How to cheat good
May 18th, 2006I 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!
May 18th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
[...] 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] [...]
May 18th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
This made my day! Although I had hoped our high school students would be plagiarising at a higher level by the time they reached college….
May 18th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
I passed all my testes. My grade should be hirer.
May 19th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Brilliant
May 19th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
This made my day! Although I had hoped our high school students would be plagiarising at a higher level by the time they reached college….
May 19th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
[...] 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. [...]
May 19th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
Eh. The dilemma is simple. If you are good enough to cheat right, you shall not need to cheat.
My wife was junior faculty for a while, and she and a colleague caught a kid cheating on his honors thesis that also satisfied a paper requirement for both their classes. This was an idiot who was set for a small-but-easy life: his father’s family had a longstanding family law practice, and as long as he passed he’d go to whatever law school would take him and eventually join it.
No, he had to go for honors, and cheat in such a way that he a) didn’t get honors, b) failed two classes and c) may have been expelled (I never followed student gossip; does it even matter?).
It isn’t that kids cheat themselves, it’s that they are fucking idiots in the first place. The sooner they learn that, the better.
For the record, I once got accused of cheating on an English paper when I didn’t. It was a really baffling experience, but I will say, the teacher in question got it pretty quick. I guess it turned out my oh-lord-I-have-to-write-some-bullshit-about-Shakespeare desperation churned out something that sounded like Cliff’s Notes. (I was a math major; sue me.)
May 20th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
My girlfriend teaches Western Civ. This semester one of the assignments was to write a wikipedia entry for someone or something related to the readings.
A couple of days ago one of her students emailed her a word doc. He claimed that he had turned the assignment in sometime before Spring Break, but had somehow failed to receive credit for it.
My girlfriend emailed the file to me and asked if there was any way to tell when it had been written. I pulled the metadata, and amazingly enough, the file had been created just a couple of days ago. I told her this wasn’t conclusive proof that the essay hadn’t been written before Spring Break, but didn’t bode well for the student’s story.
I can’t wait to see what story the student comes up with to explain this discrepancy.
May 20th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Adam: I regularly get emails from students telling me to check the metadata proving that they wrote the assignment on time. Because, I suppose, they think I’m really, really dumb. Of course, it may very well be valid, but if I don’t trust you, I don’t trust your metadata either!
May 22nd, 2006 at 12:26 pm
[...] [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) [...]
May 22nd, 2006 at 4:26 pm
I have a terrible urge to plagiarize this somewhere just for ironic value.
May 25th, 2006 at 12:41 am
[...] 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. [...]
May 25th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
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……
May 25th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Excellent piece… But… #2. I am Scottish, I spell words using proper British spellings. If Americans are too lazy to put U’s and I’s where they belong then that is their problem.
If I write an essay for you about the Colour of Aluminium then you had better not mark me down for spelling. However if someone else is inconsistent in their use of spelling American here, British there then nail ‘em to the wall. It’s not hard to run a spell checker on something and change all the British to American or vice versa.
And yes, I was Born and Raised in Scotland.
Z.
May 25th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Or, of course, you could just buy one of these non-accredited degrees offered in the spam we all get daily :-(
There is a choice of :-
BS = Bull Shit,
MS = More Shit,
PhD = Piled Higher and Deeper.
May 25th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
Holy crap you’re an asshole.
You force your students to use American spelling in your class? What if I forced you to speak in a Canadian accent in MY class? Or just failed you because you’re from another country.
You’re just a stupid as the people you purport to dislike.
May 25th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Greg-
Read closer, dude. He’s not saying he forces them to use American spelling. He’s saying that when an American student starts spelling words with the British spelling, that’s a tip-off that it might be plagiarized.
CC
May 25th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Thank you for the comment, Greg. I don’t usually allow Canadians to post comments on my blog, but your comment sounded American enough to pass.
May 25th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
My #1: Don’t volunteer that you cheated to an instructor in front of witnesses.
Yes, I had this one happen. Before she admitted it, I had no idea that she’d cheated.
As for your list, I violate #2 all the time in my own writting; I read a lot of material from British authors.
May 25th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
I was very amused when I discovered that TurnItIn had red flagged a paper I wrote because it plagarised my website.
Paste formatted text is the devil. I use LaTeX for most papers now, so its not an issue.
May 25th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
(I’m not the Greg from 16; I happen to live in the US.)
My two short years of being a grad TA while working on my MS exposed me to a surprising (or, more depressingly, unsurprising) number of these recommendations. Numbers 3 and 4 were especially good hits in my experience grading homework in a computer science cirriculum. It’s astounding how an assignment that writes consistently at a C level (Probably F level if you’re in an English program) suddenly reads like a Dartmouth PhD.
Oh, wait, that’s because it _is_ a Dartmouth PhD.
Solving a different problem.
I might propose an addition as well:
9. Don’t cheat with your buddy, then bring up both your assignment and theirs to turn them in together, one right on top of the other. I am still stunned at how often this happened, resulting in two obviously copied homework assignments right next to each other in the stack of assignments. Violation of the subrule 1b (Don’t cheat off someone who makes idiosyncratic mistakes that are easy to pick out) makes this particularly easy to spot.
May 25th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
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”.
May 25th, 2006 at 5:24 pm
I make my students spell the American way, and when my friend studied abroad in Scotland she had to spell the UK way. The way I see it, there are proper spelling conventions for where you are, so use them!
May 25th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
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 …
May 25th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
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…
May 25th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
I teach physics and general science, and one thing I’ve noticed is that you can’t tell if correct answers are plagiarized or copied off a classmate (because they all do the work the same, correct, way), but you can tell the wrong copied answers (because they’re entirely bizarre and you’ve got no clue what in the world they were thinking). The one exception: when the student hands in the assignment a week late and every single problem is identical to the solution sheet that I’d handed out the day the HW was due.
May 25th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
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.
May 25th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
…the students are merely playing the academic ‘game’ — as are you. What exactly are you attempting to measure with that specific “grading” activity ??
How much truly original analysis/research do you expect your students to perform ?
“Original” analysis by typical students is well beyond the practical scope of the normal academic game — gamerules only require a discrete level of polish in recycling the ideas of others.
There is an old slogan in academia:
– Steal a man’s idea, and it’s plagiarism.
– Steal ten men’s ideas, and it’s a term paper.
– Steal a hundred men’s ideas, and it’s original research.
May 25th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
RE: Canadian/American spelling:
You’re teaching at the University of Buffalo? I’ve got news for you. Canada is about 15 minutes away. You don’t have to be from Scotland to spell “colour” that way. Chances are there is a STRONG contingent of students who are living and working just across the border from you. I teach English in Canada, and I allow spelling using EITHER American or Canadian convention, as long as it’s consistent, thus showing attention to detail.
Given how likely it is that many of your students could be Canadian, making the assumption that they’re cheating if they use Canadian spelling just because they don’t have a tell-tale surname is a bit unfair.
May 25th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
Wow, that’s a lot of comments for this little corner of the blog-world. Some notes:
I never assume that students are cheating. Despite an overwhelming amount of plagiarism, I always assume the best of my students. But at this point, I am prepared to be often disappointed.
The University at Buffalo has one of the top five or six largest foreign enrollments of any university in the US. I am aware that use of a “colour” or “centre” doesn’t automatically mean that the work has been plagiarized.
As a side-note: of course I expect my students to use standard American English. Just as, when I publish in a journal based in the UK, I am expected to use their house style. Code switching isn’t rocket surgery. I also force them–kicking an screaming–to use APA rather than their own made up citation style (or MLA or Chicago, etc.). Why? Because I am an evil imperialist pig and consumed by dark forces.
As for Collins @ 28, yes, I expect students to do truly original work. I realize that some find that impossible, but frankly, university would be a huge waste of time if it were merely an excercize in regurgitation. (As it stands, it too often borders on just such a waste of time.) However, the “game” has certain rules, and one of those rules is that you cite your sources. I do, as does any scholar worth his or her salt. That particular rule of the game does not preclude building or rearticulating earlier arguments–indeed it encourages it–but it requires that you properly indicate which ideas you are taking and from whom. This is more an ethical than a moral issue, and cultures differ on the approach. Nonetheless, the practice within the US, especially in the social sciences, is that you are honor-bound to indicate where your ideas come from.
May 26th, 2006 at 5:02 am
Very funny! Thanks from one academic who appreciates what you are saying.
May 26th, 2006 at 5:17 am
From admin@30:
> the social sciences,
Now *there’s* a tautology. Social and Science in the Same Sentence.
Then again, it’s what I’d expect from someone who needs a hyphen but can’t find a ‘u’ when discussing honour.
May 26th, 2006 at 8:01 am
[...] A teacher’s 10 point guide to cheating better. 8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text [...]
May 26th, 2006 at 8:37 am
In a spur of the moment spell of my own stupidity I asked my students to append newspaper headline to their reports as a time check for when they wrote it. Some days later it occurred to me what I’d asked and, duh, that solved nothing about validating the time. Well, it so happened I received a student’s report by email about a week late. When I asked about it, he claimed to have sent it on time and suggested it must have been delayed – I should try and confirm it. I checked the sent time on the email – it was a couple hours before the paper was due. I checked the Word metadata – it indicated a creation time of that same morning. I checked his appended headline – it was from the day the email arrived. When I pointed that out, he got angry and claimed that’s what I asked for, and argued the point for a good five minutes before it dawned on him why he’d been caught. My stupid moment’s instructions had actually caught someone in a stupider moment of their own.
May 26th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Re: Collins @ 28: I guess I lived in a fantasy world during my college and grad school days. I thought we were supposed to 1) do research to show that we were aware of what other people thought about the topic and 2) come up with ideas of our own.
I realize that, ideas being what they are, some of what I thought was original was not. But if I arrived at it independently, then it was legitimate.
Apparently Collins does not understand the nature of education. Unfortunately, he has a view which is widely popular these days. No wonder our schools are in trouble.
May 26th, 2006 at 9:42 am
What is rocket surgery?
May 26th, 2006 at 9:58 am
I’m a first year high school teacher and have been heaving great groans at the atrocious writing my kids turn in.
Well.
At least they’re not plagiarizing.
May 26th, 2006 at 11:22 am
I stopped reading this when I got to the part about “our” endings. Fortunately I was able to attend a fairly good US university, keep on using correct English spelling, and never get accused of plagiarism. But that was a while ago. Now I see the degree of tolerance of non-Usanian spelling has kept pace with your wars against other abstract notions.
May 26th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Naomi:
I wish you the best of luck dealing with the lawsuits when you start failing those who don’t earn the privelege of a passing grade!
Stupid lawyers…
May 26th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
Rocket Surgery is a highly specialized field of rocket science that incorporates brain surgery expertise required when working with “smart bombs”.
PS, You anglos can’t even sort out your or/our and s/z, so imagine what it is for me, a French Canadian.
May 27th, 2006 at 9:03 am
You think *you* have it rough — I taught high school for a brief period. I came up with two rules for the geniuses in my classes: If you’re going to copy off of someone else’s test, 1) make sure they’re smarter than you are, and 2) make sure they’re taking the same test.
May 27th, 2006 at 11:04 am
I think you need to make another exception for British spelling. It is not the presence of coloured cheques that should alarm you, but coloured cheques being used at nite by the lite of the moon.
May 27th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
On the spelling issue: as an American who has lived and studied in a number of countries and cultures, I find my own writing is frequently a mixed mish-mash of the two styles. Quotations are always verbatim, but my own idiosyncracies now dictate an unusual combination of ’s instead of z’ and ‘ou instead of o,’ but somehow miss out on a great number of ‘re instead of er’ spelling issues. While one can only try to go back and fix/catch them all, on a larger paper this can be quite difficult. Fortunately, my professors have been more forgiving; with very few notable exceptions they seem to care more about the content than the colour. Those that mark down based on “this should be an indefinite article instead of a definite one (when either is legitimate and acceptable),” get an earful of a reminder they are teaching, say, a statistics course, and not ninth-grade english.
May 27th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Poster @ 32 needs to look up “tautology” in the dictionary. Hint: It does not mean “oxymoron” .
May 28th, 2006 at 2:28 am
In the school where I teach only the poorer students plagiarize, the more wealthy ones hire tutors who write their papers.
May 28th, 2006 at 2:50 am
“how to cheat GOOD”… hah… golden.
May 28th, 2006 at 9:56 pm
[...] 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. [...]
May 30th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
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…
May 31st, 2006 at 12:07 pm
heh. a well designed exam, in class or take home, is the best defense against cheating, Halavais’s advice notwithstanding. as for papers, if a student doesn’t first walk the talk (in class), suspicion will always arise. go ahead. try me.
May 31st, 2006 at 1:32 pm
Thanks for a great laugh! I teach high school and we see ALL of this. My funniest story is a kid who got caught because he didn’t know the difference between “UK” (the University of Kentucky) and “the UK” (the United Kingdom, as you know). He had these strange underlined words in a lighter gray too… :)
May 31st, 2006 at 5:30 pm
[i]“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.[/i]
Because you so rightly included 5 in your fauxpaux list, you might want to know that “bourne” is not the English form of “born,” but an older word for a stream or river.
-Your fan, the student
May 31st, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Ah, OK. As long as that’s the only mistake I maid.
June 1st, 2006 at 12:55 pm
You are the master. We admire you very much.
RYS
June 2nd, 2006 at 5:07 pm
In reality I think there should be a class on how to cheat. How many company steal their competitors idea and market them as their own? After coming out of the University setting a young graduate could be thinking that no one would dare plagiarize.
The irony of the situation to me is that in English we were required to study Shakespeare.
Quoting Sharna Jensen “I think there was far more plagiarism in the last century. It was almost an accepted part of writing. The ethics of writing has changed. Nobody gets upset about whether Shakespeare plagiarized something. But I think the standards have to be pretty high now, particularly for non-fiction writers.”
To me plagiarism is not wrong, bad taste yes but not wrong.
June 2nd, 2006 at 11:09 pm
My favorite example from teaching is the student who’s essay homework included a long paragraph stolen from the internet, as if it were his text, including the original inline citations (i.e., “blah blah blah (Author Year) yadda yadda”), but without any corresponding list of references.
June 3rd, 2006 at 12:23 am
Hm. Original? From the grades I saw people get throughout uni, what got good marks and what got bad marks, I didn’t think professors wanted anything but the opinions espoused in class repeated… at least, not in undergrad…
Though, I like number 1. I saw one of those kinds, without the family part, when I TA’d. So very sad. Three of the same programming assignment with the same strange error from people in the same tutorial (there were probably 30 tutorials, as it was first year– variety is the spice of life, kids!) All they did was change the variable name from i to j and i1. And two of them handed it in late. First kid apparently thought he was helping by giving the other two the solution after everyone had submitted.
Altogether a good article.
June 3rd, 2006 at 12:39 pm
My favourite, as a second language teacher, is something that’s not only plagiarized, but also mechanically translated. A few years back, a student handed in a news article about “ventilators” fighting over the ball that Barry Bonds had hit into the stands. I had to reverse translate to figure out the original word was “fans”.
June 11th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
A Guide to Plagiarism!…
And best of all, it is written by a former prof!! Read on….
June 14th, 2006 at 8:05 am
I’ve found that the Wikipedia hyperlinks embedded in the doc are also a dead give-away.
June 14th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
I cant believe it
ur little notes screwed my final science!
June 15th, 2006 at 7:24 am
This made me smile. I’m still in school, nearing the end of compulsory education, so I’ve known people to do this.
My personal favourite was when we were given an example evaluation for our IT Coursework. Hidden in it, in very pale grey, were the words ‘Copyright Edexcel, to be used as an example only’, in several instances. It didn’t show up very well on screen, but it was rather obvious when he printed them out.
However, he didn’t check the print, and handed the piece of work to the teacher. He seemed honestly surprised when he was told to do it again.
June 15th, 2006 at 7:27 am
The flip side to this is that some professors are almost as useless as the students.
I remember someone making me an offer I couldn’t refuse to draft the major paper for a high level graduate course. The paper was half the grade in the class. I wrote the draft during the insanely boring meetings I attended at my job at the time.
Despite the fact I’d never had a class in this area, the paper was turned in as-is and received an A. Frankly, if I can get an A in a class like this, the prof deserves to have her students cheating.
Which brings me to the best method to cheat on papers — always have someone just a little bit smarter than you write an original paper and turn that in.
June 15th, 2006 at 7:41 am
To absolutely and positively throw the teacher off the scent simply transcribe each sentence of your essay from a different student in the class.
June 15th, 2006 at 7:55 am
I’m a student in an engineering program. “Work groups” are essentially expected from TAs and profs, but there is still a level of stupity of students that knows no bounds. One math asssignment, a peer attached the photocopies of the solution they cleverly copied from with what they handed in.
June 15th, 2006 at 8:01 am
When I was a physics TA, I had two students turn in identical homework assignments. Now, they were allowed to work together, but we did say we wanted everyone to at least write out their own work. These geniuses? One’s was a CARBON COPY (literally, a carbon copy) of the other.
I reported it, the professor did her job, the entitled kid sued. Classic.
June 15th, 2006 at 8:27 am
I have had more than one student offer this gem of an excuse: “I did not plagiarize. The paper was written by a friend (brother/sister/mother), they must of plagiarized.”
Some other tips for would be plagiarists:
10. Remove people’s names that are not introduced somewhere in the text. I see lots of papers with a line like “This differs from Nozick’s view, in that he rejects all redistribution…” But in the students ‘abridged’ version no description of Nozick has been made (and Nozick may not yet have been discussed in class.)
11. Read the work before plagiarizing it. I frequently get papers totally off topic but vaguely in the area. So I might assign a paper on Kantian Ethics, and get a paper on Codes of Ethics in Accounting (or something like that).
June 15th, 2006 at 8:29 am
This is a funny article. I don’t get as much plagiarism now that I encourage my students to talk to me if they feel inclined to it. I also tell them how disgusting it is in plain terms. I also find that having students turn in outlines and such early helps prevent plagiarism, or slow it down. If any of you are feeling really cynical about your students, try doing some of these things to help beat back the cheating. (My comments are for teaching first and second year undergraduates; I would be merciless with a graduate student caught at this.)
June 15th, 2006 at 8:36 am
Thank you! Having just got my bachelors, I am always frustrated by the poor effort people give when they plagiarize…
June 15th, 2006 at 8:39 am
[...] How to cheat good [...]
June 15th, 2006 at 8:45 am
I taught an introduction to programming class, and had an interesting occurrence of group-cheating.
Who I like to call “The Fantastic Five” turned in the exact same solution to an assignment. There were, of course, minor differences. In total, three of the assignments had the same person listed as the author, some had slightly different variable names, and all had the same tragic errors.
As a scare tactic, I gave each of the Fantastic Five an oral test and easily determined that one person had written the solution, two others knew how it worked, and the last two blindly copied the file (leaving the author’s name as their own).
I thought the scaring them had worked, since four of them had admitted copying. Two weeks later, I saw the Fantastic Five identical solutions again. In fact, one of the students later submitted an online exam solution using his student ID but someone else’s name.
Some tips learned from here:
1. If you submit an assignment via email, please make sure your name is the one on the submission.
2. Try to make sure you’re the only one in your class copying from a source.
June 15th, 2006 at 8:46 am
I teach a chemistry laboratory, and a good tip-off that I frequently see in lab reports is perfect calculations, that arrive at the correct answer–but don’t start with the same numbers the students report as their data. Another bit of advice is that before copying another student, make sure you can read his handwriting.
June 15th, 2006 at 8:46 am
As said before, extra “u” does not always equal British spelling. Have you ever heard of Canada? Way to be a fucking idiot while you’re trying to school people.
June 15th, 2006 at 8:59 am
Great article, a must read for all students. You’ve been linked from
http://www.antiwikipedia.com !
June 15th, 2006 at 9:00 am
I am an American. Like most Americans I grew up reading children’s literature written by British authors. I instinctively spell color as “colour” and behavior as “behaviour”. Get over it.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:04 am
[during a PTA conference]
teacher: Yes Mrs. Wimberly, your son is quite remarkable. Despite being in the third grade, I find that he is already plagiarizing /at a fifth grade level/.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:06 am
My favorite is when cheaters get perfect scores. One class, way back when I was in high school, we all had the answers to the multiple choice tests because a senior had saved them from the year before. Cheating actually hurt my grade because I knew I had to get at least one wrong, which I wouldn’t have done if I had just taken the stupid test. The teacher started to notice when the village idiot kept getting 100s. Eventually he switched up the order of two questions and caught half the class that didn’t bother to even read the questions. One student didn’t actually just brought a piece of white lined paper with the answers already on it. He’d sit quietly for a couple of minutes and then turn it in. Didn’t matter that it wasn’t the same kind of paper the teacher passed out.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:07 am
My favorite is when cheaters get perfect scores. One class, way back when I was in high school, we all had the answers to the multiple choice tests because a senior had saved them from the year before. Cheating actually hurt my grade because I knew I had to get at least one wrong, which I wouldn’t have done if I had just taken the stupid test. The teacher started to notice when the village idiot kept getting 100s. Eventually he switched up the order of two questions and caught half the class that didn’t bother to even read the questions. One student just brought a piece of white lined paper with the answers already on it. He’d sit quietly for a couple of minutes and then turn it in. Didn’t matter that it wasn’t the same kind of paper the teacher passed out. Maroons.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:12 am
I may have to steal/plagiarize this bit of genius for my syllabus:
“As a side-note: of course I expect my students to use standard American English. Just as, when I publish in a journal based in the UK, I am expected to use their house style. Code switching isn’t rocket surgery. I also force them—kicking an screaming—to use APA rather than their own made up citation style (or MLA or Chicago, etc.). Why? Because I am an evil imperialist pig and consumed by dark forces.”
June 15th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Great article!
Another one about programming. I once had two students hand in a printed program (one page). They looked so similar I just put one on top of the other and held them up to the light. Sure enough they were identical.
If you’re too lazy to change variable names, add some white space…
June 15th, 2006 at 9:19 am
[...] 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. [...]
June 15th, 2006 at 9:22 am
I taught writing at a technical college for a few years, so this brings back many bad memories. I encouraged many of the students to write about their interests, which for most meant cars and such. I specifically recall one essay which carefully referenced “our July issue, page 42.”
June 15th, 2006 at 9:24 am
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June 15th, 2006 at 9:25 am
[...] How to cheat good. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. RSS 2.0 [...]
June 15th, 2006 at 9:35 am
I’m just a student and not a teacher, but it would seem that teachers of younger students have it worse. When I was at primary school (~= Elementary School + Middle School), a friend of mine printed out a website, stapled it together and handed it in. Never mind it had the URL it was printed from written accross the bottom of the page. Slightly better was in High School, when a different friend handed in a physics paper with no original work, but every paragraph sourced and properly attributed. I never could understand that.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:41 am
[...] Alex Halavais » How to cheat good [...]
June 15th, 2006 at 9:42 am
Years ago I was grading computer program lab assignments and discovered two students had identical errors in their solution. Laying the two sets of code side by side, I noticed they had changed the variable names and even the line spacing, but the two submissions were identical line by line logic of a WRONG solution. I gove them each 50% of the credit they would have gotten for the lab problem.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:44 am
As a professor at a large state university (1 250 person class and 2 40 person classes), I’d like to ask the following:
1) Did you ever consider changing the assessments you were using? Perhaps a take home assignment is not appropriate for your teaching methods. Many on-line systems, including software like Blackboard and WebCT allow for relatively sophisticated assessments that are more difficult to cheat on if set up correctly.
2) Why not *require* TurnItIn? You can get the sudents to pay for it just like any other course materials. Our university pays for this service and it is VERY EFFECTIVE! Combined with a rigid honor code/code of conduct, many students can be scared straight.
3) Did you ever think to change the content of your assessments? I, for one, do not use the same questions from semester to semester.
4) Did you ever prosecute/turn in a cheater? I have and you’d be amazed at how the word got out and cheating dropped significantly. This is especially true when the student in question is expelled (as mine was). We also have a grade of “XF” which can be issued in the event of cheating and is truly permanent on a transcript.
Finally…
I suggest that professors of most undergraduate classes switch to remotes from companies like eInstruction or Turning Point. I have effectively reduced cheating and increased attendance and participation through the use of RF remotes (purchased for $25 by the students) for assessments, live student feedback, etc.
Just my $.02.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:44 am
Rule #1 should be: if you submit another student’s paper, make sure to change the author’s name in the header/footer.
Also, if you submit electronically make sure you rename the file. For example submitting john_smith_cmpt183-01_hw_3.doc when your name is Peter might sometimes be viewed as a dead giveaway. Metadata is also a good place to find the name of the “original” author.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:47 am
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.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:02 am
Passing off somebody else’s ideas as your own is like trying to pass off vomit as food. Turning it in implies that the teacher is too stupid to smell the difference. I enjoyed this because it was true and funny; most talk plagiarism leaves me angry and fuming. Thanks for keeping your sense of humor & for passing it on.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:05 am
Jim:
1) Did you ever consider changing the assessments you were using?
Yes, but I think writing in the essay form is a (perhaps the) vital skill to learn in university. I dislike Blackboard for a lot of reasons, and although I have used its built-in assessments, they are hardly a salve for cheating…
Why not require TurnItIn? You can get the students to pay for it just like any other course materials.
I’ve considered that. Despite the whining (or is that whinging ^_^) above, my Dean did pay for me to use Turn-it-in for a while, and I suspect SUNY Buffalo will pick it up campus wide in the near future. I realize it will be a hidden cost to students when they do, but I just felt a little uneasy about making students pay to police themselves, particularly when those who plagiarize in any given class remain a minority. Why should the ethical students have to pay for the unethical ones. Though I suppose that is often the case.
Did you ever think to change the content of your assessments?
I always do. I can’t imagine folks who do not. Especially on campuses with fraternities…
Did you ever prosecute/turn in a cheater?
At least once a semester, both in my own classes and in the graduate program I directed. And yes, as noted in the post, that included expelling a student from the university. I don’t know how much of a deterrent this is when I’m the only prof doing it. One of my colleagues pointedly refused to prosecute a plagiarized paper that was reported by a student, saying he “was not a policeman.”
June 15th, 2006 at 10:16 am
David:
I can see that… Doesn’t the “Poe Effect” refer to tendency of individuals in the company of poets to commit tragically horrific acts?
June 15th, 2006 at 10:22 am
I shat a whole in my pantz aftre reading this
June 15th, 2006 at 10:33 am
On the subject of British/American spellings, there is a slight problem with REQUIRING one or the other… If you were brought up reading (and writing) in a particular way then you might not know about the alternative. I know some of the American spellings but given the lack of consistency in American Orthography (it’s Aluminum but not Radum or Uranum?) how can I be expected to know all of them?
If submitting a paper for publication I would do my best to follow whatever house style was required but I wouldn’t expect to have to change cultural references or spelling to match those of the editor. If it bothers the editor he can talk with me about it or reject my paper.
Z.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:40 am
LOL!! This was great. Yeah, I remember when that Shakespeare guy cheated off me and made me look bad. He even back-dated his work by a few hundred years to make it look convincing. What a scammer!
June 15th, 2006 at 10:48 am
I LOVE JOHN RAWLS! Read any Nussbaum? The capabilities principle is really neat.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:48 am
Plagiarism drove me nuts last semester; that’s why I’m nuts today, in fact. I had a student swear his paper was his own work because he “dinnit cut and paste, he DINNIT, he typed it all out his own self.” And since I teach ‘writing intro’ at a community college, his sentence was actually pretty good.
I LOVED your post, by the way. Would you mind if I typed it all out and signed my name to it? I dinnit want to plagiarize by cutting and pasting. . . .
June 15th, 2006 at 10:51 am
My favorite cheating story wasn’t actually cheating. My dorm neighbor in college was a dumb jock (DJ). No offense, there are plenty of smart jocks, he just wasn’t one of them. A smart(ish) guy (SG) who’d had the same class before “helped” him write a paper by giving DJ the paper SG had written for the same class. He really tried to make DJ rewrite SG’s ideas into his own words, but DJ had so little understanding of the topic that he completely mangled it beyond readability. It was obvious to me, a fellow student, what he’d done, imagine what the prof (who’d seen SG’s paper originally) must have thought.
I did a lot of cheating in high school but that’s just because the classes were so lame (it was the 70s) that I was more challenged to find ways to cheat than I would have been to actually study.
re: color/colour – I think it’s the inconsistencies that jump out. If someone is writing in ‘Murkin and then has a paragraph in British, it does catch one’s eye.
last but not least, on the business side we have
BA – big a**hole
MBA – Much bigger a**hole
CPA – Chrome Plated a**hole
June 15th, 2006 at 10:52 am
Zwack: Although I expect it, I’ve never actually required American spelling. Frankly, a lot of these comments are tempests in teapots. It’s actually never come up as a serious issue for me. (I wonder if others *have* had such an issue.) If I were to teach in UB’s programme in Singapore, I would naturally be fine with non-American spelling. I’ve had plenty of students from Canada, Australia, and India; I don’t recall having regional dialect issues come up.
I’m in the same boat as you: I let the editors make the changes because I am not sure I’ll get it right.
In the post above, non-American variants–especially inconsistently used–are often an indication that the writing is not the students’ own. I apologize to the wounded cultural pride if this offended anyone in the world. I think you talk pretty.
June 15th, 2006 at 11:20 am
You left out the one where students not only answer the wrong question, but they include a bibliography citing a different professor from a different course from a different university in a different city. And then, when caught, swear that they just happened to drop in on some random lectures when they went home for a few days.
June 15th, 2006 at 11:24 am
Good job, very funny.
When I was an undergrad I had to write a paper for some social science class and was quite bored. So I took the challenge to write the entire paper out of sentences stolen from other articles. It was really a lot of work! More work than writing the paper would have been. But I had fun. The rules that I set for myself were that I had to use entire sentences, and no 2 that were together could have appeared together in the original. I even included some graphs and diagrams.
The paper turned out to be a disjointed mess. The only comment the teacher had was that I didn’t reference the graphs in the text. I think I got a C, which was fine.
June 15th, 2006 at 11:26 am
[...] I thought this collection of tongue-in-cheek guides to successfully cheating on university English papers was hilarious. [...]
June 15th, 2006 at 11:29 am
One of my colleagues once told he had to correct some paper on phyiscs. The author had copied from someone and changed every ROT (german for red) to BLAU(german for blue) Too bad “ROT” meant “Rotation” in this case…
And in my beginners course on computer programming 12 groups of 3 students each were accused of cheating. They turned in the same solution on an assignment. And the computer reported them by refusing to recompile the executable when given some new source.
Nobody of them wrote the code in the first place – that was me. And my group was not accused because I optimized the code after mailing it to some desperate girl…
June 15th, 2006 at 11:31 am
As part of my job at a community college, I am required to audio tape student hearings. I thought I had heard every excuse under the sun, but apparently not!
This article was beautiful! So true. What’s sad is that people are failing to realize the humor. You’re not “yelling” at people for using British spellings, but merely asking for consistency. A course I just took summed it up perfectly – “It doesn’t matter if you’re a bad speller. What matters is that you’re consistently bad.”
June 15th, 2006 at 11:36 am
My favorite was when one of my students cut and pasted too much and included “in this website was helpful, click here for more information”
June 15th, 2006 at 11:41 am
I have a friend who is a doctoral candidate at the University of Buffalo in Comparative Literature. About a year ago, she told me that not merely did one of her students violate your rule number 8 — the words of the paper were blue virtually throughout — but they had inadvertantly included a footnote that mentioned their previous books on the subject.
Naturally, the student was incensed when she had the audacity to fail him.
June 15th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Cool! Comment #100.
Great piece – funny *and* depressing.
I’m surprised by the number of people who didn’t get your point regarding the American vs. British spelling.
June 15th, 2006 at 11:46 am
Oooops. Never mind – not comment #100.
June 15th, 2006 at 11:52 am
Hi, it was funny reading this post. Here’s a small example of worldwide, first class stupidity.
My brother works as an assistant in an economics class in the University of Geneva. He had completed the same lecture he’s working on last year, and as all students had done a paper and a presentation. Well suddenly this year a student sends him his presentation and paper too late, but anyway, he gives him a chance. So he opens the presentation and he sees a familiar name on the pages: his own name!!! What a dumb f***! He’s kind enough to give him a second chance because the student in question claimed that he had sent the wrong file (yeah right!) But the poor guy only had two more days. Finally when he comes to do his presentation, he had managed to delete my brother’s name (atta boy!) but could’nt explain the equations in his talk… They found the whole story so pathetic that they didn’t expell him (he got a zero though). By the way I’m a genetic’s PhD student and maybe you’ve all heard of the Hwang’s case (photoshop, copy and paste anyone). This raises the question: where are kids finding their inspiration…
June 15th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Hi there,
I was amazed when I saw this link in the best and biggest Dutch Newspaper (www.nrc.nl).
The thing is, I always try to be original, hate cheating on tests or papers.
Sometimes my classmates cheat and I think it is stupid, but in the end, they get the better grades…
One time, I asked my professor for a comment on a B, he told me to stop asking, I should be happy I passed the test and shouldn’t ask further. It is not a one way street you know.
Interested in your reply,
Peter
June 15th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Other tips:
9. Don’t copy from sources that are about entirely different things and written in entirely different styles. If you’re writing about social pressures on youth, going from writing in an academic style about nineteenth-century industrial working conditions to writing in New York Times style about cell phone ringtones will out you every time.
10. Don’t copy from Wikipedia. Please?
Finally, in re: the British/American spellings bit … I’m American and I teach in Canada. I have to ask the students to write using Canadian spellings. And I circle American spellings on their papers, though I don’t mark down the paper as a result. Why? Because they’re in Canada, and when they write outside of university they’ll be asked to write according to Canadian style. Same thing in the States when I had students from the Commonwealth–it’s not a fatal flaw, but it is a slight stylistic adjustment.
June 15th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
I am astonished at the number of people who are taking offense at the idea that you would require consistent use of a spelling convention in your class. Sure, Canada is 15 minutes away. Sure, some students grew up spelling things in the English fashion. But it’s your classroom! Have these folks forgotten what it’s like to take a class, and deal with the inevitable idiosyncrasies of the teacher? I took a class where no chocolate was allowed in the room (even if it stayed in the pocket or bookbag); another professor would take points off if you used a computer rather than a typewriter (at a Macintosh-heavy school!); and so on.
It’s your classroom. You can set the conventions. These people whining about colour versus color should get over themselves. I’m half Canadian myself, and I agree that code switching is no big deal.
Great essay, by the way. I did write a paper for someone else once; she was in a class that I never took, so I got her a D minus. An indication of the professor’s ability to detect shoddy work, at the very least.
June 15th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Former IT teacher here, current homeschooling mum.
The system is broken. Before you college blokes or even high school for that matter, go whining and wailing about the quality of students and their dishonest work, why not take a good hard honest look at the system that pays you and uses/digests/excretes students from ages 5 and up?
Why shouldn’t they cheat? I know, I know, “They are only cheating themselves.” Maybe. Maybe, they’ve been screwed with for so long they can’t see the difference? Maybe cheating allows a bit of autonomy and self-respect that sucking up to the TA all semester doesn’t?
If soooooo many students do it, perhaps it is because it works.
Margot
June 15th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
This made my day. Thank you.
June 15th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Would it be plagiarism if I copied this and passed it out to my class before they did a report? Hahaha!
June 15th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
I have a question. Have you ever received a paper produced by one of those automatic social science paper generators found on the Internet that every so often makes it into a journal (no doubt submitted by someone in the hard sciences) and causes an uproar?
June 15th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
I never cheat.
Once.
June 15th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Thanks so much for a very entertaining read! The comments left have been almost as good!
June 15th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
#2 – Don’t forget Canadians. We tend to mix and max proper and American ways to spell things if we aren’t careful.
June 15th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Oh wow, this is amazing! I remembered with a sudden flash helping to grade the papers of a High School English class where we were able to Google the first lines of FIVE papers and find the entire body online. Sitting through college, I’ve seen the same amazing things… I think these kids put more effort in to cheating than they actually would put in to the work!
June 15th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
You left out a favorite “preventor” for plagiarism. Put a very small footnote at the end of the paper, staple the report and rip the last page containing the single footnote crediting your source. Well, it could work…
June 15th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
For Zwack: if British or Canadian students don’t know American spelling while at an American university, doesn’t it follow that the American professor at an American university might not know British or Canadian spelling and simply see it as incorrect (which it is in America)? And here’s a newsflash: MS Word used with American English automatically corrects spellings like “organise” to “organize,” and flags words such as “colour” and “honourable” as misspellings, so it’s not like this is a huge challenge for Canadians or Brits in American universities.
June 15th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
I teach ESL, and cheating is extremely easy for me to spot. Most of it is pretty pathetic, too. I get mad just as much because they think I’m dumb enough not to notice as because I consider cheating (of any kind, not just plagiarism and other academic sorts) to be an act of pure cowardice.
Lots of my friends have rolled their eyes when I’ve said it, but I never cheated in school–not from elementary through grad school. It was a matter of honor (or honour, for those of you who are tracking the spelling thread here). Perhaps I have unusually high standards for my own behavior, but at least when I catch cheating students–and dishonest colleagues, too–I can’t be called a hypocrite.
For all the students who think that grades are all that matter and that it’s OK to cheat in classes because “everybody does it,” I bring up a point that others have made. Do you want yourself or your child to be treated by a doctor who cheated his way through medical school? Do you want to be represented in court by a lawyer who cheated on her bar exam? Do you want your taxes audited by an accountant who cheated his way through the CPA certification? Do you want to hire employees who cheated throughout high school and college and really don’t know how to read, write, process, or evaluate information? Do you?
June 15th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
If you work for a department as a lab monitor, don’t use your key to let yourself in after hours, steal another student’s lab work and turn it in as your own.
Seriously, I had a case of that back when I was teaching. Usually, we dealt with plagiarism informally, but this turkey got the book thrown at him – expelled with a permanent hold placed on his transcript, as I recall, so that none of his earlier work (he was a senior, I believe) could be offered for transfer credit at another institution. (I think that the University’s lawyers put the kibosh on prosecuting him for accessing computers in excess of authorization, so he didn’t get jailed for it. He should have.)
June 15th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
IN RE: color vs. colour:
I also am saddened by the number of posts ripping you for the color/colour thing.
I also got the impression that your issues about the matter had more to do with consistency rather than spelling. Either one is right, in my opinion.
It’s not about using these spellings as it is more about the student from Arkansas or Mississippi switching from: “Shakespeer was fixin’a set for a spell when he grabbt aholt to a snake that bit’em”, to “and lo and behold! he evisioned a fair maiden with lips of rose petals standing erect before his very eyes.”, in the same sentence.
And before anyone starts with the north and south comments, I am not making fun of the Arkie’s (I’m an Arkie myself) I am simply using this as an illustration.
When you get to know your students, their writing styles, their language skills, etc., you KNOW when they are passing someone else’s work off as their own.
There is nothing wrong with “grabbing aholt to” anything, but if youre not consistent with your grabbing then that’s where you can get caught.
June 15th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
I am an American. Like most Americans I grew up reading children’s literature written by British authors.
That does not make any sense whatsoever.
June 15th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
I had students turn in identical Excel worksheets, that had an error that made Excel pop up a box complaining about a Circular Reference on cell such-and-so….by the third student who’s assignment popped up the identical error, that was kind of a hint to me as the professor…
I had another student for a programming class who included in his ZIP file the original files he had plagarized from, including the original author’s name. I was co-teaching, and we offerered the student the chance to do a different assignment that proved he knew the material, otherwise we’d fail him. The student went to the Student Conduct Office and said that yes, he had cheated, but complained that we were being unfair to him by making him do the new assignment! (This is equivalent to going to the DA and saying that you have burglarized a house, but the police are harrassing you by arresting you for it.) That started an independent investigation by Student Conduct, and THEIR investigations get noted on your transcript. This same kid cheated his way all through school….he really should have been expelled, but he worked the system just perfectly to sneak by.
June 15th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
For reasons too complex to go into, I had to take a freshman level Sociology course. Before the first paper, the prof and TA spent twenty (!) minutes going over style (margin no greater than 1 inch, font of 12pt, yadda yadda). Five minutes outlining what to talk about.
I didn’t understand why they’d waste so much time until I saw the paper turned in before mine – easily 14pt font, with two inch margins on each side…
June 15th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
[Sorry about the duplicate post]
Regardless, I think every last one of them should be failed and/or expelled. Why won’t they stop devaluing my degree?
June 15th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
This is great. I’m gonna copy it.
June 15th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
wcw: “For the record, I once got accused of cheating on an English paper when I didn’t. It was a really baffling experience”.
I had the same experience once in a college philosophy course. Baffled is a good description of how you feel.
Normally I was honors-level in everything, but I was totally blowing off this course (pulling a B) because the prof was so dry and uninteresting. When I actually managed to come up with a topic I was really excited about for my paper at the end of the year, I really knocked it out of the park … and boy was he surprised.
It didn’t lead to an outright accusation of cheating, probably since there was exactly zero evidence (because I didn’t!). But he called me in to discuss it and was pretty grudging about giving me a grade on it, and it was obvious that he suspected someone else had written it. For my part, I think he didn’t give the paper the grade it deserved because he still felt that I must have cheated somehow. But in the end I decided to just let it slide… I was happy enough just to be done with his class and have that last humanities req fulfilled.
factor: “In reality I think there should be a class on how to cheat.”
But how would you grade it!? You’d have to make sure that the students are actually providing plagiarized content, not -original- content. :-) And if you can tell the difference between the plagiarized and original content, then clearly they shouldn’t be passing…
June 15th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
A professor or TA doesn’t really need to spend a lot of time scrutinizing for plagiarzism. Just accuse them of it. Let guilt do it’s job and see who admits their transgression. To illustrate this my grad school advisor did just that. He came in one morning in an usually good mood. He said he had just caught a number of students in his freshmen night class plagiarizing. One of the reports submitted sounded very familiar to him. With a little reasearch he found passages from several books he had just read. The student had done a good job of piecing together a good report except for the fact when she ran across a word she didn’t know she just left it out. That night he went to class and explained penalty of plagiarizing. Then announced he had detected plagiarizing and whoever did it had two hours after class to withdraw their paper. A dozen students showed up to withdraw their papers. He thought that was so good he tried it on his next class with equally good results. Who needs to spend time checking, just accuse them and let guilt take over.
June 15th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
[...] How to cheat good by Alex Halavais [...]
June 15th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
‘Those smart enough to cheat effectively, are smart enough to do the work.’
This may be true, but are they necessarily motivated to do it? The smartest students are often the least-best fit for the academic process as it stands; original thinkers resist didactic teaching. If they’re cheating in your class, it’s because they’re bored senseless.
June 15th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
[...] درست تقلب کنیم یا درست «کپ» بزنیم! : مطلب خواندنیی است. نویسنده استادی است Ú©Ù‡ می‌پندارد آن دسته از دانشجویانش Ú©Ù‡ ناشیانه تقلب می‌کنند او را اØمق Ùرض کرده‌اند Ùˆ به او توهین می‌کنند. آنها باید یاد بگیرند Ú©Ù‡ چطور درست «کپ» بزنند! [...]
June 15th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Re: comment #126 … American (I am not prone to use USAian, as it’s ugly) attempts at children’s literature, with the exception of Dr. Suess and a very few others, are unreadable, hence those of us — of a certain age, at least — who read as children, read a great many British authors. I still, far too many years later, have difficulty with er/re and z/s. For some reason, our/or has never been a problem, nor have I ever spelt ‘tire’ with a ‘y’. I, however, as you may see, have the habit of putting many clauses in my sentences; something no properly brought up American can do, in writing or in speaking. I blame Kipling and Carroll, and even, from later years, Brunner and Amis and Orwell, for my sad state.
June 15th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
I once gave another student a copy of a report I had written, as an example of the type of writing that a particular teacher liked, marked in red pen with comments about how he should lay out his own paper and the function of each paragraph, including a warning that the topic he was assigned was not the same as what was assigned when I wrote this paper. He did not retype it or even photocopy it to remove the marks. He handed it in, red pen and all.
June 15th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
My best friend in college was a TA in math.
In linear algebra class one semester, a student handed in a photocopy of another student’s take home exam.
Most of the answers were wrong anyway…
Fantastic…
June 15th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
I read a story many years ago about plaigerising. A student in a fraternity went into the file of collected papers that had been handed down for generations. He copied a paper and turned it in. The professor wrote this comment on his paper: “When I wrote this paper in my undergrad days, I thought it deserved an A but I got a C. So I am giving you the average of the two grades, a B.” I don’t believe the story but I think it is funny.
Here’s a story that isn’t quite a plaigerism story, but it did have to do with my helping another student get a grade. I once typed a friend’s take-home final exam because he couldn’t type very well. His writing was so atrocious that I asked if he minded that I fixed the grammar. He got an A on his paper and I got a B. It turned out that the professor didn’t grade on the content of the paper. He had asked us in the test to state whether we had read all of the reading assignments, most of the reading assignments, some of the reading assignments, none of the reading assignments. I had read about half of the assignments and I wanted to say that I had read more, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that I had read all of the assignment. The professor gave his grades out on the basis of the reading level one admitted to, so I got a B and my friend lied more than I did and got an A.
June 15th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Some people just shouldn’t be cheaters. This gave me plenty of chuckles. Perhaps the stupidest cheat I’ve seen is this one boy who did a paper on the Cherry Blossom Festival, and copy and pasted the content from the first webpage that comes up from the search on the above subject.
June 15th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
A professor of theology told me this story about plaigerism. Although he is a Catholic priest, he was teaching a course at a non-Catholic theology school in Wash DC. He received a paper once that was so typically Catholic in its imagery and use of words that he thought the student was either brilliant or a plaigerist. He asked another friend of his to look at the paper. The friend thought it was familiar so he looked through the books he thought it might have come from. It turned out that the student had copied a chapter from a book by an obscure Polish prelate, Karol Wojtyla, who later was elected Pope and called himself Pope John Paul II.
June 15th, 2006 at 5:30 pm
The stupid thing, the REALLY stupid thing is people do this in all manner of courses, not just achedemic. I’m in a chef school, and we have to occasionally hand in “work plans” outlining complicated cooking labs. You know, along the line of “Cut the vegetables for the soup, get soup on, work on chicken de-boning”. And people feel the need to even copy that, the very way they are supposed to come in and work on their meal. Our chef-instructor pointed out that she can’t catch everyone, but when two people spell “wine” as “whine”, well… it’s certainly not going to encourage her to believe they independantly wrote that.
And yes, for our midterm this week, no less than three strangly identical workplans were handed in. It’s not like spelling, puctuation or ANYTHING literary counts, so it boggles my mind. It’s perhaps 30 minutes of work based on notes you really needed to have been taking during our demonstration classes anyways, but some people can’t be bothered to do even that.
Makes me wonder if they are also the people (not in my class) who the chef mentioned habitually steal other people’s prepared foods out of the fridge to replace their own badly mauled fish fillets and jullienned potatoes.
June 15th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
I saw the opposite with one of my wife’s classes. She was asked to write a set of goals for her clinical class. She turned it in a couple of times but was told it was wrong. Eventually she was given another student’s goals and essentially told, by the teacher, to copy that. Of course the reason why she liked that paper was that the student had just copied bullet points from the teacher’s handout.
June 15th, 2006 at 6:10 pm
I hope you busted them all!
June 15th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
Hehe, Simon (#109) – that’s very similar to the story I was going to relate.
When I started in the department I recently graduated from, I was still going by my married name. Some two years later, I’d reverted to my maiden name.
So anyhow, I end up TAing a class I’d taken in my second quarter there, with all papers handed in under married name. And sure enough, a newer student who only knew me as my maiden name attempted to hand in one of my papers as their own.
I would have been irritated, had I not reacted so well that it shamed the person to drop the class. (Said person handed it in to me, I glanced over it to make sure it included everything I require – name, title, etc – and caught the opening paragraph in the process. Without really thinking, I commented on how much I enjoyed that particular opening hook the first time I read it, right after I finished writing it.)
Moral of the story, and tip #somewhere in the teens – if your prof is a female, do make sure you’re aware of all the names she’s written under.
(And of course, how can I not join the chorus of spellings – as an American that spells like an expat, I’d probably toss a fit being told I had to change the way I spell a word just because someone would rather not read the extra ‘u’. Then again, I tend to pronounce the words as an expat would, so I probably get slides on the assumption that I’m not American – which is quite fine with me!)
June 15th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
My favorite example from teaching high school for 13 years isn’t mine, but my colleague’s. I’m happy to say I was in the room when the follow exchanged occurred:
Teacher: Is this writing completely yours?
Student: Oh yes, I did it by myself.
Teacher: Look, I’m going to give you one chance. Tell me the truth and I’ll let you redo it — Is this 100% your paper?
Student: Yes, it is.
Teacher: Okay, [pointing to a specific page of her paper] tell me about the years you spent as an ombudsman for the District of Columbia.
——————
The sad thing is that evidently many teachers aren’t even educating their students that you can’t just cut and paste without citations. I’ve seen many students “take notes” by cutting and pasting from websites, often without bothering to note their sources. Sad.
June 15th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
My apologies if I am re-iterating what someone above me has said, but I found this article (whilst very funny) profoundly depressing. In it, you more or less confirm what I have suspected for a long time; that educational proffesionals will happily attribute work with any sense of style, consistent grammar and original ideas to copying. Us lowly students are expected to write badly because we are all quite evidently not as bright or accomplished as those god-heads of intellectual monopoly above us. Sorry about the rant, just feel it is a sad state of affairs when flawed grammar and unsophisticated sentence construction can be construed as a positive.
June 15th, 2006 at 7:40 pm
this is hilarious. and, unfortunately, true. one of my students just plagiarized a paper from a Christian website review of the movie version of the book she was supposed to be writing about. best plagiarism ever.
June 15th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Someone once used the last bit of your “excuse” to a colleague of mine: “But I’m in my final year and I’ve _always_ copied my essays out of books. All my other professors have always given it a pass!”
June 15th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
Funny stuff. I used to grade for engineering professors in college and some cheating was SO obvious. This was not writing, but problem solving (you know, big complex story problems :) ). Often a student would try to solve a problem in some crazy ass wrong way and then I’d find another student solving it the same crazy ass way, letter for letter, often duplicating simple math errors.
I’d write smart-ass comments on their papers asking them if they were friends with the author of the similar paper.
June 15th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
I explained in my post “I have lived in the monster” similar techniques for plagiarizing programming projects in computer science courses.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
[...] Link [...]
June 15th, 2006 at 10:05 pm
Good advice. Here’s some more:
1- When you are plagiarising a technical paper, make sure to remove all the usage of “we”, unless your pet mouse is helping
2- If you copy from a paper that has figures in it, don’t forget to copy the figures. It doesn’t look too good to have references to figures that aren’t there
3- Don’t provide ambiguous references in a research paper. They raise the professor’s suspicions. Use completely random references instead.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
It boggles the mind that so many students think they can get away with such obvious tricks…
I wonder for some if their motivation comes not from thinking they can fool their instructor, but from thinking they don’t need to. How many students are thinking “Yeah, it’s obvious I pulled this from the web…but by printing it out and handing it in, I am clearly proving I can find the information online, so why would anyone ever need to write a paper on it?”
I remember when I was a young child(Grade 3 or so) copying out an encyclopedia article to hand in…I asked the teacher about it first, and was told that wasn’t allowed. I was very confused as a child because I couldn’t help but think “Why do *I* need to write a report on the subject when the information is already there in this book? What’s the point – if you just want me to know the information, how about I just tell you I read the article in the encyclopedia and we’re done?”
At least that’s a charitable interpertation for why people might submit such obviously stolen work… I mean, it is hard to believe that people could be stupid enough to think they could get away with it…
June 15th, 2006 at 11:52 pm
[...] 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. [...]
June 16th, 2006 at 1:35 am
I *love* the Rawls excuse!
I struggled with Rawls in Ethics 1xx — and by “struggled”, I obviously mean I was too busy with my drunken orgies to read him but wrote a paper citing Theory of Justice anyway.
June 16th, 2006 at 2:02 am
Dude, you just gave me my new Bible, just in time for third semester of college english!
June 16th, 2006 at 2:14 am
A dead giveaway in Physics assignments is seeing a correct answer with ‘52′ appended – it’s usually a misinterpretation of another student’s hastily-scrawled ‘Ω’ (omega).
June 16th, 2006 at 2:51 am
Thanks for this, it was quite funny.
I’m a student now and can’t get over how many people try to get me to help them cheat. I’ve given up on trying to resist now, but I remeber in 9th grade on a multiple choice test where a girl next to me was copying answers verbatum, I thought I’d teach her a lesson (because the instructor, new and didn’t care). I completed the test quickly, and went to go to the bathroom. When I came back, she was gone, so I went back and changed all my answers to the correct ones. I actually feel bad about that now…
June 16th, 2006 at 3:38 am
Very funny! What isn’t funny however, is the legal process involved in turning in a cheater. One of my students blatantly plagiarized an English comp paper. I needed to go no further than the first stop on Google to prove this (I think we all Google). In spite of the evidence, the University treated me like the criminal. I was cross examined about whether or not I had told her that plagiarism was wrong etc. I had to provide affadavits of other students stating that I had gone over plagiarism in class. I refused to back down and in the end she withdrew from University the day before the hearing was to take place.
The aggravation and loss of time lead other teachers to pass these students along. (It is against the rules at RU to fail a student for plagiarism. Instead the evidence must be submitted to committee).
June 16th, 2006 at 8:26 am
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 …
June 16th, 2006 at 9:07 am
I still have a few more semesters of grades to submit, but I truly enjoyed your cheating “suggestions” here. I suppose there are folks who may think that some of these ideas **never** happen; students would never do such foolish things, however I have experienced several. I had a “memorable” experience with rule number 4: “Dont rite to good.” Several years ago a student turned in a term paper on environmental philosophy that was remarkable (although the student’s prior work was C+, I was thinking “A”). I was doing some research in the area at the time, so some of the student ideas were professionally interesting. During a grading break I Goggled a couple of key ideas in the paper. The **first hit** was an equally remarkable unpublished essay by a west coast philosophy professor, who apparently had plagiarized my student! Their papers were virtually identical, except his essay had a few years priority. The “A” thinking vanished as I prepared a case for the University Student Judicial System.
Come to think of it, but maybe my experience is not so much a violation of rule #4. Perhaps you need another rule: “don’t write on a topic that you professor is **really** interested in.”
Finally, could I have permission to save the print version of this page and post it on my teaching web page? **Obviously,** I would cite you as author & provide the full web citation for the original.
RS
June 16th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Yes, copy and paste is tricky, if there are different font styles, I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Also I remember the surprise of our class when in highschool our teacher started to google sentences of our works. Some students’ world shivered:)
June 16th, 2006 at 10:25 am
I quote Robert DeNiro in ‘The Untouchables’ — “Like many things in life, we laugh because it’s funny and we laugh because it’s true.” I teach an undergrad elective on intellectual property law at my highly selective liberal arts alma mater outside Boston, selective to the point where I probably wouldn’t get in if I applied today. Last fall, a student a) called me the night before the final paper was due and told me he had just started working on it, and b) turned in a paper the next day that “quoted” me directly from our conversation the night before, as if these thoughts were the student’s own.
Then this semester a student who got a week extension on the final (a family member died, and yes, I confirmed that with the dean) turned in an excellent paper…but one whole paragraph was lifted from a Boston Globe essay I happened to have read and enjoyed a few months earlier. I asked her if she had “forgotten” to cite this, and referenced the original article. Her reply was to ask me to reevaluate the paper because she thought she deserved a better grade. Can we make “Don’t be such a jackass” Rule #9?
June 16th, 2006 at 10:34 am
In my grad school days, one of my colleagues received a photocopy of another student’s paper. Now, that’s bold!
June 16th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Hi Stuart (#147):
While I understand your distress, I think you grossly misinterpret this site’s discussion if you truly feel that “educational professionals will happily attribute work with any sense of style, consistent grammar and original ideas to copying.” I have taught college composition classes for ten years, myself, and I am happy to say that the vast majority of my students are bright, well-intentioned, and hard-working scholars who do their own writing and do it very well. There are lots of strong young minds out there, eager for a challenge, looking to make their mark on the world or in the halls of academe.
[I wouldn't teach writing if I thought any other way. One of the greatest joys in life, for me, is reading, and I find new authors' work to love every new term.]
This site, however, is not dedicated to the earnest efforts of those students. It is a place for teachers to blow off steam about the tiny minority of another type of “student” altogether–the ones who lie and cheat and have the effrontery to think educators can’t know (or can’t prove) the difference. It never ceases to amaze me, even after all this time, how much heartache it causes me to find out that a student has turned in work not her or his own. In my experience, it’s only 1-2% of my class roll, so you’d think I wouldn’t care, or could at least keep some perspective about the whole issue.
(At least on this site, profs are willing to look on the bright side: stupidity is occasionally quite funny! :)
But it is a breach of trust, and an implicit claim that the student in question thinks his or her professor too moronic to notice, too apathetic to press charges, or too weak-willed and fearful to stick to her guns if the case becomes a legal issue—as it often does. This is a really big waste of *ALL* of our time–not just for teachers, but for students too. We teachers have to use the energy we should rightfully be using to work with *you*, the students we came to this line of work to mentor.
So please don’t misunderstand: I don’t think most of the teachers here think they are “god-heads”—we’d just like our students to use their own (quite adequate, mortal-type) heads, just like we have to do. Failing that, we’ll have a laugh about some of their more amusing attempts to cheat us–and you–as we continue to do the work you pay us to do….
But thanks, seriously, for speaking for students. Having been one all my life, I appreciate the candor and the perspective.
June 16th, 2006 at 11:59 am
After having caught my first entirely plagiarized paper (Prompting me to suggest the rule that if you are going to a paper mill site don’t copy a free paper; shell out the few extra bucks so that my google search chokes a bit more.) this was a helpful balm on my wounds. [tongue now firmly in cheek] I understand why students would plagiarize on other professor’s assignments but me??!!? So thanks, and I hope you have a colourful summer.
June 16th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
When I worked in the English lab in one of the City Colleges of Chicago, I was often asked to write papers for people. The offer was usually $50 to $100. I always told them that I wouldn’t do it, but if I did, they’d be sorry. Because I can write, and write well, and the teacher would know in an instant that it wasn’t their work. They never believed me – the better the paper sounded, they more they wanted it.
June 16th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
I disagree with your point in 4c; I was in English 10, and apparently my teacher is a solipsistic ass. We rarely ever “learned” anything in his class; we merely listened to him ranting or raving for 15 minutes about an obscure author, or more regularly, Freud’s take on _____, and then it would e our turn to take his words, change a few here and there, spit them righ tback at him, and he’d go on for another 10 minutes about how he agrees with our point. By the end of first quarter, we had all figured out that original writing was discouraged; just write or say the teacher’s ideas and you’re guaranteed an A.
Throughout the course of the year, we wrote perhaps 15 or 20 essays. The grades he gave me ranged from a B- to an A-. However, there was one essay with which I was having real trouble. I failed to come up with a good thesis to begin with, so I went to my teacher for help. He gave me some suggestions. Actually, that’s not really what he did; he told me what to write. And so I did, and later on I received an A for the paper, bearing comments such as “brilliant!,” “well said,” and “excellent paper.”
After that, I told myself “screw this,” and almost never talked in class, and soldiered on with B+ essays. I wanted to write about my own ideas, not my teacher’s. I received a B+ for the year.
Within the next few weeks, I’ll be moving to London, and I’ll be glad to do so for two reasons: a) I’ll get to write “colour” without being corrected, and b) I’ll never have to see my English 10 teacher ever again.
June 16th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Yeah Anonymous Coward, you’ll have that. It’s a strange when copying a teachers ideas is called learning, but copying them from a book is called plagiarism. Sometime you might get the opportunity to learn from a solipsistic ass in a course where said ass is using a textbook they authored; the distinction will become even more grey/gray.
But, (and it’s a but that might be worthy of two t’s) bad teaching is no excuse for plagiarism. Sometimes a B+ is the price of admission for learning that discernment, even about your professor, is a good skill, just like good writing. Straight A’s can mean brilliant; it can mean uncreative too.
June 16th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Cheating, especially in graduate school, is particularly “rediculous”. In an MBA finance class I moderated a series of online postings for discussion of a journal article. I found several incidents of copy-and-paste via Google and reported them to the professor. The incidents caused me to question the value of my effort to pursue an MBA at this particular school. I realize that by not cheating, I am not cheating myself out of an education, but the other students’ cheating cheapens the quality of the school. Shame on them.
June 16th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
I will say though, in the very least, students who cheat are at least better preparing themselves for the world ahead. Business is about cheating. It’s about taking the ideas of others and, in some cases, improving upon them (though I can think of numerous times where this is certainly NOT the case). So I would argue that in a way, it is a form of learning. Just not the kind professors appreciate.
June 16th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
I have two stories that are related to this article and the comments made.
First, when I was a college freshman, I was wrongly accused of plagiarism. It was a literature class that I actually rather liked. I had just turned in the second paper of the semester and I hadn’t really put much effort into the first. Since, we were allowed to write on anything that we had covered in class, I was excited to let my mind lose and tackle something really interesting. Having been in college for all of two months, it was a very upsetting and humiliating experience to be accused of cheating. He didn’t believe me until I showed him all the sources I read (for ideas, not content) and my methodology for writing the paper. I realize now that it was just the sort of cynicism shown here that lead him to think I had plagiarized.
Finally, in a more recent example, I was extremely surprised to get an A in a class I had expected to fail. It was a World Lit. course and I was trying to hold down a full time job and take a full load over the summer. I am not defending myself but I had three papers due at the end of the class and I only completed one. I had finished the outlines for the final two but just ran out of time before I could get them into a coherent essay from. In defeat, I turned in the one paper along with the two outlines for kicks. I am forced to wonder if I had cheated and tried to slap together some essays if I would have still made an A.
June 16th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
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…
June 16th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
I have two stories that are related to this article and the comments made.
First, when I was a college freshman, I was wrongly accused of plagiarism. It was a literature class that I actually rather liked. I had just turned in the second paper of the semester and I hadn’t really put much effort into the first. Since we were allowed to write on anything that we had covered in class, I was excited to let my mind loose and tackle something really interesting. Having been in college for all of two months, it was upsetting and humiliating to be accused of cheating. He didn’t believe me until I showed him all the sources I read (for ideas, not content) and my methodology for writing the paper. I realize now that it was just the sort of cynicism shown here that lead him to think I had plagiarized.
Finally, in a more recent example, I was extremely surprised to get an A in a class I had expected to fail. It was a World Lit. course and I was trying to hold down a full time job and take a full load over the summer. I am not defending myself but I had three papers due at the end of the class and I only completed one. I had finished the outlines for the final two but just ran out of time before I could get them into a coherent essay from. In defeat, I turned in the one paper along with the two outlines for kicks. I am forced to wonder if I had cheated and tried to slap together some essays if I would have still made an A.
(edited for grammar and spelling, teaches me to post before proofreading!!!)
June 16th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Intro programming class. Girl A and Girl B hand in identical assignments. When Girl A is called in to talk to the prof, she strenuously denies having engaged in any wrongdoing, though “my boyfriend helped me out with it”. Girl B is called in and asked the same question, and says “well, my boyfriend helped me out with it”. Awkward silence from the prof. “But I think he has other girlfriends”.
June 16th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
When I was in High School there was no world wide web, or at least we had never heard of it. I once handed in 3 pages I photocopied right out of the encyclopedia, and told my teacher “just read the parts I highlighted.” He got a good laugh out of that and I turned in my real paper.
At the time it was funny because it was so absurd, but now I realize that what I considered satire is for others a reality. How depressing.
June 16th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
1. sherriff Says:
May 26th, 2006 at 18.10
read Alex “how to cheat†post….luved it…so satirical…
how do u come across such great posts on the net with such regularity…thats a mystery
and yes there is so much of pressure to succeed and so many things to do….that can be one excuse for cheating…but why do we blame them alone….kids imitate what they observe in the society
2. sathish Says:
May 27th, 2006 at 19.30
:)
3. Amrit Says:
May 30th, 2006 at 20.44
People in Bollywood have been getting “inspired†since the time immemorial. The difference these days is, the inpiration these days is purer.
1.
mirroring, as I think it is called, does become tedious at times, since following the herd to become part of its tail is somewhat sad.
Luckily a lot of the bloggers I read are capable of addressing these news facts in their own style, from their own points of view. Perhaps this distinguishes the blogosphere from traditional media, all picking up on the same Reuters story without much distinction? Most blogging is and will (luckily) remain a personal endeavour. That makes it so interesting and such a joy to participate, I think.
Fascinating post and comment thread on the Isuzu story, btw.
Cheers & thanks for blogging!
Comment by Napfisk — 5/29/2006 @ 1:56 am
2.
Best Blog Forward…
Via Alex: Kevin Lim is requesting that bloggers write a post about their most popular blog entries and to tag the entry through Technorati with bestblogforward. Because I can never resist an excuse to go digging through my archives, I’m……
Trackback by the chutry experiment — 5/29/2006 @ 10:21 am
3.
[...] While my professor Alex Halavais and blogger Julie Meloni noted the flimsy metrics I suggested for finding your popular blog posts, it really doesn’t matter. The results might differ according to methodology, but they shouldn’t stray off the same cluster of thought unless you have a tendency to write eclectically. [...]
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June 16th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
“Its better to cheat than repeat”
“When in doubt look about”
I am 17 and have a 162 IQ. I cheat, it doesnt mean im stupid, its just why try hard at subjects your never going to see again and your most certainly not going to major in, such as International Baccalaureate Spanish 3…. haha, I hated that class with a passion
June 16th, 2006 at 7:45 pm
I teach in academic writing courses at two universities in Tokyo. These are courses for English majors, so the courses are meant to prepare students to actually write MLA style research papers or essays about novels they have read in English.
The student who copies too much and includes “Click here for more information” is always good for a laugh, or a sigh.
One caveat regarding rule 7: “Borrow from someone who writes as badly as you do.”
I had a fourth year student last year join my second year academic writing class. He’d failed with another teacher in second year, failed with me in third year, and was well on his way to not graduating because he just couldn’t pass this required course. I failed him last year because he didn’t turn in the paper. I tried to cut him a deal–100 words in English every week for 12 weeks about his topic and I would pass him. It’s not his fault that he is a fourth year student who should never have been admitted to the English department in the first place, and once he was there never received the instruction he needed.
So, he plodded along for a few weeks, then turned in a 2500 word research paper. One paragraph at the beginning and end from him with the rest soon found with Google. He swore up and down that he hadn’t copied. He cried great salty tears before many of his classmates in the hallway after class. Even faced with the offending website, he swore he hadn’t copied.
Rule 7 B “Borrow from someone who writes as badly as you do. However, if you get your girlfriend to write your paper for you, make sure they know how to cheat good.”
June 16th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
[...] Alex Halavais » How to cheat good. [...]
June 16th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
Inspiration is not the same as plagiarism, folks.
And a friend helped me understand that plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement.
Resorting to plagiarism is most often the action of someone who is lazy (intellectually), not necessarily stupid. People do not usually get paid when they don’t do their job at work, so why should a student be rewarded with a degree? F = FAILURE & FIRED.
Loved the article. Brilliant. Thanks.
June 17th, 2006 at 12:12 am
I have a terrible urge to plagiarize this somewhere just for ironic value.
June 17th, 2006 at 12:15 am
Ok, so the use of “ironic” broke rule #5, since plagiarism in that context might be apropros, but would not be irony. Excellent post.
June 17th, 2006 at 1:18 am
Your Chinese-Room excuse is interesting, and I think this is most vital, examines the nature of knowledge and ability. Life isn’t a closed book test and while I myself test well, I would much rather work with a creative person who can make the work of others work for them than some tortured genius who elaborately reinvents wheel after wheel.
The core issue is dishonesty, and I think this is most vital, as a dishonest answer can’t be trusted at all, despite the technical skill of the liar. However, I do feel like the system is stacked in such a way as to almost guarantee cheaters. For instance, grades are assigned largely on the whim of the teacher and can have little reletion to the classwork and much to interpersonal relations, a grading curve, or an “Only 3 As” policy.
Great grades, unfairly, are required for many positions and further education. By inaccurately manipulating those grades, even unwittingly as you describe by your “[...]less likely to suffer her ire, since it will amuse her[...]” comment you are playing god with a students future. Until the system is fixed such that a students dreams of a success aren’t turned to a nightmare of low grades and “Would you like fries with that?” jokes through unrealistic policies of the schools. While it’s possible for anyone with a documented disability to get out of anything they consider remotely dull (I used this to my ability during my least-favorite classes) someone who “merely” reads at half the speed of their fellows is going to be stuck taking the same timed tests and made to appear an idiot, by transcript alone.
And so I re-submit that the Chinese Room point is very vital, as that’s a much better model than the rote learning one for producing a useful person.
June 17th, 2006 at 4:30 am
[...] 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.* [...]
June 17th, 2006 at 6:49 am
Heh :)
We had a hilarous cheating failure during our final essay in high school that illustrates #3 very well. Here (well, it was true when I was finishing high school 5 years ago), students have to pick one of 6-8 topics (most are semi-specific topics about some classic book/author or some problem/whatever in context of some book, and one is usually some kind of “free topic” about some problem or area of life “in general”) and you have to produce an essay in 3 hours or so, in class. Most people choose free topic (I did ;)). Amoung the few of those who have taken complex book-related topics in our class were two guys sitting on the opposite sides of the class. They both took the same topic and their essays were identical, word by word. They got essay bases off the internet and printed them out in tiny font, except that they both had the same set, and they pikked the matching essay to copy; the same essay for both. They were given the lowest mark that enabled them to pass, just out of mercy :)
June 17th, 2006 at 9:05 am
I’m tempted to a) share my funny story, and b) make a serious comment. So I’ll do them both, in that order.
I’ve never cheated, but I did once deliberately do poor work to get a better grade. See, I had one creative writing class taught by an overworked TA who really didn’t know what he was doing, and didn’t have time to try to figure it out. He just split us up into small groups, gave us vague assignments, told us to peer-review each other’s rough drafts, and then he got on with his own studies while we worked with each other.
I wrote my first paper for the class, and gave it to the rest of my group to be peer-reviewed while I PR’ed theirs. My comments were things like, “Move this paragraph to here, eliminate this sentence, refine this point, take out this blatant spelling error, discuss this further, et cetera.” Theirs went, “Wow! This is really good!” I got a B, they got an A.
That was when I figured out how the teacher graded. He looked at the rough draft, looked at the final draft, and the more changes you made, the higher your grade. Needless to say, my rough drafts got substantially worse immediately afterwards. :)
And the serious comment: I’ve seen all sorts of comments on this entry blaming lazy teachers, incompetent teachers, arrogant teachers, and one notable entry where someone with a “162 IQ” and the inability to use apostrophes properly blames having to learn about things that he doesn’t want to. The fact of the matter is, those are all just excuses. People use plagarism to avoid having to absorb and comprehend the knowledge they’re supposed to be learning for the course (which is why you can’t just recopy the encyclopedia–it’s not enough to know you’ve read it, forcing you to restate it in your own words shows you understand it.) They know that it’s wrong, and every “blame the teacher” line is just the next line of excuses after “I didn’t do it.” Even if you didn’t have the honesty to do the work, have the honesty to admit it’s your own fault.
June 17th, 2006 at 9:16 am
WNight: As I noted, I generally grade blind to try to minimize the bias that I might have–say–toward an attractive student. That said, I see no problem with grading higher for ideas that attract me.
It’s not playing god to say I know what I think is right. I think saying more than that is probably a bit too egotistical. Nonetheless, the process of education is one of learning form people who are experts: that is, from people who have spent more time with a topic than you have. That doesn’t mean that they are always right, but it does mean that they tend to represent (often) the consensus of current thinking on a topic.
Grades are a way of communicating this back to the student. I realize that they are used for more than this, particularly for entry into graduate school. I don’t mind this–it’s not as though things change in graduate school: you are still expected to be able to articulate the position of the instructor.
I prefer when students engage in the material in a critical way. In each of my syllabi, I make clear that the sole criterion for an A is that the student teach me something. But the nature of the beast is that we are humans grading humans.
How this can possibly be used as an excuse for theft is beyond me. I certainly don’t expect students to reinvent the wheel. No one will do well in one of my assignments by starting from scratch. I simply ask that they not present material that is not their own as their own material; i.e., plagiarize.
I’ll reiterate an earlier comment. It’s not that plagiarists or cheaters are stupid, or even that they are lazy (though this is often the case). It is that they are dishonest. If you draw from someone else’s work, the modern Western view is that you are expected to cite that work. (Indeed, the only way the “shoulders of giants” things works is if your readers can identify the giants.) When you fail to do so, you are implying that you have come up with the material on your own.
I see several comments above that say “so what?” It really is a question of honor and ethics. If you are willing to be known as a dishonorable person, and to bring disrepute to your school and classmates, then you will plagiarize–and there will always be people who do. Just as there will always be people willing to mug others at knifepoint, or steal a purse left unguarded. Just because it works for you, doesn’t make it the right thing to do. And just because you have excuses, even good excuses (society unjustly distributes wealth, school is boring, etc.), doesn’t change the social fact that it is unethical behavior.
June 17th, 2006 at 11:18 am
Interesting and amusing article, thanks!
I sometimes wonder about students. When I was an engineering TA, I supervised a lab where the experiment did not go well. In fact, it pretty much failed to show what we had hoped it would show. But, when I was grading a few lab reports, I was surprised to see perfect data and perfect graphs. What the writer had done was to use the information from his textbook to massage his data and graphs to be “presentable”. The problem was I am of the school that believes that science is messy, and I am highly suspicious (sp?) of perfect data. The offending student received a C on this paper because I was restricted by faculty on how low I could go.
It is my experience that such works of academic dishonesty are ignored or encouraged by the actions of the instructors. Certainly, there is an ethical question ont he part of the students, but there is just as much blame to be placed on lazy instructors. There is an unstated contract between a student and professor that should preclude cheating in all its forms. But, it has been my unfortunate experience that the contract is broken more often by the instructor than it is by the students.
June 17th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
[...] 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 differencesâ€.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. [...]
June 17th, 2006 at 6:58 pm
I once turned in a 15 page term paper with nothing but “Blah blah blah blah. Blah, blah blah blah….” you get the idea. My teacher was amused enough to give me a D for proper punctuation rather than the F I deserved.
June 17th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
When I attended college all students were required to form their responses to tests with a pen. The pen was used on a parchment-like substance called paper. Typewriters, for the few students who had them, were not electrified. Yes, that’s correct; manual typewriters, very heavy manual typewriters that spit out smudgy letters which often had to be corrected using, of all things, an eraser.
Plagiarism was usually accomplished by copying something from a book in a library using the ever-present pen. Cut and paste was not an available option. There were no copy machines. That’s right. No copy machines. And Cliff Notes, well, they didn’t exist either.
Oddly enough, it was easier to simply sit down and think about a test question for awhile then it was to locate someone else’s thoughts and borrow or pilfer those thoughts for your own use.
And most students did just that; think, that is. But not all, not all of us.
College doors in those days were not clamped shut with high-density magnetic locks opened only with a plastic key card whose identity is verified via intranet with a computer database encrypted with some unhackable 256 bit military-grade algorithm. No, in my day most doors were easily opened with little more than a pen knife or a clumsily duplicated key, and those individuals who were naturally inclined to burglary could sneak into the professor’s chamber late at night while the unsuspecting faculty member was enjoying his or her very dry martini and pondering lofty and irrelevant socio-economic concepts. You could leisurely search through the instructor’s simple manila folders for previously submitted papers on the testable subject matter, remove those bearing a non-scarlet “A,†and then stealthily secrete those papers between shirt and chest and take them back to a remote dormitory room for purposes of perusal and plagiarism. The process was repeated in reverse during the next evening, usually with the assistance of an inebriated colleague standing guard outside as a look-out.
Of course, we knew enough not to simply copy the stuff we had stolen. We re-wrote it using our own words. It is, after all, the thought that counts, especially Grade-A thoughts.
Very tidy, and no one ever got caught – except me. Then I was forced, like a horse being broken or a bird being caged, against every natural human tendency towards freedom, comfort and ease, to extricate myself by actually doing something original and creative. I will never – ever – forgive the noxious administration personnel who dogged me without mercy like rabid Nazis for the remainder of my academic career, claiming all the time that they were doing me an immense favour – yes, favour – simply allowing me to remain enrolled against their better judgment. The vermouth-breathing scoundrels even required me to provide handwriting samples, just to make sure it was I who had written the stuff I handed in. I despised every dreadful degrading moment I had to endure on my loathsome journey to graduation and degreehood. And, I am sad to report, the process of thinking long and hard before plagiarizing has become a life-long habit, but not one I can comfortably recommend to others due to, ahem, natural inclinations.
So you see how easy you have it. Now all you need to properly perform plagiarism is Google, a little bit of bandwidth, and a purloined word processor. You don’t even need to leave your dorm room. The only way you can get caught is by being really, honestly, truly and unrepentently lazy and stupid.
Life is so much better now.
June 18th, 2006 at 1:17 am
You know… I wouldn’t mind reading through all the comments if half of you didn’t copmlain and gripe about being British or American or Canadian or just plain ANAL. Everything that the author wrote, no matter what style, was meant to be that way and if you don’t catch any humor… Too bad for you. Just shut up. I don’t care where you came from.
June 18th, 2006 at 9:56 am
Excellently said. I’ve managed to fill the better part of two hours at work reading this thread, which goes to show my academic honesty has paid off with a job that gives me depressingly little to do.
Having recently graduated, I’m reminded of some amusing paper-writing goofs I was witness to. One of my many work-study positions was in the student writing center, proofreading papers for interested students. The theoretical purpose of the center was to help students improve the organization, tone and topic-centeredness of their papers. In reality we had two kinds of students: the lazy ones who wanted living spell checkers and the paranoid grad students who would take their essays to three different evaluators because they were sure we were missing some grievous error. However, for students whose schools have similar programs, student writing evaluators are probably the easiest way to make your plagarism harder to detect, because they will kindly point out differences in word choice, font color, and writing style, and many of them will take cash to make the corrections themselves.
One case of headdesk from that job I’ll never forget is the freshman who brought in her first World Cultures response essay. The formatting was weird, and after about a page and a half I started to get a headache (but not, surprisingly from the subject matter). I mentioned that she needed to double space all of her academic papers, and she said, “Oh, but I already did; it took forever for me to go through and add the extra spaces.” I looked closer, and sure enough she had put:
two spaces between each word. And then four spaces between sentences.
Finally, I will admit that even though I love creative writing and am not particularly lazy, I once plagarized an paper. It was a 15 page thesis for my high school senior Bible class (parochial school) and I wasn’t religious. I had put off doing it until the day before it was due because I just didn’t want to. I stayed home sick and spent the day taking 15 pages of material to make a persuasive paper on apologetics. It was almost as much work as writing the paper myself, so I didn’t feel too bad when the paper got a 998 out of a possible 1000 points (-2 for an typo) and was lauded before the class as a sterling example of pre-collegiate work.
June 18th, 2006 at 10:47 am
Dear god – are you so stupid you can’t see irony Steve etc etc??? The spelling issue isn’t about what’s right or wrong..it’s about being consistent with your local norms…To plagiarize a favourite author “Irony is of course the key word here. Americans don’t use it much (actually I’m being ironic; they don’t use it at all)
Bill Bryson: Notes from a Big Country
June 18th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
I remember one class in college, where I was accused of plagiarism. Truth was, I had NOT plagiarized, and was eventually able to prove it to not only the satisfaction of the dean, but to the satisfaction of the ethics board – at MY request! It was that, or fail the class. It seems the conclusion I wrote to a term paper had a word for word identical conclusion of a published book on the topic. Thing is, I had never SEEN the book. There were all of 4 known copies of a self published work, and the professor owned one of the copies. The other 3 I did not have access to. For some reason, the dean and the board believed me, but the teach always insisted that I copied this paragraph from the author of this book.
Sigh
Always did wish I got to read the book – it sounded interesting once I found out about it
June 18th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Another tip – only use a word if you know what it means. My favourite trick, if I’m not sure whether if you’ve plagiarised, is to use the unusual words in coversation with you. If you don’t understand me, you’re about to get investigated …
And I agree – it’s about consistency. I feel for the students who have been accused of plagiarism for working harder – and it’s a good reminder as we get cynical to go softly and look for a real explanation with an open mind – because it *might* be true. Maybe.
Oh yes, I’m English :)
June 18th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
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…
June 19th, 2006 at 10:29 am
1. Great read Alex, can’t believe the number of comments. Seems like everybody loves to hear about cheaters? hmmm
2. let’s not forget about cheating by *teachers* (to help their students on standardized tests) like as made famous by levitt’s paper http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/9413.html
Again it was patterns of errors was one factor that gave them away … when students copied the teacher’s errors!
June 19th, 2006 at 11:11 am
I taught high school history, and once gave an assignment on the Popes (you know, the Catholic ones…). Anyway, this one student wrote a looong paper on Pope Alexander, obviously copied. You know, the one who lived his whole life in England, was friends with Jonathan Swift, wrote “The Rape of the Lock.” Oh well, he was Catholic….
June 19th, 2006 at 11:31 am
My favorite excuse ever offered as to why a student couldn’t turn in her final paper on time is, I am not kidding, “because I am planning to have sex tonight.”
June 19th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
Ward Churchill.
June 19th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
This article was vey amusing. Since we are sharing plagiarism stories, I am reminded of one from my first year of teaching. Since I teach 8th grade grammar and composition, I required evidence of the whole research process over the course of several weeks. I had discussed/explained plagiarism to my classes, but many chose not to heed my warnings. I had students to plagiarise me, but mostly they copied from the web. One student plagiarised her rough draft from the Internet and was surprised when I caught her. She was referred to the administration and received a zero for the rough draft grade, but still had the opportunity to submit an original final draft. Imagine my surprise when I read her final draft and it, too, was plagiarised, this time from the library’s encyclopedia. She tried to say I didn’t give her enough time to write an original report. The following year, I showed my students how I catch plagiarism and showed them examples of students’ writing that had been caught. They took great pleasure in laughing at their peers and took the lesson to heart. That year I had only one instance of plagiarism.
June 19th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
As a Political Science TA, I was amazed to discover several students actually cited the website from which the cut and pasted entire pages of texts. A good rule of thumb is don’t list where you are plagiarizing from in the bibliography or in the annotation.
June 19th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Katie: For what it’s worth, I tend to assume that students who do that really do have a bad grasp on what plagiarism consists of. Of course, if all the material is cut and paste, that is another story. But if they have failed to quote properly–but have cited the material–I tend to assume “stupid” rather than “dishonest.” They will still get a zero on the assignment, though…
June 19th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
Someone (Pete Seeger keeps nagging at my mind–though I haven’t been able to validate this) once said, “…when you borrow from one person, it’s called plagerism, but when you borrow from hundreds of people — it’s called ‘research’.” Anyway — as a former H.S. teacher, I have to agree, what irked me the most with cheating was not that kids were doing it (which was just sad, really)–but that they were doing it so half-a**ed.
June 19th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
if no one minds, i’m just going to copy this fulltext on my blog sans attribution now…
June 19th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
This made my day! Although I had hoped our high school students would be plagiarising at a higher level by the time they reached college….
Comment by Dave — 5/19/2006 @ 2:33 pm
June 19th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
My favorite one was when I was grading programming assignments for a 100-level computer science course. As I was grading the program, I noticed a lot of people making the same mistake in formatting their output.
So, I decided to grep for the particular format string, and got about 35 offenders out of the class of around 400. Some of the more popular mistakes:
1) Handing in the program from adjacent workstations at about the same time (found 10 clusters)
2) Trivial renaming of variables
3) Trivial recommenting
4) Forgetting to remove the name of the guy who wrote the original wrong solution.
Sadly, instead of failing them on the course as policy would have dictated, the professor wimped out and just failed them on the assignment.
June 19th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
I was the victim of a plagerist. One fine day sitting in a CS class, I happened to look at the screen being used by the student in the row ahead of me. I had arrived late to the class and this ‘gentleman’ was in the seat I generally used. While I sat the re watching, I saw him open files from the hard-drive, including copies of the work I had done the day before! (Apparently I had neglected to delete the files as I usually did.) When I confronted him, he tried to deny it and begged me not to tell the teacher about it.
He did have enough sense to change the name of the file, as well as the author’s name, but not enough to check if said author was sitting behind him!!
June 19th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Alex,
It is you who spell colour incorrectly – it is our language, and while not being as prissy about it as the Academie Francais, please accept that ours is the true, original, spelling – of course after the various other languages we may have borrowed it from!
London. you know, the one in Englandshire……
June 19th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
Alex –
In law school (1984-1985), I was part of a study group that collaborated on putting together notes for all of the 1st year classes. I collected, edited, reformatted and printed out my Contracts class notes for my study group. It was a pretty good effort. Four years later, while I was a practicing attorney back on campus recruiting for my firm, I walked through the Law Library reading room and noted that one of the first years was studying from my Contracts Outline (which had pretty wide distribution, apparently). My Contracts prof had never changed either his textbook or the cases he covered in class. It gave me a bit of an ego boost, I must admit . . . .
June 19th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
Ah, favorite stories! Here’s mine:
It’s the mid-70’s; I’m a teaching assistant in a huge introductory biology class at the U. of Illinois/Chicago campus. Final exam is given in the biggest lecture hall we have, and students are seated with an empty chair on either side of them. We then pass out two versions of the exam, differing only in the order of the four choices of answers to each of the 100 multiple-choice questions, so that each student with version A is seated between two students with version B. We make an announcement to the effect that your neighbor has a different version than you do. Exams are taken, turned in, and graded.
And a girl in my section gets just 6 out of 100 correct. Even if she had made random choices, she would’ve had a score closer to 25. She simply copied all her neighbors’ answers, which of course made each one wrong. She is confronted, denies wrongdoing, and flunks the course.
But there’s more: two years later I get a call from a college administrator, because the girl, still in college and apparently close to graduating, has claimed that there was a mistake made in her biology grade. I assure the administrator that there was no mistake.
So apparently this blatant copier and liar had survived two years’ worth of other classes without being caught again. Hard to imagine. I never heard whether she managed to con her way to graduation, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
June 20th, 2006 at 9:22 am
To Rusty, poster at #179: You may be a 17-year-old genius with a 162 IQ, but it’s hard to tell. You can’t punctuate or spell worth a damn. I wonder how well you cheat if you can’t even write a decent sentence.
June 20th, 2006 at 9:58 am
I wrote a grant for turnitin at the high school where I teach English. It changed everything, THAT YEAR.
The most effective anti-plagiarism device I have found is the blue book. There’s no cutting and pasting because they aren’t allowed to bring in scissors or glue.
As 94% of our graduates go on to “higher” education, one of the biggest selling points vs. plagiarism is the terrible cost they will pay for stealing in college. When college professors don’t check and prosecute, that has a terrible impact on down the line.
As I tell my students, “When in doubt, cite it out.” It’s the difference, often, between theft and good research.
Favorite case of cheating: Student resubmitted an essay on morality from the previous year. He hadn’t changed the date.
June 20th, 2006 at 10:51 am
After slogging through 214 other comments, I figured I should add a few of my own.
First, we must remember the 11th commandment: Thou Shalt Not Get Caught. If you can successfully navigate this commandment, then I don’t want to know. This includes being smart enough to pull off the crime, being thorough enough that it’s not detectable, and not annoying anyone who is “in on it” (intentionally or not) who could rat you out.
Second, My own personal anecdote about cheating comes from the second grade. My parents were called in because the teacher was convinced I had someone else, possibly multiple someone elses, doing my handwritten assignments. I had to demonstrate for her that I had four distinct handwriting styles ranging from neat block lettering to nearly illegible scrawl. These four styles have been analyzed (analysed?) for those of you curious, and only two come up with any pathological leanings.
Third, about Queen’s and American English: Growing up I read CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Douglas Adams and Poe more than I read Hardy Boys or MAD Magazine (which was considerable). My mother and sister both specialized in English (My sister in Shakespeare and Chaucer specifically) though I am very much an American. I always ended up getting the word “SYNTAX” in big red letters across every paper, and having the words “colour” and “armour” struck out with equal vigour. (You like how I did that?) It was not until last year (My first year of graduate school) that I realized my “Academic” syntax and spelling came from my early reading experiences.
Finally, If you wish to address cheating, you have to ask yourself three questions:
1- Are you trying for fear of being caught?
2- Are you trying for a sense of honour and dignity?
3- Are you taking it personally?
If the answer to the first question is “Yes” you have to understand that punishment is only a deterrent if consistent and public. Question two is made more difficult because most people just don’t have these concepts, especially in the west. The third question is something I think most of you know the answer to. Most students are told they are just a number to their professors. They know they have 13 weeks with you and then maybe a chance at 13 more, but it’s not like we connect with our students in anything other than a pedagological way. (To do otherwise invites accusations of fraternization).
Unless you are teaching medicine or martial arts, the honor and responsibility of the student will mostly only affect themselves. After all, who wouldn’t want a defense lawyer who was able to weasel his way through 22 years of school? That’s a pretty strong recommendation.
June 20th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
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……
June 20th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
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……
June 21st, 2006 at 11:28 am
Great article.
Stunning, too, how many teachers apparently need help with reading comprehension. Seems that universities in Canada and the UK may be slipping in this regard. ;)
June 21st, 2006 at 3:13 pm
[...] 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. [...]
June 21st, 2006 at 11:54 pm
Heres my tip:
If you have to write a paper on something (especially science topics), find a good review paper on the same topic and cite the same sources the review paper cites in different words. Heck even get two or three review papers (especially good are ones the university dosen’t have electronic access to!). Don’t cite the review papers of course. Easy as pie and noone the wiser!
June 22nd, 2006 at 1:16 am
Dear (former) Dean of the Buffalo Blogosphere…
Did you learn all of this in Buffalo? Can’t wait to cut and paste this and make it my own!
Thanks…
June 22nd, 2006 at 8:57 am
I git thru 4 years of colleg education at the BYU by doing something even ezier that you hav posted hear.
I take articles or Wikipedia entries like all these others students & then I goes to Babblefish and translate them into French, then translate them to Spanish, then translate them back to English. It is sooo sweet, the errors that apear are just enough for earning an A- or B+ depending on the professor. It only took me 20 minutes to “write” a 5 page paper.
I’m now earning $38,000 a year working for Enterprise Car Rentals, and my ingeniosity didn’t hurt me none.
June 22nd, 2006 at 9:55 am
shouldn’t that be cheat well ;) 8Þ…… but on another note…. thanks…….. sadly all my exams are gone for the summer……
June 22nd, 2006 at 2:58 pm
My father once had a student plagiarize in an upper division short story writing class. He called her in and explained how serious this was, and she burst into tears. He then pointed out that this was worse than she thought, because she had plagiarized a story from the required reading, indicating she hadn’t touched any of that material either. At this point her sobs grew even louder and she said “Oh God it’s worse than even that. I took it from a Twilight Zone episode!”
Dad went home pretty blue that day.
June 22nd, 2006 at 7:56 pm
[...] 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 [...]
June 24th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
212. Oh, lovely, another person who seems to believe that she owns the rights to a language. If you truly think that British spelling is correct and American is not, you ARE just as prissy as the Academie Francais. They’re both correct–they’re just different. Spelling changes (yes, even in British English) in the same way that accents do. (Or do go around arguing that speakers of Old English were the “true, original” purveyors of the language?) That’s how language works. American spelling has been around long enough that it’s time for you to stop treating it as some sort of quaint, aberrant trend.
By the way, Alex, great post!
June 24th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Excellent. As a new to teaching but experienced RN, I will enjoy using your “research” to identify those who would be a danger to society if they “cheated” while caring for real paople.
June 25th, 2006 at 5:14 am
Sounds like cheating at good old UB was a lot easier back in the 80s when I did it.
June 26th, 2006 at 5:51 am
[...] Last post for tonight. Alex Halavais about cheating in your essays: [...]
June 26th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Rusty #179 reminds me of a traffic crash that I helped investigate near Bellbrook, Ohio. A motorcycle operator slid off a sharp curve at the end of a long straight. He was launched into a treetop before landing dead on the ground beneath it. His pre-skid speed calculated out to 87 MPH in the 35 zone. He worked in rocketry for the USAF, but his riding showed contempt for the very laws of physics he worked with daily. I fear Rusty is headed for the same fall. Happy landing!
June 27th, 2006 at 1:53 am
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.
June 27th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Someone once applied for a job at an architecture firm I worked for and used my work in their portfolio. Ooops.
June 27th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
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?
June 27th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
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.
June 27th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
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.
June 28th, 2006 at 10:09 am
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.
June 28th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
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.
June 28th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
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.
June 29th, 2006 at 2:29 am
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?
June 29th, 2006 at 8:25 am
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.
June 29th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
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.
June 30th, 2006 at 1:29 am
[...] از این نوشته به قلم الکس هلویسخوشم آمده، آنقدر Ú©Ù‡ دوست داشتم اگر Ùرصتی Ùˆ Øوصله‌ای پیدا کردم Ùارسیش کنم. این نوشته یک ترجمه‌ی آزاد از آن مطلب است. [...]
July 2nd, 2006 at 6:36 pm
[...] 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. [...]
July 6th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
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…
July 7th, 2006 at 8:16 am
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?
July 9th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
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
August 16th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
[...] 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. [...]
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:12 am
[...] 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. [...]
September 5th, 2006 at 11:06 am
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…
September 5th, 2006 at 11:08 am
*the kids wouldn’t have been _able to_ tell me…*
Sorry.
September 29th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Is anybody here?
October 5th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
My mother, an English professor, once received a paper which began, “To those of us who knew William Faulkner…”
October 23rd, 2006 at 6:11 pm
[...] 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”. [...]
November 2nd, 2006 at 7:44 pm
[...] 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… [...]
November 6th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
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.
November 8th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Nice :) I agree this you.
April 17th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
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.
May 5th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
[...] Brian needs to combine two or more site links – Sheesh, I can knock this one out right now! How about this and this? [...]
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:33 am
Wow. I thought I was the only one with REALLY STUPID students.
July 12th, 2007 at 11:17 am
[...] 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. [...]
July 13th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
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?
July 16th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
how i make cheats
August 14th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
[...] 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 [...]
March 13th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Above all, do not select a professor that uses Turnitin.com what ever you do!!!
May 8th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
A. Yes that is my real name.
B. Why at the top of the page people are complaining about the writing in british thing?
July 23rd, 2008 at 4:19 pm
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.
June 14th, 2009 at 6:16 am
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.”
August 31st, 2009 at 12:49 pm
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.
October 21st, 2009 at 10:23 pm
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!
December 4th, 2009 at 3:53 am
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.