I just submitted my last set of grades for the semester. This is always a big weight off my shoulders, but since it will be the last set of grades I ever submit at the University at Buffalo, it is an even greater relief. And so I think it’s time for me to “give back” as the kids say.
I had a 24 hour take home (distance course, so “keep home”?) final exam. Students had to submit it in text–and most submitted it in Word. In the exam, I noted that “I expect everyone to behave honorably,” and noted that receiving assistance from others or plagiarizing work was a bad idea.
I would prefer that students don’t cheat. Yes, they really are mostly cheating themselves, so fine. But it also reflects poorly on the community. Rationally or not, what particularly irks me is that it is disrespectful: of me, of their fellow students, of the university, of the institution of learning, and of themselves. And–did I mention–of me? It is particularly irksome when their cheating implies (reminds?) that I am a fool.
So, to help students across the country cheat better, saving themselves both from easy detection and from incurring the wrath of insulted faculty, and leading to a much more harmonious school environment, I offer the following tips, based on recent experience:
1. Don’t cheat off family.
If you are in a class of several hundred people, and you share an unusual family name with another student in the class, it is best if your reply to an open ended short-answer question is not identical, word-for-word. This is particularly true when the answer is wrong, and when it is wrong in an idiosyncratic way. Many profs, as I do, grade “blind,” without reference to the names of the students, but still, it’s easy enough when you find something like this to track back to the names. My suggestion, in this case, is to continue to cut and paste the answer, but to legally change your name. A convenience marriage may do the trick.
2. Don’t talk British.
The only people allowed to use the word “colour” are those with Indian surnames. “Weight,” you may argue, “I was bourne and razed in the english countryside.” I have no doubt, but your Commonwealth heritage is not easily detectable by your surname, so I’m afraid you will need to switch to Amerkin spelling for work in my classes. (If you are Indian, but your surname has suffered from various Colonial incursions, I’m afraid you’ll have to lose the U’s as well.) Otherwise, fair or not, it somehow appears that you have copied your work from another author.
3. You Google, I Google
How do you think I check suspicious work? It’s not like our state university is shelling out for TurnItIn. I am pretty good with that Google thingy. And changing two words won’t send me off the trail. So copy from something a bit more obscure. Or–and this is really tricky–try making up your own stuff.
4. Dont rite to good
When you “write” a sentence like “The veil of ignorance, to mention one prominent feature of that position, has no specific metaphysical implications concerning the nature of the self; it does not imply that the self is ontologically prior to the facts about persons that the parties are excluded from knowing,” you have two ways of being caught up. First, while I make no claim of having anything approaching an eidetic memory (more like an idyllic memory), it may ring some dusty bells and heck, I might be able to pull the book you stole it from down off my shelf, even if you followed the advice of #3. If my memory fails to serve, as is frequently the case these days, Google Print might help out.
The second way you can trip up is by following this with your original words, which tend to be less sophisticated, or equally sophisticated material from an entirely different source that simply does not seem to make sense in this particular context.
As a corollary here, try not to plagiarize the teacher. You will be less likely to suffer her ire, since it will amuse her and her colleagues to no end, but you are more likely to be caught. Steal her ideas and rephrase them in your own prose, because there is nothing teachers like more than knowing that students can write well but have no original ideas.
5. Malaprop big words
Make sure you pick a word that sounds impervious and use it incorrigibly, or inventorate words. We’ll be udderly convinced of your genuinity (not to mention your precedential potential). Snuff said.
6. Use the word “rediculous.”
This almost magical word will cause any instructor to instantaneously turn off all internal plagiarism detection.
7. Borrow from someone who writes as badly as you do.
Don’t do what one of my graduate students did, and steal a text on Korean feminism from someone who wrote slightly better English than he did. I’ll notice the slightly better writing, even before I notice that you have expressed no interest in or knowledge of feminist perspectives in the past. (Once kicked out of our program, he applied to the English department. No kidding.)
8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text
This is my Number 1 piece of advice, even if it is numbered eight. When you copy things from the web into Word, ignoring #3 above, don’t just “Edit > Paste” it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on. This seems to happen in about 1% of student work turned in, and periodically makes me feel like becoming a hermit.
If you follow these simple rules, you are almost guaranteed to pass off your plagiarism and cheating as your own work. This will allow the faculty to remain in blissful ignorance, believing that–despite the low pay–they are spreading knowledge in the world, while at the same time convincing your parents to continue to pay for several more years of school, drunken orgies, and Prada bags. Your classmates who do not follow the above rules will constitute the “low hanging fruit,” easily picked off and tormented by mean-spirited unfulfilled teachers for their own amusement. You, however, will rise above the fray, secure in your superious ability to act smart, even if you don’t understand the text you are passing off as your own.
And what if you follow all eight points and still get caught? Here’s your “get out of jail free” card. Simply say this to your teacher (no, no one has tried these exact words on me yet), and you are off scot free:
“Like a postmodern version of Searle’s Chinese Room, I am able to re-articulate existing knowledge through my command of its (re)presentation and manipulation. Any claim to originality ignores what I like to call our ability to stand on the shoulders of giants. By this, I mean that there is a well-known correlation between book sales and height, and we should use their height to our own advantage, to avoid mud and small dogs.
“Also, is it really all that original to give me an F? After all, I’ve already received an F from two other profs this semester alone. Be an original: give me a C.
“By the way, I don’t know who this ‘John Rawls’ guy is–is he even in our major?–but I think it’s possible he cheated off me.
“Finally, and I think this is most vital, my plagiarism in this case is a clear indictment of the educational system. After all, I’ve been failed by my high school and by three years of university, while continually passing. I don’t think it can be entirely my fault if I’ve gotten this far by plagiarism, and in this, my last class, you decide that it is somehow ‘wrong.’ Clearly, you should use this outcome as a way of evaluating your own teaching and expectations.”
You have my permission to use the above excuses, verbatim and without attribution, in any discussion with your respected faculty. I don’t guarantee their success, but would be happy to hear from any of you who employ them as to their efficacy.
Update (6/16): Be sure to read the huge number of comments below, because they have some top-notch cheating tips. Also, a few have asked whether they can reprint, borrow this in some way. It got lost with my last blog redesign, but everything here that is original is Creative Commons licensed for non-commercial, attributed use. So have at it, just don’t say you wrote it… and don’t turn it in for a grade!
233 Comments
There is a simple and easy solution to this problem. DON’T CHEAT. If you don’t cheat in the first place it will be easier in the long run because you will actually know your stuff and if the professor decides to have a ‘random’ chat with you about your progress in the course you will be able to amaze him or her with your understanding of the subject. And study is not that hard all you have to do is set aside 2 hours (lectures & tutorials count towards this) per subject unit per day. If you are an average student you will be doing about 4 units per semester and this will work out to 8 hours a day which is no more than a fulltime job. This should leave you 8 hours in the day to go out and have fun and have 8 hours sleep.
Someone once applied for a job at an architecture firm I worked for and used my work in their portfolio. Ooops.
Reply to #189:
I disagree that you can “grad[e] higher for ideas that attract [you]“. If you do anything other than grading based on the content of the work itself, ignoring your own feelings, you’re doing a disservice to the concept of standardized grades. Your prejudice against an uninteresting topic could cost your student a grade they’d have gotten with another teacher, causing them to be rated incorrectly. If grades are to have any meaning, and at this point your industry offers us nothing else to grade it on, then they must be impartial.
Whatever you want the world to be like, currently your whim on marking an essay or your lax/eager eye for plagiarism (perhaps real, perhaps not) is more important to that student’s future than anything you teach them. Nobody is every going to ask them for the economic motivations of Napolean, or to square a circle, but people will look at their grades for everything they do for the next ten years, perhaps longer.
However, that is only part of my point. I feel that the entire system of higher education, that I’ve seen, is nigh unto useless and that this “OMG Cheating!!!” attitude is just another attempt to redirect this on the students. This is just another of the student-hating policies. Mandatory textbooks, increasingly with a user-locked CD included so that nobody can buy the used book. Ownership of student-created intellectual property, both copyright and patent. Censorship of students off-campus lives (Facebook, etc). What should rightly (by cashflow) be seen as a customer relationship is instead closer to indentured servitude at worst (grad students) or merely an Orwellian customer experience.
While I agree about cheaters, etc, etc, I find myself less annoyed by the concept of an overwhelmed teenager cheating on an essay than an entire industry based on perpetuating that fear of somehow annoying the teaching gods and being thrown down to dispense freedom fries for the rest of their life.
Cheating on a test is no more, or less, dishonest that lying on an immigration form to gain refuge status, lying about your bedroom practices in prudish states, or your religion to a census taker. Should you be disqualified from teaching for life if I could find a lie on your taxes, or an expert level question in your field that you couldn’t answer under pressure?
WNight: I don’t have an answer for you. If you honestly think that lying on your taxes or on a legal form for personal gain is an acceptable practice, and you do not respect the law or social norms, I’m not going to be able to convince you that cheating in your educational life is any more despicable. I suspect you would be just as willing to rob someone or steal their car. Again, if you have no ethical baseline, then I don’t have much to appeal to.
Students are not customers. Customers are always right. Students are not, and it is not our responsibility to pretend that they are.
That’s a strawman. I didn’t say there was nothing wrong with, just that I didn’t seeany reason that students should get kicked out of school with no compensation, etc. It’s not that serious of a crime.
As for customers, I think you should look at who pays your wages. Refund tuition and you’ll have a moral right to do whatever crazy grading strikes your fancy.
I’d suggest though, that you are really missing the point. Students ARE the customer. They pay tuition. You aren’t serving them well in your role as a teacher because you aren’t even following consistent grading practices.
Of course, my differing opinion is a lack of ethical baseline – I might even be a terrorist. Go catch a cheater, make the world safe for ivory tower accamedia.
My experience this semester helping out with the labs for a Computer Science module suggests to me this hot cheating tip:
If you come to the labs every week claiming not to understand the question, don’t turn up one day with a nearly-complete solution which you ask for help with, because I will be wondering where you got it from. In this situation it is particularly advisable not to claim that you wrote the code when you have just claimed that you don’t understand it.
And yes, that applies even if it is written in Perl. You might think it looks like line noise, but it’s my second language.
I couldn’t agree more about impartial grading. Though I cringe at the thought of a customer model for education (It is not akin to shopping at Pep Boys or hiring a DJ), I do beleive that our personal feelings on topics should have NO BEARING on the marks we receive. If a teacher cannot seperate themselves from their biases long enough to recognize a well-reasoned (If wrong) argument, how can we trust them to do research, or to present a balanced view to our students?
As an example, I was aware of a graduate student who admitted that she graded papers based on her feelings on the subject. “The student should know better then to attack adoption as a practice knowing that I was adopted.” I was dumbfounded. One of the basic fictions about science is that an objective truth can be reached, but it is something we should at least TRY for.
One thing the Greeks tried to impress upon us was that LOGIC does not need to be TRUE. If you claim to have some tiny sliver of Truth (capital T), fine, but that has no bearing on a well-written paper.
I have, in the past, argued for the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the benefits of Fascism, Caste, and Creationism, as well as a hundred more “Devil’s Advocate” positions and nothing is more of a “sin” against claiming to be educated than failing someone because their arguments provoke a visceral reponse.
However, students may not be Right. But they may also not be Wrong, no matter what our education and experience tell us. Galileo had to admit he was “Wrong.” Look for quality of work, not quality of person (You are being paid to judge the former, not the latter).
And because I should mention cheating in response to this Blog. I beleive in the 11th Commandment. If you are smart enough not to get caught, you deserve to get away with it. If I notice and call you on it, it’s too late.
B.W.: Not sure who you are agreeing with there, but I agree with you! I am actually pretty proud of the fact that students can’t gauge my personal political position, despite the fact that I teach classes on controversial issues (free speech, pornography, surveillance, etc.). At least that is true at the undergraduate level. I think at the grad level I let my guard down a bit because it is useful to start from an argumentative position (even if it doesn’t happen to be your own).
That said, I have a feeling I am the exception to the rule. I think that’s why students comment on it. I hate to admit it, but it is hard being a conservative student in a university, particularly if you are not very articulate in your position. It’s sad that more faculty don’t take your approach, because I fear that many students graduate not knowing the difference between a good argument, and an opinion they happen to agree with.
I don’t want to miss the spirit of concilliation, so I’ll jump in here and agree, and offer a shake over my harsh words.
I’ve been a participant in school more recently, I’ll wager, than you, Alex, and I see these things in the context of the whole system. Administrators act as if they own students, their information, their work, and their private lives. They are a captive market which exists to be fleeced. Mandatory copy-protected textbooks and bans from out-of-school activities like Facebook are just the latest chapters in this. With this blatant disregard for their customers fully in your mind, re-examine the structure of school, especially as the door to all higher career choices. What might seem like quirky policies – grading curves, biases, restrictive NDAs and ownership of work that we normally say “well, go elsewhere” about in a job environment. It’s different with schools as there really is no practical alternative for many careers paths that all, for artificial reasons, start here.
Schools advertise, with the same agencies and tactics as DeBeers and Walmart, to tell the world that they are *the* gateway to higher knowledge, such that it is difficult to succeed in the world without “papers”. I think that this obliges them to be useful – provide an education to a customer, treat them like a partner and prepare them for real work, instead of treating them like child prisoners.
I know you see this from the inside, and see it charitably, or not terrible at worst, but I ask you to look at this from the other side. Students just see this as arbitrary and overpunished. You see this as sending a message, students see it as the accedemic death penalty for a first offence. What are laughable events for you and co-workers, are life destroying ones for those caught in them. Everyone makes mistakes, accademic institutions are for overstepping their bounds in punishing people.
Please consider this viewpoint and consider asking for advance copies of papers. When you see blatant cheating, red-pen it and say “Don’t forget to mark this as a quotation until you rewrite it, that way you don’t accidently plagarize”. This way a misguided hotheaded move to cheat gets turned into constructive criticism, and the student at least can get marks (albeit low) for doing research and presenting snippets, even if they didn’t rewrite them, as long as they claim it honestly. An essay consisting entirely of quotes is legal, though it may be derivative and score low. A simple viewpoint shift here to students as customers and partners could save everyone a lot of trauma, but it wouldn’t look at funny on Boing Boing.
Friends?
WNight: In the spirit offered… :) If you go back over this blog, you will find that I am not as sanguine as it might seem about just the sorts of things you have listed. I find the textbook industry extraordinarily exploitative (and have posted on the ways it is several times). Luckily, none of the schools at which I have worked have exerted claim on faculty or student IP, but I realize that this is a creeping problem as well, particularly in the sciences. I find the university system depressingly ineffective overall, and most students are just going through the motions, as are most faculty.
However, I see the move to treating students as customers to be core to encouraging this sort of behavior. My previous university–and no doubt my new university–advertise heavily and look at how to improve their rankings, etc. We’ve had administrators encourage us not to fail failing students because we want to keep our numbers (and tuition dollars) up.
The trick is, when students treat themselves like customers, I begin to think of myself as an employee, not a teacher. And frankly, if I were merely an employee, I wouldn’t work nearly as hard as I do. Other faculty do treat their jobs this way, and those are the faculty that have canned lectures from 20 years ago and force students to buy their overpriced, poor textbook. I don’t want to give in to the trend in higher ed, and say that students are customers, and I’m going to just do my job. If it were about the money for me, I wouldn’t be teaching–I’ve been offered jobs that pay nearly twice as much in the “real world.” It’s about helping students become more knowledgeable for me, and while the university system is deeply flawed, it remains the best place to find people who are interested in learning.
Your warning is perfectly reasonable if, and only if, I’m actually teaching a student something. If students unknowingly plagiarize, I don’t toss them out of the class. (It remains distressing when US students get through all of high school and much of college and still don’t know how to cite properly, but that is not entirely their fault.) But when students knowingly cheat, they waste my time, and suffer the consequences. I wasn’t hired to correct essays by Wikipedians, and since they’ll never see the corrections, it is wasted time for me.
This really isn’t all that different from a customer arrangement. I worked retail, and I can be ridiculously patient with a customer that is indecisive, chatty, even just plain crazy. But if you are shoplifting, I’m not going to treat you politely, because you have decided to violate our social contract.
As a personal pat on the back, I recently taught a class on Narratives and was approached afterwards by a few students who said, ‘We weren’t sure what position you had. You started out with jokes and arguments about one side, then the other, then you argued from a third position. What *do* you beleive?’ My response, of course, was ‘That you should include your thoughts in your paper, not mine.’
If you think it is hard to be conservative, try being a Centrist. Then you are obviously on “The other side” no matter who you are talking to.
I wonder if we cant create a mass-scale “Apprenticeship” model for teaching as opposed to a customer or pedagogue model. It is obvious people do not see teachers for what they are, and instead see them as employees. It would require a shift in mindset of givernment, parents, and teachers… in other words, probably isnt going to happen.
My favorite is when students turned in last semester/year’s assignments without realizing that they’d been changed this year. Then they have the gall to question the 0 that they were given for the assignment. And I liked looking at last date modified, and finding out that it had been written while the student was still in high school. Yeah, that one was clever.
Or students turning in electronic copies of assignments that had other people’s names on it. If you’re going to hand something in, at least open it up and look at what you’re handing in. Those ones made me sit back and wonder what I was doing this for…
To add my two cents to the idea that students are “customers” and therefore should be handled as such, I must agree with Admin of June 29th. I don’t get paid any differently whether I have 10 students in a single class (like in this summer term) or when I have 36 students in a single class (as I have had many times in the past). I don’t want students to feel that their tuition is wasted, but they aren’t paying ME. Since I teach ESL for college-bound international students, I put my effort into giving them the tools they need to succeed in later classes. They insult my intelligence by cheating and thinking I won’t catch them, but the only people they truly cheat are themselves. If they can’t learn to read, think, interpret, and express themselves, sooner or later (and it usually IS sooner), they will be tripped up by a real-world situation which actually demands that they know not just information but how to use it.
My college likes to puff itself up and brag about its supposed overall excellence, but in truth the administration is not anywhere near as interested in student success and achievement as it is in student tuition payments. The instructors, however, are just the opposite. Our pay is not tied to the enrollment, we have a limited ability to affect curriculum, and none of us will ever get rich at our jobs. I can’t overrule district-wide administrative decisions like the institution of expensive mandatory language lab classes, and I can’t even get my supervisor to trim our required list of textbooks . I have plenty of useful, updated materials without them, but that’s too nebulous for the admin because all sections of the same courses are supposed to be completely standardized. Everybody knows that two different instructors can teach the same course in totally different ways with totally different levels of competence, but of course you can’t say that openly, especially if you’re a student advisor .
All I can do is tell the students not to pay for books I have no intention of using, come to class, and I will give them as much as I can of what I know they need to succeed in the class above mine. Those “teachers” who rely on ten-year-old lectures, poorly written textbooks, and outdated methodology deserve students who try to weasel their way out of doing real thinking and real learning. Those of us who pour all our efforts into giving students the necessary skills to make it in the academic and real worlds deserve students who put at least a moderate effort into trying to improve. I don’t cheat my students out of the education they allegedly want—why should I tolerate them cheating me out of the effort I clearly require?
Re the spelling (UK vs US); I agree with the blog-writer’s requirement that his students use US spelling: when in Rome, as they say.
One cultural specific spelling isn’t more correct than the other, but certainly, if we’re teaching our students to join an academic community (which they seem to have signed up to join when they registered as students), we have some responsibility to teach them the mores of that community. These mores include more than just MLA vs APA and computer-generated vs handwritten docs, but also the academic community-based expectations of culture-specific punctuation (commas are differently placed in the UK) and spellings (color vs colour etc).
I’m originally from the UK, and I came over to attend a US university with every expectation that I would have to learn quickly US spelling and punctuation. I would have been amazed had my college instructors accepted UK spelling in a US classroom. Code-switching, as the blog-writer notes, plays a huge part in assimiliating into a community–and that assimiliation is what I assume my students are trying to do since they are sitting in my English class in a US university.
I ask all my students, even those who come from UK spelling countries, to use US spelling; I think it’s important to use the code appropriate to the community to which you’re trying to belong.
AJ
My Masters thesis (on Shakespeare) was failed the first time I submitted it – partly because it wasn’t very good, but partly, I later realised, because there may have been a suspicion that I’d plagiarised part of it. My tutor was very subtle, and merely suggested that I should have made reference to a particular book, which he had recommended but which I hadn’t got round to reading.
When I did read it, I found to my horror that one chapter followed a very similar line of argument to one that I had used, and used the same quotes from a particular play to illustrate it. I can’t remember ever feeling so sick.
Of course, I altered my thesis (in this and many other ways) and attributed the ideas to the writer of the book. Even now I’m not sure whether I had in fact seen the book – or an extract from it – some time earlier, and only thought I was having original ideas about the play. I have a parrot-like memory for gobbets of text, though I don’t always know where my quotations come from, so it is possible. But if so I never intended to do it. I’m very grateful that my tutor didn’t make an outright accusation.
On the other side of the coin, I have seen French schoolchildren trying to pass off pasted chunks of English-language websites as an English homework submission – the best exemplars of rule 7 I’ve ever seen. The kids wouldn’t have been tell me the meaning of all of the English words, let alone write it in the first place. (Also, more than one of them picked the same website.)
I understood what you originally meant about spelling, and I don’t think that British English is superior (and I’m British). Mind you, as an undergraduate I had a tutor who used to correct the spelling in quotations, which I think is going a little too far in the name of consistency: I don’t spell “waggon” with a double g, but if George Eliot did, I’m not going to change it…
*the kids wouldn’t have been _able to_ tell me…*
Sorry.
Is anybody here?
My mother, an English professor, once received a paper which began, “To those of us who knew William Faulkner…”
It’s important that the penalty for cheating be significantly more than simply not turning in the assignment. Otherwise, there’s an incentive to cheat. And when students are customers, they want to be sure of getting a degree from a *respectable* university/college, so the penalty isn’t because the teachers/graders are fascist rule-followers with not concept of the new paradigms the come with the internet, the penalty is because the students to *paid* and then *did the work* deserve something other than “Oh, you got your degree at Plagiarism U., well, that’s nice, but a flatworm could get a degree there, bye!” when they go looking for a job, or a grad school.
Cheating isn’t a victimless crime. It’s destroying the value of a degree for all those students who aren’t cheating.
Nice :) I agree this you.
As a student, I understand the desire to cheat, thereby quickly completing the essay/paper/test. Also, as a student who has successfully passed under the radar, cheating, and doing it well, takes about as much time as doing the assignment itself. If you actually read the articles you are plagiarizing and understand the material, then there is no harm done, except saving yourself some time. When, cheating correct the cheated material, so it contains only terminology you know, and is written in your style. In essence, edit the paper so it “sounds” like you. I don’t understand what English teachers call “voice” and thereby can instinctively tell if you are cheating, but I do know that one has caught me cheating. I am an A student without copying others, so when I cheat, I don’t need to “dumb it down.” If you’re a C student, you Must make the work “sound” like C quality work, something you could write. Also, never use the popular search engines, that’s where the teachers go to check for plagiarism. Go to a little known engine, search, find something you like reading, and then enter the first sentence into Google, MSN, and Yahoo. If that article is on the first page or so, don’t use that article. Most teachers won’t look after the first page. Also, if you can register to a paid, private service that provides journals, essays, and research papers, then you are not as likely to be caught as if you used a free essay. Just some tips. I could go on at length, but I think the profs that replied would leave hate mail at my doorstep. They don’t want students to learn how to really succeed at cheating.
Oh, once, in middle school, I had no time to write a English paper, having been busy the entire month with other extracurricular activities. So I found an excellent paper online, and quoted the entire thing. Right down to the Worked Cited. Technically, I had done nothing wrong, because on my own Worked Cited, I cited, in proper MLA format, where the paper had come from. Anyway, the teacher found it hysterical, but requested that I rewrite it, “with less quotes.” She gave a week to get the rewrite done, and I did so in good humor, having gotten the time extension I wanted. I got a B on the paper I wrote, for it being late.
I believe, that as college students, we are paying you and are the consumer. It is your job to make your subject matter engaging and understandable, so that most students have no desire to cheat, except for the incredibly lazy/stupid ones that truly do not care. Even if you just threaten to send our papers through a plagiarism machine, we probably won’t cheat, for fear of getting caught.
As an American child, I used to enjoy taking on a British manner. I liked using the ‘u’ in colour and honourable. I found it way cool. So I read a lot of British literature, so I could write like the Brits do. I don’t think changing code is that big a deal, and isn’t a surefire way of detecting cheating.
Wow. I thought I was the only one with REALLY STUPID students.
I was at UB myself, but I doubt we ever crossed paths: I was a pharmacy student, and did my pre-pharmacy studies at CUNY/Brooklyn.
I remember when I was taking Economics 10.1, which was the first course in Brooklyn’s idiosyncratic numbering system. This wasn’t required by my major (which was Chemistry at the time), but would have been required by the pharmacy program at a different pharmacy school (which I didn’t wind up attending, as it happened).
I think this was the first course the Business majors took right out of high school, and the only class I’d ever taken where I felt like I was back there. The professor couldn’t control the class, although he shouldn’t have had to in a college-level course, and there was much conversation going on around me. Every ten minutes or so, he’d say “Uh, can we have a little quiet here?’, and it would be quiet for maybe a minute, then the talking started back up. Not even whispering, talking at normal conversational volume. I think I must have been the only one paying attention, even though I hated economics, and still do. (Got an A in the class anyhow.)
Came exam time, and suddenly I had twenty new-found friends. I sat down, and all the students who had been aimlessly milling about in the back sat down around me. I got up and moved across the lecture hall, and they all rose and followed me. Come on, guys, at least try and make it less blatant? I wound up covering my answer sheet with a blank paper and writing with my hand underneath it. One guy behind me then had the chutzpah to offer me $20 to uncover the paper! I told him how he could fold the 20 and where he could subsequently insert it. (Well, OK, not really, I just told him to get lost.)
He said, “Come on, man, please help me out! I really need to pass this class!” I responded, “Well, you should’ve studied then, shouldn’t you’.
By my last exam in that class, I was so P.O.’d at the cheating that I wrote my (multiple choice) answers in Hebrew characters, and then gave the professor (who I don’t think could read Hebrew) a key: aleph=A, beis=B, etc.
(Come to think of it, in elementary school, I once wrote an exam in invisible ink, then gave the decoder pen to my teacher. He wasn’t best pleased by this. I wish I’d remembered that one in college.)
I have to wonder. I never saw such outright copying in any other class I took, nor such disrespect for the teacher. The science majors who I hung out with (out with whom I hung?) weren’t like this, nor the math majors in my sister’s classes, nor the pharmacy students at UB. Was this deliberate, as a way to prepare them for what passes for ethics in the business world?
how i make cheats
Above all, do not select a professor that uses Turnitin.com what ever you do!!!
A. Yes that is my real name.
B. Why at the top of the page people are complaining about the writing in british thing?
Hi! Alex – I am your student from the Informatics Class of 2003. Yes, I remember that you actually informed our class that you use turnitin.com and we shouldnt bother plagerizing! It was one of the best classes I ever took.
I just gave a student a zero because about 15% of his paper had come from Wikipedia. He asked why he failed the essay assignment. I told him that it was because he plagiarised. He asked me to explain. I showed him the Turnitin report and the word-for-word passages cut and pasted directly from Wikipedia. I pointed out that they were not placed in quotes. I showed him that Wikipedia wasn’t in the references list. He said, “So basically what you’re saying is that it’s a referencing problem. I think it’s pretty harsh that you’re just failing me for a referencing problem.”
yeah… if that worked for the Los Angeles School District, I’m sure there’s more coming this way.
I assume that this form of cheating only applies to writing papers, which goes for only so far in secondary education.
Oh, boy.
Blatant plagiarism is bad enough for the student involved, but it trickles down to the rest of us. I had a 4.0, was in the honors program for English, LAH honors, and was a double-major in Latin. For this one class, I had turned in two previous papers and gotten A’s with glowing comments on both. I turned in my third paper and the teacher accused me of cheating because it was “too polished”. To be fair, I don’t think he thought I copied so much as I had written it before or something, but it was extremely upsetting. Even worse, he didn’t accuse me officially so I couldn’t really file a complaint or anything–but he severely damaged my credibility with the other professors in the department, and I had to write my thesis the next year. So yeah, it’s not only dishonest, but it hurts the rest of us who actually work on our papers, too.
On a lighter note, I work at the writing center at my college and there are tons of rules about what we can/can’t do to avoid any hints of “collusion”. Quite often I’ll have ESL kids come in who don’t cite–not because they are trying to actively cheat, but the Western system of citing everything isn’t what they were taught. I usually gently remind them that they need to cite their sources. Then we get native speakers who come in and have paragraphs like: “The dichotomy between the natural world and the mechanical one creates an underlying tension throughout the novel. These are good. I think the natural world is better.”
Um, pretty obvious. I have no authority to report cheating, so I usually point it out and say, “Oh, so what were you trying to say here?” and wait while they hem and haw their way through an explanation… If I notice it, trust me, your teacher is going to notice it.
Anyway, lovely article–when I’m a professor, I’m so putting a copy of this up somewhere!
I’ve never even had the faintest temptation to cheat, but that didn’t stop me from being accused of it late in my first year of college. According to my friends, my response was priceless: a look of pure offended horror, followed by a “Why would I copy other people’s work?” Turned out my language really kicks up a gear when I go from writing-essays-in-class to writing-assignments-with-full-reading-and-referencing, so it suddenly looked very different, and the teacher (unlike those I’d had in school) didn’t recognise it as my style. C’est la vie, I suppose.
However, our college had worked out an easy way of finding out whether the student knew what they were talking about. Get them to talk about it, with no notes, for five minutes or so. It soon becomes very apparent who’s done the work and who hasn’t.
Not plagiarism: but a freshman lab student once wrote “I have improved the measured results, so as to fit better with theory”. I just wrote “please do not do such things again” in thick red pen in his lab book.
Fuck you hoe. i will plagerize till the day i fuckin die… or at least till i get my agree. you fuckin professors waisting my money giving me shitty classes that aint got shit to do with my major anyway. fuck english, i’m a business major.
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[...] Alex Halavais – sadly no longer of the University at Buffalo and who, though he is the kind soul who runs schoolof.info, I have never had a chance to meet – offers some suggestion on “How to cheat good.” The top tip, though not the penultimate tip in a list of only 8, for those students who are just not feeling the whole work thing: 8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text This is my Number 1 piece of advice, even if it is numbered eight. When you copy things from the web into Word, ignoring #3 above, don’t just “Edit > Paste” it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on. This seems to happen in about 1% of student work turned in, and periodically makes me feel like becoming a hermit. [Halavais] [...]
[...] Blog scholar Alex Halavais recently wrote an entertaining blog post about his experience of cheaters – how to cheat good – culminating in this gem: When you copy things from the web into Word… don’t just ‘Edit > Paste’ it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on. [...]
[...] [via Media@LSE] Alex Halavais hat einige Ratschläge an Studenten zusammengefasst, wie man in Seminar- oder Abschlußarbeiten plagiieren (?) kann, ohne dass es auffällt. Eine sehr schöne Liste, die auf tatsächlichen Täuschungsversuchen beruht und bei der man sich bei allen Punkten an den Kopf fasst, wie doof manche Leute sein können… Make sure you pick a word that sounds impervious and use it incorrigibly, or inventorate words. We’ll be udderly convinced of your genuinity (not to mention your precedential potential) [...]
[...] The media blog of LSE has an interesting link to a post by Alex Halavais – how to cheat good. They quote Halavais – When you copy things from the web into Word… don’t just ‘Edit > Paste’ it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on. [...]
Cheating on Tests…
“How to Cheat Good.” Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text This is my Number 1 piece of advice, even if it is numbered eight. When you copy things from the web into Word, ignoring #3 above, don’t just “Edit……
Cheating…
Many of the worst cases of plagiarism are executed so poorly that they reveal the incompetence, ignorance and stupidity of the writer. So perhaps teachers should just fail such students for incompetence and ignorance, instead of trying to convict them …
Identity Differentiation…
It is not unusual for decisions of trust to make a distinction between different identities of the same person. Let’s say I have a friend called John. JOHN-SOBER and JOHN-DRUNK are two different identities, with recognizably different patterns of beha…
[...] A teacher’s 10 point guide to cheating better. 8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text [...]
[...] Most recently, I got a lot of hits and comments on my post about How to Cheat Good, due in large part to nods from bloggers with serious followings: Michael Froomkin and Bruce Schneier. Thanks to the search terms people use, a lot of folks end up at an entry on Really Sexy Sindication or, strangely, How to Build a Raft. [...]
How to cheat good…
Eine Professorin aus Amiland geht in Rente und gibt Tips zum schummeln:
And so I think it?s time for me to ?give back? as the kids say.
Alex Halavais » How to cheat good
6. Use the word rediculous.
This almost magical word will cause any i…
A Guide to Plagiarism!…
And best of all, it is written by a former prof!! Read on….
[...] How to cheat good [...]
[...] Full story… (via BoingBoing) Filed under: humor | My friend was forced into an arranged marriage and I think she is being held somewhere against her will. I need help, so I started a new blog. Seriously. [...]
[...] Filed under: Random No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack Leave acomment [...]
[...] How to cheat good. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. RSS 2.0 [...]
[...] Alex Halavais » How to cheat good [...]
[...] I thought this collection of tongue-in-cheek guides to successfully cheating on university English papers was hilarious. [...]
[...] How to cheat good by Alex Halavais [...]
[...] درست تقلب کنیم یا درست «کپ» بزنیم! : مطلب خواندنیی است. نویسنده استادی است که میپندارد آن دسته از دانشجویانش که ناشیانه تقلب میکنند او را احمق فرض کردهاند و به او توهین میکنند. آنها باید یاد بگیرند که چطور درست «کپ» بزنند! [...]
[...] Link [...]
[...] Oito dicas para plagiadores serem menos óbvios em trabalhos escolares. Alguém poderia traduzir e adaptar para a realidade brasileira e fixar no mural do PPGCOM da Fabico. [...]
Tradition, Change, and Precision…
I observe that my dictionary software permits using the traditionally transitive verbs “expound“ as intransitive: whereas I was taught that one expounds a position, a claim, the Scriptures, or a proposal, the Oxford American Dictionary (on …
Alex Halavais on How to cheat good…
Recently we had a presentation from Turnitin.com, a company that markets an online service that claims to detect possible plagiarism in student works. While there was some interest in the service here, I think we came away with more questions than answ…
[...] Alex Halavais » How to cheat good. [...]
[...] While I have two posts chock-a-block full of stunning insights and thoughtful interventions into modern theory (not to mention the controversy—oh, the controversy!) simmering on my mental back burner, until they reach maturity I thought I’d pass on Alex Halavais’ instructive epistle to his students, How to Cheat Good (via BoingBoing), a list of 8 rules students looking to cheat successfully really ought to follow. I’ve had students break a good number of these rules, much to their dismay and my entertainment, and I agree with Halavais that if students would just get smarter about how they cheat, the world would be a better place: they’d pass, our egos would be stroked (‘cause we’d think we taught something), and the college community would turn into a decent semblance of a functioning society rather than something out of John Adair’s picture of the post-War pueblos.* [...]
[...] No post de Alex Halavais sobre dicas para plagiários (indicado pelo Solon), vários leitores deixaram comentários com suas próprias dicas e experiências. Minhas favoritas, até agora: My favorite from the time I TA’ed in math: the guy that copied somebody else’s homework verbatim… down to the page numbers the original had put on the bottom of the page. Since the perp had smaller handwriting, I found an absolutely unmotivated “-1-” on a line be itself, right in the middle of the page. Beautiful. Best part: among ten possible groups of people, this genius had chosen another one in my group to copy from, so I could actually lay the two versions side by side and play “spot the 10 differences”.And if your assignment is writing a computer program, just copy someone else’s, and change all of the variable names to be players from a well known football team. This cunning ruse will throw anyone marking your assignment off the scent. In fact, so much so that you can even turn up to class the next day wearing a jersey and scarf from said team, and nobody will suspect a thing.As an Organisational Behaviour lecturer (Yes, In England. Get over it. And as far as I could tell, the point was about consistency, not spelling), my best advice to students who want to plagiarize is as follows: 1. If asked to write an essay about the Hawthorne studies (a set of seminal studies in the field), try to avoid paragraphs comparing Hawthorne with Edgar Allan Poe and Melville.2. When copying and pasting from a website, even if you do the formatting thingy, remember to remove the lines referring to other products on offer from the site, as well as all references to the colection of links at the bottom of the page. Yes, really. [...]
Cheating Successfully…
I used to consult for schools and social service organisations that were struggling to manage programs for children with behavioural problems. One of my favourite memories from that time is of a parent who approached me after I had given a talk, descr…
Links Worth Looking At…
While I’ve been busy and not posting anything I stored up some links that are worth looking at. This one tells you how to cheat well. Don’t get too excited, he’s just telling (hopefully) obvious things like not to copy……
Teaching Carnival X…
So it turns out that when most of us aren’t teaching, most of us aren’t blogging about teaching either. But still, after scouring the internets, waiting for del.icio.us and technorati to get caught up, and checking in on the usual……
[...] Exams coming up? A University Professor is ready to share his experiences in order to help prospective cheaters not make fool of ourselves. This guide includes 8 important hints you should consider when trying to take the slightly easier way in life on campus. Darn it, I had to find this just after I’ve finished my french exams. Maybe next year. [...]
[...] While this advice is probably a bit late for this semester (since I finished my exams on wednesday), I’ll be sure to keep all these useful tips in mind before I plagiarise work next semester! http://alex.halavais.net/?p=1427 [...]
[...] Last post for tonight. Alex Halavais about cheating in your essays: [...]
[...] از این نوشته به قلم الکس هلویسخوشم آمده، آنقدر که دوست داشتم اگر فرصتی و حوصلهای پیدا کردم فارسیش کنم. این نوشته یک ترجمهی آزاد از آن مطلب است. [...]
[...] I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what following the rules means. Part of this comes of the comments (now nearly 250) on an earlier post related to plagiarism. Several people in that post suggested that people who break the rules come out ahead. Plagiarism has shown up in newsrooms and on book editors desks a lot more frequently lately, and there is a growing awareness of professors being caught up in plagiarism scandals, as well as other forms of cheating. [...]
[...] Back in May, Alex Halavais at A Thaumaturgical Compendium offered advice on how to plagiarize to avoid detection. Of course, it also lets the cat out of the bag on how to detect such plagiarism, which was his tongue-in-cheek intention all along. Halavais has some other stuff worth reading, and a very impressive resume. Any teacher grading essays should read the plagiarism post. [...]
[...] Alex Halavais teaches you How to cheat good. As a univ. teacher, he’s undoubtedly uniquely qualified to give his studied opinion on the subject. [...]
[...] Professor Alex Halavais shares some advice on How to Cheat Better. Tired of reviewing poor attempts, he suggests the students make a decent effort and follow some of his tips such as “Borrow from someone who writes as badly as you do” and “Edit>Paste Special>Unformatted Text”. [...]
[...] 3) Since I brought you a blog last week, it’s only fair I should bring you another one this week. In the spirit of tomorrow’s exam, this one is http://alex.halavais.net/?p=1427 “How to Cheat Good.” May it do us all some good… [...]
[...] Brian needs to combine two or more site links – Sheesh, I can knock this one out right now! How about this and this? [...]
[...] How to cheat good, The Isuzu experiment, Capstone defenses, del.icio.us for class, BestBlogForward (ironically, an effort to publicize the most popular posts), Bariata: November Archives, A bad few days, School of Informatics post-mortem, Check this out: Informatics Dissolution, WordPress.com, The graduate, NoFollow for WordPress, Bloglines Step-by-Step, Really Sexy Sindication, Last stops to Buffalo, Ask Alex: Getting a communications Ph.D. [...]
[...] In order to make these figures more legible, I have omitted the most popular post, entitled “How to Cheat Good,” which was the target of 435 backlinks by August of 2007, and had collected 264 [...]