At least some artists are fighting back:

"Sorry to say, but you're probably picturing art thieves all wrong. Gone are the days
of suave scoundrels in black turtlenecks Cirque du Soleil-ing down domed ceilings to
switch Monets for money. Today, an art thief is just some douche who uses algorithms
to steal from struggling artists on social media to secretly slather their work on
sweatshop-grade t-shirts. But other social media artists want to fight these awful
practices, and they're delivering payback in the only currency they know -- exposure.

Putting the laundry back in money laundering, shady online t-shirt printers are
constantly having bots scour social media to swipe any and all images linked to
keywords like "T-Shirt" and "money." It has gotten so bad, online artists are starting
to warn their fans to no longer to show their appreciation by commenting something
like "I want that on a T-shirt," because that command will summon an intellectual
property thieving bot to fulfill that wish like a flea market bootleg 'Genny' from
'Aladdoon'.

But other artists are getting more creative in putting the word out. Instead of telling
their fans not to draw the auto-art thieves to their work, they want the exact
opposite, subtly asking fans to lure them in so they can steal and commercialize their
posted images -- which all happen to be either useless copyrighted sketches of
corporate mascots..."

See:

https://gizmodo.com/i-want-that-on-a-t-shirt-1840273177

&

https://www.cracked.com/article_2690...-scammers.html