7 ms·

Completely unrelated plagiarism story: Right now is the end of the school year for many schools in the USA. That makes it a time for final exams for many stude

Completely unrelated plagiarism story: Right now is the end of the school year for many schools in the USA. That makes it a time for final exams for many students. This week a student I know prepared for the Literature final by reading through the SparkNotes for the book they had read earlier. Then the student took some SparkNotes practice tests on the book. Then the student showed up to take the actual final exam. The final exam was verbatim the SparksNotes practice test--uncredited.

mdonahoe 4y ago
Another unrelated story: A middle school classmate once turned in an article from Encarta as their essay for Social Studies. They didn’t copy paste the text… they literally printed the article, crossed out “Microsoft Encarta” with a pencil and then wrote their name at the top. I was impressed with how little effort they put in. Teacher gave them an F of course.
- Fomite 4y ago
  I once graded an assignment handed in that still had hotlinks in blue underlined text from copy and pasting.
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    In the 90s, I remember there being a piece of student work pinned to the public display board (this only happened to the best work). It had blue links in it. Either the teacher who marked and choose it had no clue what that meant or had no fucks to give, not sure which.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    We used to rick roll teachers by pretending to copy paste from the internet by writing "Please click here for more information" somewhere in the text. I haven't thought about that in about 15 years and just started laughing to myself about the time my English teacher was struggling to turn the volume off during study hall as Rick Astley sang almost the entire song at full volume.
- cianmm 4y ago
  Thinking back to when I was a student I wonder - do you think your classmate thought they were being funny, or were they legitimately not considering the teacher would notice?
zw123456 4y ago
OK, here is my unrelated plagiarism story... I was in high school waaaayyyy back in 1974, before the internet lads. I was in AP path and one class we had to take was a creative writing class, the assignment was to write a poem. I was completely stumped, so I copied the lyrics off the back of a Rick Wakeman Album (Journey to the center of the earth). The teacher said, "one student handed in the most fantastic work" then said my name asked me to read it in front of the class. I did, a few students caught on, but they did not rat me out because they said they were going to use the same idea themselves on the next assignment. I got an A, but it was a dufus move by a dumb kid. I just don't understand today how anyone can think they could get away with plagiarism with computers and the internet etc.
- icambron 4y ago
  There is an SNL skit about doing this https://youtu.be/EWEX2jXSyFY https://youtu.be/EWEX2jXSyFY
  - zw123456 4y ago
    LOL, never saw that one, hahaha, I am sure I was not the first to do that and not the last :) would never work today with turnitin.com etc.
    - jrootabega 4y ago
      A few of us got away with it in the early 90's reciting Spin Doctors and Metallica lyrics. The trick was to use a deep cut. I don't think the teacher would have even recognized a radio single, but she may have picked up on all our poems being "verse verse chorus verse chorus"!
- mizzao 4y ago
  Oh, they sure as heck are gonna get away with it, see this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/sharplm/status/1524024667576619008 https://twitter.com/sharplm/status/1524024667576619008 Students are going to generate writing they didn't do with GPT-3 And teachers are going to use the discriminator part of a GAN to figure out if students did their own writing
jterrys 4y ago
A lot of uni exams are bullshit because they're drafted by overworked and underpaid TAs and some (particularly undergrad) professors just don't give enough of a shit to really rewrite their exams. I took a class on logistics as part of my major, and our course professor was rotating an exam he had given three years prior, with weirdly dated examples and all.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
In Britain we had a government that wholesale plagiarised works to create the so-called "Dodgy Dossier" - the basis of the case for going to war in Iraq in 2003 [1] In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide. The only thing more disgraceful than plagiarism is the arms-race and racket around "preventing" it with tools like the dubious "Turnitin" - dubious in its effectiveness, treatment of students work, privacy implications and the fact that students are compelled to use it, in most cases without prior formal agreement [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier [2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/anti-turnitin-scholars-call-rethink-tackling-plagiarism https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/anti-turnitin-scho...
- cycomanic 4y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment in particular of turnitin. I'm somewhat surprised by the copying of course notes though, as in my experience many academics take plagiarism extremely seriously, sometimes overzealously so, i.e. not use the same graph in two distinct works which is completely acceptable IMO. > In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide. Did you report it to the university? You should, the academics who do this, should be face consequences and in my experiences plagiarism is one of the few wrongdoings that gets relatively swift action, I suspect because it usually is very clearly unethical conduct.
  - zrobotics 4y ago
    Plus, for course notes that is just extremely lazy. The students who are paying for the course are almost certainly being cheated, if the instructor can't even write their own slides then I doubt the quality of instruction is very great either.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
victor9000 4y ago
I've encountered this twice in my life. The first time it was during a midterm where I studied 100 problems in an obscure topic, and it so happen that the midterm was one such problem. The second was even more ridiculous, it was during a job interview where I googled "XYZ interview questions" for each technology listed in the job description. 95% of my questions were from the top 10 search results lol.
anoncow 4y ago
This happened to me. For my Ophthalmology paper, I reviewed all Multiple Choice Questions given at the end of a popular Ophthalmology text book. All multiple choice questions in the test were lifted verbatim from this section of the text book. I got a very good score on the test.

mdonahoe 4y ago

Another unrelated story: A middle school classmate once turned in an article from Encarta as their essay for Social Studies. They didn’t copy paste the text… they literally printed the article, crossed out “Microsoft Encarta” with a pencil and then wrote their name at the top. I was impressed with how little effort they put in. Teacher gave them an F of course.

Fomite 4y ago
I once graded an assignment handed in that still had hotlinks in blue underlined text from copy and pasting.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  In the 90s, I remember there being a piece of student work pinned to the public display board (this only happened to the best work). It had blue links in it. Either the teacher who marked and choose it had no clue what that meant or had no fucks to give, not sure which.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  We used to rick roll teachers by pretending to copy paste from the internet by writing "Please click here for more information" somewhere in the text. I haven't thought about that in about 15 years and just started laughing to myself about the time my English teacher was struggling to turn the volume off during study hall as Rick Astley sang almost the entire song at full volume.
cianmm 4y ago
Thinking back to when I was a student I wonder - do you think your classmate thought they were being funny, or were they legitimately not considering the teacher would notice?

zw123456 4y ago

OK, here is my unrelated plagiarism story... I was in high school waaaayyyy back in 1974, before the internet lads. I was in AP path and one class we had to take was a creative writing class, the assignment was to write a poem. I was completely stumped, so I copied the lyrics off the back of a Rick Wakeman Album (Journey to the center of the earth). The teacher said, "one student handed in the most fantastic work" then said my name asked me to read it in front of the class. I did, a few students caught on, but they did not rat me out because they said they were going to use the same idea themselves on the next assignment. I got an A, but it was a dufus move by a dumb kid. I just don't understand today how anyone can think they could get away with plagiarism with computers and the internet etc.

icambron 4y ago
There is an SNL skit about doing this https://youtu.be/EWEX2jXSyFY https://youtu.be/EWEX2jXSyFY
- zw123456 4y ago
  LOL, never saw that one, hahaha, I am sure I was not the first to do that and not the last :) would never work today with turnitin.com etc.
  - jrootabega 4y ago
    A few of us got away with it in the early 90's reciting Spin Doctors and Metallica lyrics. The trick was to use a deep cut. I don't think the teacher would have even recognized a radio single, but she may have picked up on all our poems being "verse verse chorus verse chorus"!
mizzao 4y ago
Oh, they sure as heck are gonna get away with it, see this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/sharplm/status/1524024667576619008 https://twitter.com/sharplm/status/1524024667576619008 Students are going to generate writing they didn't do with GPT-3 And teachers are going to use the discriminator part of a GAN to figure out if students did their own writing

jterrys 4y ago

A lot of uni exams are bullshit because they're drafted by overworked and underpaid TAs and some (particularly undergrad) professors just don't give enough of a shit to really rewrite their exams. I took a class on logistics as part of my major, and our course professor was rotating an exam he had given three years prior, with weirdly dated examples and all.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

In Britain we had a government that wholesale plagiarised works to create the so-called "Dodgy Dossier" - the basis of the case for going to war in Iraq in 2003 [1] In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide. The only thing more disgraceful than plagiarism is the arms-race and racket around "preventing" it with tools like the dubious "Turnitin" - dubious in its effectiveness, treatment of students work, privacy implications and the fact that students are compelled to use it, in most cases without prior formal agreement [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier [2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/anti-turnitin-scholars-call-rethink-tackling-plagiarism https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/anti-turnitin-scho...

cycomanic 4y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment in particular of turnitin. I'm somewhat surprised by the copying of course notes though, as in my experience many academics take plagiarism extremely seriously, sometimes overzealously so, i.e. not use the same graph in two distinct works which is completely acceptable IMO. > In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide. Did you report it to the university? You should, the academics who do this, should be face consequences and in my experiences plagiarism is one of the few wrongdoings that gets relatively swift action, I suspect because it usually is very clearly unethical conduct.
- zrobotics 4y ago
  Plus, for course notes that is just extremely lazy. The students who are paying for the course are almost certainly being cheated, if the instructor can't even write their own slides then I doubt the quality of instruction is very great either.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago

victor9000 4y ago

I've encountered this twice in my life. The first time it was during a midterm where I studied 100 problems in an obscure topic, and it so happen that the midterm was one such problem. The second was even more ridiculous, it was during a job interview where I googled "XYZ interview questions" for each technology listed in the job description. 95% of my questions were from the top 10 search results lol.

anoncow 4y ago

This happened to me. For my Ophthalmology paper, I reviewed all Multiple Choice Questions given at the end of a popular Ophthalmology text book. All multiple choice questions in the test were lifted verbatim from this section of the text book. I got a very good score on the test.