7 ms·
Once in undergrad, I got an email from my professor one day instructing me to meet him in his office with all of my notes and materials for a research paper I h
by anamexis 8y ago
Once in undergrad, I got an email from my professor one day instructing me to meet him in his office with all of my notes and materials for a research paper I had recently turned in.
When I arrived, his first words to me "I think we both know why you're here." I didn't.
He explained that he had run my paper through a plagiarism detector, and it had come back as a 100% match with a paper turned into a university in another state. I was rather dumbfounded because I had researched and written the paper entirely on my own.
We quickly came to an impasse, because he had faith in this rather damning score from the plagiarism detector, and I obviously was quite sure I had in fact written the paper myself.
As I left the office and began gearing up for a battle with the Office of Academic Integrity, I got another email from him profusely apologizing and telling me he had run the paper through the same plagiarism detector again and it had come back clean.
I'm really glad I didn't have to fight that fight, but I got awful close. My theory is that there was some problem during the upload, and it just checked an empty document against another empty document and found they matched exactly, but I'll never know.
- umvi 8y agoOne time in a take home programming interview problem I was asked to create my own quicksort implementation in python. I had already done this previously in answer to a StackOverflow question, so I just submitted a copy of that implementation. Later I was told I was disqualified because I had cheated and copied my answer from StackOverflow. I tried to explain that the user I copied it from was indeed me and that I could prove it by logging into SO in front of them but I never heard back.
- ghaff 8y agoI wrote and published a book through Createspace and Kindle on Amazon a few years ago. I got an email from Amazon that the Kindle book was flagged as containing material from other sources. This was, in fact, the case given that parts of the book drew heavily on blogs I had published in a number of different places. I emailed back that I had the rights to the material and provided a bunch of links. I never heard back but they went ahead and published.
- zaccus 8y agoFFS how many different implementations of quicksort in Python can there possibly be? How would they expect you to make yours unique? Different variable names or something? I'll never understand the concept of plagiarizing long-established solutions to problems.
- jplayer01 8y agoIt's ridiculous. If you're going to require a take home programming test, at least make it something that isn't solved immediately just by opening SO. Ask a cookie cutter question, get a cookie cutter answer.
- kemiller2002 8y agoHonestly, I think I'd be more impressed by the person who got the answer off of SO. At least that person isn't wasting their time trying to solve silly problems that have already been done.
- ghaff 8y agoOr Wikipedia. (OK, you'd have to turn the pseudocode into Python. I'm not even primarily a developer and that would take me about 10 minutes.) Or wherever. There are apparently a few slightly different implementation details to Quicksort but how unique can a Quicksort be?
- msla 8y ago> FFS how many different implementations of quicksort in Python can there possibly be? How would they expect you to make yours unique? Different variable names or something? Not even different variable names, as any plagiarism detector which is halfway-competent would have to ignore them because changing variable names is one of the things any halfway-competent plagiarist would do. The arms race has gone to the point where it's impossible to detect mechanically whether an implementation of a standard algorithm has been plagiarized. It's probably impossible for a human to detect it without other context. And that context comes down to "Has this student shown steady gains or are they suddenly handing in competent code after demonstrating complete incompetence?" which you can't know unless the class is structured such that students show what they know to the graders in person. Which requires a certain student-to-grader ratio. Which is expensive.
- haxton 8y agoWell, that is self plagiarism. Although I don't agree with the question or how that was handled, it is using your previous work without citing that you had previously written it.
- dtech 8y agoAn interview has to show capability, self plagiarism is not relevant there.
- paulcole 8y agoAnything can be considered relevant in an interview -- excepting illegal discrimination.
- ghayes 8y agoI guess the corollary would be a baker asking a potential apprentice to bake a baguette and send a photograph. Sending a photo from your blog of a baguette you cooked a year ago might still be considered disingenuous, even if it shows capability.
- rainonmoon 8y agoWell, no, because a code snippet is the same every time you write it, whereas an apprentice may, even while following the same recipe, produce variations in the result due to the nature of baking.
- ggggtez 8y agoIf you can write the exact same (non-trivial) code twice, that's fairly remarkable.
- Jach 8y agoAlas they'll attempt to justify it by saying they want your capability now, not X years ago. Maybe it's not entirely unjustified -- I have some old mathematical code on github that I don't think I could explain the technical details of without many hours of review, I wouldn't want to be hired to produce more code of that sort without an understanding that ramp up will be needed to return to my previous level. Given something like quicksort, though, I'd just get the feeling of "dance, monkey, dance".
- boringuser1 8y ago"Hey bro I copied your stack overflow answer, I'll give you $100 to access your account so I can "prove" it was my answer"
- empath75 8y agododged a bullet, there.
- thatcat 8y agoI just learned this myself, but apparently if you don't cite yourself as the source of previously published information it's considered self-plagiarism.
- ksaj 8y agoThis is actually a thing. John Fogerty might be an unlucky pioneer. http://mentalfloss.com/article/27501/time-john-fogerty-was-sued-ripping-john-fogerty http://mentalfloss.com/article/27501/time-john-fogerty-was-s...
- cryptonector 8y agohttp://www.ithenticate.com/resources/papers/ethics-of-self-plagiarism http://www.ithenticate.com/resources/papers/ethics-of-self-p... Basically, it's not necessarily OK to plagiarize yourself. Always disclose when you do it.
- pmarreck 8y agoOh man. One of my biggest pet peeves is being accused of something I did not do. I would have probably gotten into trouble for heading back to that guy's office and ripping him a new *hole for presuming I am guilty based on a faulty software tool without first verifying the result manually himself. That's just absolutely ridiculous. I mean... that is a really serious accusation! We trust our systems way too much, when we should first be trusting our own minds, and other people.
- furyofantares 8y agoI had an interview about a decade ago, before doing a massive amount of prep on toy problems became standard for interviews candidates. The first question was to implement itoa, by far the easiest question of the day, and one presumably designed to warm the candidate up while also directing interviewers whether they should even bother with their harder questions. I walked to the whiteboard and just wrote the implementation top to bottom without mistakes, then explained the code. I may have been a little lucky that I didn’t have any missteps, such as briefly forgetting to handle negatives or zero, or not immediately realizing that the first idea that pops into your head for pulling digits off will be a little awkward as you want to fill the string in the reverse order. But I’d never done itoa before so I didn’t think to offer any sort of disclaimer about why this was particularly easy, I was just happy with my performance and ready to do the next question. The interviewers excused themselves and I saw them consulting the person who recommended me down the hall. I was surprised to learn that they were asking if it was possible I’d been supplied a list of interview questions and memorized the answers, to work out whether they even wanted to proceed from there.
- rainonmoon 8y agoThat must've been a pretty excellent feeling. Did you get the job in the end?
- furyofantares 8y agoYep -- still have it, too.
- mooman219 8y agoI nearly had an incident in a MIPS assembly class. There was a fairly basic data structures assignment that I had submitted only to be called into the professor's office being accused of plagiarism. The program used aggregates all submissions over the lifetime of the class and compares them. Because of how basic the assignment was, and how rigid assembly is, there's a baseline ~40% match with all assignments, and mine just happened to hit ~50% and that was grounds for plagiarism. The match was for some submission 6 years prior. At the time I took backups of school projects on save and could replay the history and walk through my design which was enough to convince the professor. There were at least 3 other students roped into this and were probably not as lucky.
- stordoff 8y agoMy university basically did a viva to get around this. They know they can't prevent you from copying the code, but they _can_ make sure you understand it well enough to walk through it and be able to explain why you did things, and ultimately that's more important. They also biased _heavily_ in favour of exams (practicals are essentially something you had to do, but are ungraded), where there is no (reasonable) opportunity for plagiarism.
- hermitdev 8y agoI studied electrical and computer engineering in college. One of the classes was a hardware/software codesign class. There was a graded lab component, i.e. We had to design and build a circuit for the given purpose, hook it up to a bare-bones computer w/ a 68K chip and write assembly to drive the circuit and pass a set of tests. Each lab was typically booked as 2 3-hour sessions (one session per week). I lived off campus, and the commute was about an hour, in good traffic, so I wanted to minimize the number of times I had to go to campus. Unlike the students that lived on campus, I was methodically prepared walking into the first session. I'd probably have spent 6-8 hours on a weekend working on the lab. I was meticulous. I designed the circuit using Visio (obviously can't simulate, but I was concerned with layout), so I had precise diagrams of the circuit. My diagrams matched the layout of the bread board, and my physical implementation was clean (wires were always just as long as they needed to be and never longer). I could take the diagram and literally check off wires as I placed them (and my wiring was clean). I had my 68K assembly written ahead of time and was generally bug-free, though some debugging was needed from time-to-time. I was generally in and out of lab in 15 minutes of what was supposed to be a 6 hour session. After a few rounds of this, my TA suspected I might be cheating and he walked up, ripped out a bunch of random wires from my circuit and told me to fix it. I chuckled, said ok, and I pulled out my design, replaced the wires and checked them all off, plugged it back in and it passed. He was dumbfounded. He sort of had a "Wow, a student that's actually prepared for lab for once" kind of look on his face. He never bothered me again. I think the TA was doubly surprised because I also had a habit of obviously sleeping during lecture, dead center in the front row.
- kgwxd 8y agoIt sounds like that detector didn't reveal the source that was supposedly plagiarized. Who would be dumb enough to rely on the results of such a tool? Is that a common attribute of modern detectors?
- analog31 8y agoRevealing a paper that another student had written, would violate that student's FERPA rights, and potentially lead to abuse. For instance, if you knew that your papers were all going to be gathered in a centralized database, would you share your innermost thoughts about any sensitive topic?
- sib 8y agoIt seems like the existence of these tools implies that all of your papers are "going to be gathered in a centralized database," right? (I'm lucky enough to be old enough that this wasn't an issue. OTOH, we couldn't just Google or search Stack Overflow from source code examples...)
- hermitdev 8y agoWhen I was in college, 1999-2003, they were explicit in that the institute assumed copyright ownership of all class work submitted be it an essay, lab write up, project submission, etc. It was a condition of attending.
- analog31 8y agoYes, but that's about copyright, not FERPA.
- zachrose 8y ago"There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it." Clearly they hadn't read the Zen of Python.
- thatoneuser 8y agoThat's why I'll never accept automated systems for determining things that need a human with context. "We used our black box and it says you're guilty." - what do you do against that? There's nothing to argue and inevitably you'll end up facing some tribunal where a group of people are going to decide your ultimate guilt. What if they use their own black box?