Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Josep M. Fontana -
回帖数：17 
As one of the projects for one of our courses and in view of the problems we had last year with plagiarism, I had some of my first year students do a little research project on plagiarism. Basically they were supposed to do a little research to gather information about the problem of plagiarism and write a little essay discussing what plagiarism is, why it is bad and how they can avoid it. One of the students submitted this essay. Before a Google search yielded the following page, I knew this student was in trouble: 
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/plagiarism.html
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回复Josep M. Fontana

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Art Lader -

Cry. Definitely cry.

You should laugh. The student should cry.

-- Art

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回复Josep M. Fontana

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Greg Lyon -
hmmm...your student has either a very dry sense of humor/irony (and lack of respect for the process I might add) or is really, really (insert your own word here)...

in either case Art is right...they should cry!
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回复Josep M. Fontana

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Jon Allen -
In his new "Little Book On Plagiarism," Richard Posner (7th Circuit Appeals Court Judge) writes that the University of Washington's web page on plagiarism is itself plagiarized from the University of California's web site...

jon
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回复Josep M. Fontana

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Dailia Adams -
First you cry - then you laugh - then he get's a F and an honor code violation.
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回复Josep M. Fontana

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

N Hansen -
Well, I think in one respect the student deserves a perfect grade on this assignment. He or she did demonstrate quite well what plagiarism is!
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回复Josep M. Fontana

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Tony Hursh -
There was a case at Columbia University recently where one or more journalism graduate students were alleged to have cheated on an ethics exam.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/02/AR2006120200922.html


Sheesh.



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回复Tony Hursh

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Frances Bell -
It's not just students who need to watch what they do. In marking a student essay a few years ago, I came across a few sentences (about virtual identity) that I thought might be from elsewhere. When I googled for an exact phrase, I came back with just 2 hits. The first was the original source, Judith Donath's PhD thesis, and the second was a paper by an academic from, yes, an Ethics Conference. It wasn't a serious case of plagiarism (for student or academic) but rather sloppy scholarship. It has made me quite cautious though, and I am now much more careful about citing in slideshows, etc.
What do we think about practice in this space? (who mentioned the cat photos tongueout?)
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回复Frances Bell

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

A. T. Wyatt -
Do you mean a format for citing things when referring to them in the forums? Or do you mean have a discussion about professional plagiarism in this space?

I read an illuminating article several years ago on academics and self-plagiarism. The author had surveyed colleagues in several disciplines and determined that we are collectively rather fuzzy about what constitutes self-plagiarism and when it crosses the ethical line. (Students are also--they think as long as they wrote some text or even a whole paper originally, it can be used and re-used as needed!) If you do a some research, you will often need to start citing yourself! This "feels" strange, at least to me, but if you publish something, I think the copyright normally belongs to the publisher. That is an interesting wrinkle on the topic!

Now I am curious about how to cite things in podcasts. I can at least tell whose VOICE it is (when they are also in my class), but I can't tell if they are reading someone else's work.

atw
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回复A. T. Wyatt

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Frances Bell -
Re: citing things in forums - I think that our practice is (inevitably) changing here. I have noticed that several well-known bloggers have increased the use of images in their blogs and tend to use CC Some rights reserved images (or their own) and give an informal citation to show the source.
I agree with you that we are fuzzy about self-plagiarism - I am happy with fuzzy actually. At one end of the scale, there is 'theft of an article' (probably Josep's example) and at the other end of the scale there is an accidental missing citation, and an awful lot of fuzzy in between - yet when many educators talk about plagiarism they seem to assume it is clear cut and 'beyond the pale'.
The point that I was trying to make was that I think as educators we should look at our practice, seeing how it develops as the context changes (the privacy of the classroom giving way to the publicness of the Internet). That might help good scholarship be seen as something that student learn over time rather than the deficit approach of 'plagiarism' where I have heard some academics lump all 'plagiarism ' together and treat it as some sort of evidence of the moral decline of youth.
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回复Frances Bell

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Tony Hursh -
There's also the question of when something becomes "common knowledge" that need not be cited. For example, we don't cite Euclid every time we use plane geometry for some other purpose.

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回复A. T. Wyatt

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

N Hansen -
The copyright belongs to the publisher, if you sign a contract to that effect. Otherwise, it automatically reverts to you.
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回复N Hansen

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Art Lader -
Good to know. Is that an internationally recognized law? (Just curious.)

-- Art
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回复Art Lader

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

N Hansen -
Art-I think it is the case in most countries, although the details differ. You automatically own the rights to anything you compose, unless it is done as part of your work as an employee, or as a work-for-hire as an independent contractor, or if for whatever reason you decide (and the law of the country allow you) to sign that right over to someone else. Some publishers, especially magazines, will just claim exclusive rights to publish an article in a single country, but allow you to publish it in other countries. I've signed contracts with British and Australian publishers whereby they took the rights to what I wrote, but in both cases I got paid for it. I've had stuff published by Egyptian and Dutch publishers, and was never asked to sign anything, and at least in one case got paid to write what I wrote and I was never asked to sign anything. Things I wrote as an employee, well the copyright automatically went to my employer.
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回复N Hansen

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Art Lader -
I see... That all sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Thanks!

-- Art
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回复Josep M. Fontana

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Mark Burnet -
I couldn't help but notice that even the spelling errors were copied verbatim. I have been told that some authors now routinely leave a spelling error in a published work to allow for more effective searching of copied work. At least it would help catch those too lazy to perform a spellcheck. surprise
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回复Mark Burnet

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

Dailia Adams -
Leaving spelling and grammar errors in a quote is one of the hardest things to me.  I just naturally want to correct them, but if it's a quote it should stay as it was originally written.
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回复Dailia Adams

Re: Should I laugh or should I cry? (on plagiarism)

A. T. Wyatt -
Well, you could use [sic]. It draws even more attention to the error, though!
atw
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