From Plagiarism Today:
1: Plagiarism Detection Software is Everywhere
Your school may advertise that it uses plagiarism detection technology of some sort. They may even require you to sign a waiver to run your content through it.
However, even if your school doesn’t run a dedicated system, it doesn’t mean that you’re off the hook and no one is checking for plagiarism.
Plagiarism detection tools are ubiquitous in 2018 and, even if your school hasn’t adopted a solution, it doesn’t mean your teachers haven’t. There are a variety of low-cost tools that teachers can and do use on their own. Even Google can be turned into a powerful plagiarism detection tool with a bit of work.
. . . .
3: If You’re Accused of Plagiarism, There’s Little Defense
Though schools often structure their academic disciplinary system to be like that of a court of law, it rarely operates anything like one.
In any disciplinary hearing, including plagiarism, the playing field is inevitably tilted against the accused.
There are many reasons for this, the biggest is that such cases don’t usually get brought unless the evidence is overwhelming. But couple that with the fact schools rarely seek impartial outsiders to hear cases and that those prosecuting the case are colleagues of those judging them, it’s almost impossible to overturn an accusation of plagiarism, especially once they reach that point.
As such, if you are accused of plagiarism and it makes it to a tribunal stage, the best thing you can do is mitigate the severity of the punishment, not prevent it.
. . . .
5: Essay Mills WILL Market To You
Doing a search for a paper? Expect to see ads for essay mills. Tweet your frustration about an assignment? Expect to see bots trying to get you to buy your paper instead.
No matter where you go you’ll likely be targeted by essay mill advertising and it will play to both your insecurities and your laziness.
Link to the rest at Plagiarism Today
Maybe there in the USA.
Here in Brazil, teachers of public universities don’t care.
Back in the Pleistocene Epoch when I was an undergrad, our student body president was charged with plagiarism. Went before a faculty court. Guilty. Expelled from the school.
The most important line in that entire article? “it’s the instructor who determines what is or is not plagiarism”.
Do you have a common turn of phrase you find yourself using in your writing? You might see it as nothing more than bring lazy or a linguistic crutch, but I’ve had instructors that were adamant that such phrases needed a citation even if it’s to your own previous work.
I have absolutely no problem with defining plagiarism as the intentional copying of another person’s work and passing it off as your own. Academia, in particular, has moved well past that definition. It’s not uncommon for students of particularly overzealous professors to pass their own original works through plagiarism detection software just to avoid false accusations.
My own university had a zero tolerance policy and accusations were tantamount to guilt. The punishment? Expulsion from the course if you were lucky, total expulsion if not. I spent a pretty penny vetting my own original works to avoid accusations.
Plagiarism may be a problem, but it’s hardly the only one here.
Wow. I’m glad I apparently got through college before all this became a big thing. At least, I was never aware of it being an issue when I was in college. Sounds like a stress that already stressed students don’t need.
I have to laugh when I read comments like this. Stress goes both ways. “Stressed students?” LOL. How about overworked/underpaid professors who really don’t need the added responsibilities and time sinks of trying to keep abreast of new technologies that make it easier for students to cheat rather than actually learn the material? (This doesn’t include the hours spent if one actually wants to go through with an academic dishonesty incident claim. It’s far easier not to, incidentally.)
I agree that overzealous faculty members have provided new punchlines to old jokes, but if students just did the work assigned to them, or asked for help when they needed it, many of us would bend over backward to help. I once followed a couple students walking to a class who were discussing the new ways they’d found to cheat on exams — from the old hack “one cough is true, two is false” to “put the answers in the bathroom and then take a bathroom break” to “write the answers on the soles of your shoes” — to a new one, “the prof allows a bottle of water, so write info on the back of the water bottle label and tape it back on, so you can see the info through the water.” Genius, right? Apply this to the content, and you’d probably have your A.
Then there was the red-handed plagiarist who I confronted some years back with the smoking gun of directly lifted materials from various websites. Her tear-laden response? “I was rushing a sorority and didn’t have time to get everything done, and I thought with a bigger class like this [50-ish] you wouldn’t notice.” Well, undergrads don’t write like those peer-vetted sites, so… I didn’t need any tech to catch it. Pro tip: learn time management. Pro tip bonus: If you must plagiarize, be smart about it.
So why do I bother? One word: Fairness. There are students who DO perform the assignments fairly and work hard. I don’t want cheaters to win by cheating. So I follow through.
Plagiarism and associated cheating may not be the only problems, but they are the crux of many. Damien, you may be doing your own original writing and turning your own original phrases, and I have no reason to believe you’re not. However, I’ve got enough examples after 20ish years in academe to know that there are plenty who aren’t. Just do the work. BE ORIGINAL. DON’T CHEAT. It’s not that hard, and if it is, college isn’t for you.
/rant off.
I did my undergrad business degree in two widely separated parts. Fortunately, the later one (2000s) included a plagiarism checker that you submitted your paper to, and if it came out clean, the instructor couldn’t say boo.
Now, that saved me some hassle a couple of times when I was rushed and missed getting a cite into the text – those were less than five minutes to fix before sending it off to the instructor. I probably did the same thing in my earlier courses (1980s) – and fortunately never got yanked up on it. (Which was good, as I had a computer but no printer at the time and was using an old Smith-Corona.)