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Plagiarism and the ridiculousness of college papers
Thanatos
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, this thread got me thinking: why do colleges waste our fucking time with this shit? I don't think I've ever actually learned anything from writing a paper like that, other than how to do bullshit busy-work. Do the professors not have the internet? Can they not look this shit up themselves? In what way is this "education?" It's burning through my money and spending precious hours that I'll never get back.
Not to mention the fact that with companies scanning in each and every paper ever written, it's becoming nigh-impossible, while remaining within the restriction of using existant languages, to write anything ever that isn't "plagiarized" because someone else, somewhere, used the same combination of words at some point writing a paper on the same topic. Does this sort of "plagiarism" even deserve the definition, in a world with the internet?
Not to mention the fact that with companies scanning in each and every paper ever written, it's becoming nigh-impossible, while remaining within the restriction of using existant languages, to write anything ever that isn't "plagiarized" because someone else, somewhere, used the same combination of words at some point writing a paper on the same topic. Does this sort of "plagiarism" even deserve the definition, in a world with the internet?
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I don't know why they make us write asinine papers. I guess so we get better at doing the busywork the real world requires and learn how to write papers, asinine or not.
Are you saying that Google is a sufficient tool for research? I'm not trying to be snarky - I really don't know what you're arguing.
You do realize you're making a quantitative claim without any quantitative support at all, right? Maybe you should try to substantiate the idea of people being punished for coincidental plagiarism if you want us to share your outrage.
Don't know how it really works out though. I can only think of a couple of times where I had to do something novel for a paper - that is, really learn new research skills.
Well, it's a refinement, like any skill. I've been writing game reviews on and off for five years and though I'm still prone to error and sloppiness now and then I like to think I've gotten better between then and now. Same goes for any similar skill...like research, or presenting a coherent analysis utilizing other's published concepts, or javelin throwing, spear fishing, hiking, etc., etc.
Unless you spend your high school and college careers in total obliviousness it's not possible to not improve. That is, your skills will improve the more of these papers you do. Which, I contend, is a positive thing.
Now, back to deciding whether the eleventh book of Apuleius' Golden Ass is sincere evangelism for Isis, or a parody in line with the previous ten books...
I'll be fine, just give me a minute, a man's got a limit, I can't get a life if my heart's not in it.
In my opinion, it also encourages individual thought and outlook on the subject, if possible. I took an environmental science course and we weren't allowed to fill our papers with useless statistics straight from the book, and the teacher told us to write about our opinions and how we would approach the problem(s) in question. I could write the entire paper the night before it was due because it's much easier to write a lot about your own thoughts and beliefs than regurgitate facts, and I think the teacher will appreciate it more if you go into detail.
However, this was the kind of class where you wouldn't have to do any work at all if you could present a solid argument.
:P
Writing papers teaches you how to:
a) seek information on a topic
b) figure out what parts of that information are relevant
c) figure out how to present it in a way that fits the context and the audience
You learn research, critical thinking, and presentation skills. I'd say these are far more relevant to the "real world" than, say, memorizing a bunch of information for an upcoming midterm.
You don't write to a government board about a several-billion dollar regulation unless you can make it clear that you're not a random angry redneck.
What is your crappy job?
Problems.
I solve them.
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I basically get like everything other people would have a hellish time with.
I'm currently working on dealing with six regulations, an inventory program (as in, one of the IT guys is still writing the code, it's a nine figure construction company), twenty years of archives and the archive system, oh and also contracts and insurance and first aid training and purchasing code books and mini-IT and whatever other random thing floats my way.
So I have to be absurdly organization-minded, be able to communicate with people who just don't get things, and occasionally have to play lobbyist sweet-talker, and I'm constantly researching things like environmental building and the economy and the various companies we're dealing with to make sure they don't go bankrupt without telling us etc, as a way to clear my head.
:P
If I didn't spend so much time dealing with huge piles of text in school I doubt I'd be casually handling 180+ pages of regulations quite so easily.
Dunno if it's an urban legend or whatever, but it's neat regardless.
I got very few assignments I considered bullshit in uni, and none of them were in the science curriculum. We learned far more from research assignments there than from exams, its just the nature of the subject. Its not a waste of time at all.
No, but that's not what they're looking for. No one is looking for a single matching sentence before crying, 'aha! Plagiarist!' because that could be just random coincidence. However, when your entire paper has a very high correlation to one in the database (for example, because you copied a previous work and then changed a word here and there), or you have an entire paragraph that is identical to another paper's, then mere coincidence is a remote probability.
Regardless, the OP's teacher shouldn't have called not-citing-stuff plagiarism. It was simply an example of lazy academic writing. He should have simply been marked down for doing that.
As part of my curriculum, I was a TA for intro-level comp sci classes, and it was ridiculously easy to notice lifted code. I can only imagine it's even easier with essays.
On the other hand, my essays don't form part of my final grade apart from my dissertation next year, and each one is accompanied by an hour-long discussion with a supervisor to ensure that you understand the material, so plagiarism becomes less of a problem - if you don't know your shit, you'll be crucified in the supervision unless you're very lucky.
You'd be amazed at the lack of effort most kids will put into actually concealing their plagiarism, too (especially at the high school level, when I really AM trying to teach them some basic research/synthesizing skills). I got a late paper handed in to me after I'd already handed back graded stuff, that sounded EXTREMELY FAMILIAR to me when I started reading it. Hint: when you may write about ANY bacteria-related topic, don't plagiarize from someone who picked a really obscure subject, and definitely don't plagiarize from the best writer in the class when you're one of the worst.
it's kind of hard to talk to people who don't have a background in this kind of thing, but suffice to say, plagarism and the concept of stealing other people's ideas is about the worst thing you can do in the field and if you do it you're a horrible person.
not citing things IS plagarism, because its' plagarism of ideas. i'm assuming that most of you here understand the concept of citiation, which may be an unearned assumption; if you're writing a paper that's, say, an analysis of the differences between US foregn policy under kennedy and eisenhower, and you say something like "esienhower's method of deterrence was fundamentaly different than kennedy's because of X and Y because Z," and Z was something you read in Kennan's Strategies of Containment, you've done something akin to taking another scientists' data and claiming it as your own.
no one cares if you don't cite somehing like "in 1862 Lincoln came up with the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation" because it's common knowledge. but inferrences and suppositions and original research, which are at the heart of historiography, are personal ideas that must be cited.
edit: a more concrete example is this
i did a group project my last quarter of undergrad that involved conducting research into what happened on Ohio State's campus in 1970 during the riots. during my research i dug up a ton of information, interviewed people who were at the riots, found photographs of the riots that have never been published, wrote a lengthy paper, and helped create a 45 minute presentation. if i were find out that someone had taken the conclusions and information that i had come up with as a result of a lengthy research process and essentially claimed it as their own by not citing me, I'd be furious. that was my work.
if i'm that protective of it, i can't imagine how historians who spend years on researching and writing just one book feel
Hoy hoy.
You're right about how humanities is almost the inverse of science - in History, you tend not to cite facts (unless they're obscure) but nearly always cite opinions, since they're rarely your own.
that's probably the best way to put it.
also, the point of writing history papers generally is to not only demonstrate your knowledge of the material, but also your ability to synthesize that knowledge and come up with your own interpretation of that knowledge (historiography). which is why plagarising ideas is such a big deal.
Accumulated marking experience of my friends and myself can be summarised thusly:
When copying someone else's work then please remember to change to farking name at the top of the file.
When lifting massive sections of text from a textbook and passing it off as your own work with just a 5 line intro/conclusion around it try not to to pick the coursebook written by the man who's going to mark your work.
Finally my personal favourite because it involves awesome detective work. When submitting a file that your friend in a different tutorial group has e-mailed you then make sure it is not both A) incredibly distinctive, showing a level of skill far above your own and
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
We had a guy in one of my first programming classes that very obviously copied from another. He even used the same variable names. I hate cheating, but if you're going to do it, at least put some effort into it.
No word of a lie.
Are there studies on this? My business school was quite vigilant on getting rid of cheaters.
o_O
Man.
We did five pages papers AS tests on a regular basis.
:P
There are I think. I know my school was trying to crack down on this, but I'm going to explain something and some people might be offended: the biggest perpetrators of plagiarism at my business school were the foreign students. Not having the best grasp of the English language and trying to write papers, I can see how it gets frustrating for some and they look for an easier way which involves the ctrl-c combo. I remember being in a presentation group for a senior-level business model analysis class and it my was job to piece together everyone's reports into a single presentation and I began to notice that a lot of stuff that was written by a member of our group from China was actually lifted from the company's website and PR packages. When I mentioned this to someone else in our group, his response was "Yea, man, it's happened before in other classes. This shit happens all the time."
I'm not trying to say that it's only THEM DURN FOREENERS doing it, because there's just as many douche-bag frat boy business majors who pull the same shit, but at my school, most people who were caught for plagiarism were the international students.
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Fun anecdote: One of my teachers caught a plagiarizer who was doing college in hopes of becoming a school principal.