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.

Blatant plagiarism is bad enough for the student involved, but it trickles down to the rest of us. I had a 4.0, was in the honors program for English, LAH honors, and was a double-major in Latin. For this one class, I had turned in two previous papers and gotten A’s with glowing comments on both. I turned in my third paper and the teacher accused me of cheating because it was “too polished”. To be fair, I don’t think he thought I copied so much as I had written it before or something, but it was extremely upsetting. Even worse, he didn’t accuse me officially so I couldn’t really file a complaint or anything–but he severely damaged my credibility with the other professors in the department, and I had to write my thesis the next year. So yeah, it’s not only dishonest, but it hurts the rest of us who actually work on our papers, too.

On a lighter note, I work at the writing center at my college and there are tons of rules about what we can/can’t do to avoid any hints of “collusion”. Quite often I’ll have ESL kids come in who don’t cite–not because they are trying to actively cheat, but the Western system of citing everything isn’t what they were taught. I usually gently remind them that they need to cite their sources. Then we get native speakers who come in and have paragraphs like: “The dichotomy between the natural world and the mechanical one creates an underlying tension throughout the novel. These are good. I think the natural world is better.”

Um, pretty obvious. I have no authority to report cheating, so I usually point it out and say, “Oh, so what were you trying to say here?” and wait while they hem and haw their way through an explanation… If I notice it, trust me, your teacher is going to notice it.

Anyway, lovely article–when I’m a professor, I’m so putting a copy of this up somewhere!

I assume that this form of cheating only applies to writing papers, which goes for only so far in secondary education.

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?

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.

Cheating isn’t a victimless crime. It’s destroying the value of a degree for all those students who aren’t cheating.

Sorry.

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…