From the department of #fail

Not that you might think that students in my classes would toe the line about avoiding plagiarism. I just picked this gem out of a submitted exercise. The directions stated: "You need to write up to a half a page in your own words (that means *no* Wikipedia copies) summarizing the lecture and answering any questions asked."

Any questions?

Off to a great start

I sit on the committee that evaluates the applications for our Master's program and awards points that determine who will be offered a position. We met today to slog through 57 applications for 20 places. We offer applicants the opportunity to write us a letter, telling us what motivates them to study with us. They don't have to, but there are 6 points or about 15 % of the possible points riding on this, so you can make up weak grades with a great letter.

We had 18 students choose to write letters. As a colleague began reading letter six, he realized that he was reading the same sentences he had just read in letter five! We had not given that one full points as it was rather puffed up and was not well personalized, but here was the same stuff about striving for a position in top management (a strange thing, as our program is not for management but for media computing) and ended with a flowery sentiment about knowing that our Fakultät (strange, we have Fachbereiche) only had a set number of places and how they were sure that they could contribute to the program.

We dug out letter five, each grabbed a laptop and started googling. He won - in about 4.5 seconds he turned up a web page on how to write a motivational letter. And there were all the bits and pieces, slightly reworded here and there.

<rant>
We were pissed.

Here we are sitting in a hot, hot room spending an entire day doing all this work, and they can't be bothered to write a page themselves about why they want to study with us. We contacted the admissions department, we were only allowed to give them 0 points for this part of the application process. I would just as soon reject them with a letter stating why and publish their names somewhere, there is no excuse for behavior like this, especially when the site itself says:

Nicht kopieren!

Lasst euch von den Beispielen in diesem Text inspirieren, aber kopiert sie nicht. Wir haben Rückmeldungen von Hochschulen bekommen, dass bis zu 20% der Bewerber Formulierungen aus diesem Text nutzen. Das lässt euch nicht gut aussehen. Textet also selbst - es ist in eurem eigenen Interesse.

Don't copy!

You can get inspired by this text, but don't copy it. We have heard from schools that up to 20 % of the applicants use sentences from this text. You don't look good that way. Write yourself - it is in your own interest.

Right. This shows that they are not even capable of following directions. Do I want them in our program? No way.

We continued. Guess what motivation letter #12 was like? Yup. A THIRD copy of this self-same letter. S/he was given 0 points as well.

Out of 18 letters, 3 were obvious plagiarisms, or 16,6 %. For a Master's program!! Two plagiarists didn't make the cut, but one had so many other points s/he will be offered a slot. Let me tell you something, dude: I will be speaking about plagiarism at orientation. And I will be watching you.
</rant>

I had heard that the States was having terrible trouble with people handing in plagiarized letters, or Mom and Dad writing them. I am completely at a loss to understand why anyone would do such a stupid thing, especially in a Germany that has been discussing plagiarism for over two years.

Six Students Found Guilty of Plagiarism in Sweden

One of the advantages of having a central board at university to deal with plagiarizing students is that they can issue a press release on their current meeting. In the local paper in Sweden (Skånska Dagbladet, 24 May 2012) there is an article about the current decisions at Malmö högskola. Six students have been found guilty of plagiarism, copying large portions from the internet or other sources into their term papers. One insisted that she had not been taught the "intracies" of scientific writing, and she had change some words so that the text was "hers".

I'll repeat it slowly, in the hopes that everyone can follow: if you take something from somewhere - words, arguments, ideas - you mark where it begins, where it ends, and where it is from. Rewriting a word here or there does not make it your. BES - Begin, End, Source. Is it really that difficult?

The punishment for all 6 students is being locked out of the university for six weeks. No instruction, no cheaper beer at the student pubs, and above all: no examinations. This is a very good punishment, as students in Sweden get student loans based on passing a certain amount of credits. Everyone gets one year's worth of student loans. If you pass 75 % of the credits for a year, you can get money for the second year. Missing all of the examinations for one half semester can mean not getting money for next year.

I think it is a good idea to have an article like this in the paper (no names, just age and gender) reminding people what will happen if they get caughe.

Keepers

There are now two cases of people accused of plagiarism who have been permitted to keep their doctorates, as determined by the respective universities.

• Johannes Hahn, University of Vienna
  The former Austrian Minister of Education and current Member of the European Parliamenthad been accused previously of having plagiarized his dissertation (a number of articles can be found at the blog Plagiatsgutachten). The University of Vienna reopened the case, hemmed and hawed, asked for expertises, and then decided that the thesis would have been unacceptable today, but they could not determine what "rules for quotations" were valid 25 years ago. Many people found this shocking, as pretty much the same rules for quotations have been in place for more than 25 years.
  Reports can be found at Die Presse - Spiegel Online - Official university statement
• Bernd Althusmann, University of Potsdam
  The current Minister of Education in Lower Saxony and chairman of the German national board of Ministers of Education (in Germany, education is the responsibility of the states, not the federal government) was accused of plagiarism in the newspaper Die Zeit in July. The University of Potsdam took the issue up and looked into the thesis. Everyone agrees that the thesis is pretty bad. Some even say that it should never have been accepted. But the problem is, the doctorate was granted, and the rules say that in order to rescind the doctorate, you have to prove that he knowingly cheated. Much of the plagiarism is of the sloppy kind that you normally throw in the face of a bachelor student and demand a rewrite. It appears that he was actually asked to rewrite one or two times, and then they gave up and gave him a rite on it, a grade meaning "go away and stay away from university, but you can put the letters in front of your name". The commission felt that they could not prove intention, just sloppiness, and so did not rescind his doctorate. There is a good discussion on the blog de plagio explaining the reasoning.

My problem, today, is that I caught a student plagiarizing three times. Okay,  I hadn't graded the lecture summaries for 2 weeks, so there were four half page reports for each student to grade. One student stole from the Wikipedia twice, and a tutorial once. The first Wikipedia one was easy, he forgot to remove the links to other Wikipedia articles. The second one he even had the word "Wikipedia" on the page, but didn't use quotation marks. The third one was stolen from a tutorial site, and easy to note, as in the middle of the second paragraph it said "In this tutorial....".

Now, if I apply the reasoning above or the reasoning zu Guttenberg uses, if the plagiarist is busy or does not know the rules, then it's not plagiarism.  Which pretty much means that we can pack in as teachers. How can we enforce tough plagiarism policies, when education leaders get let off the hook for sloppiness?

This seems about right

Found on rateyourstudents.blogspot.com who found it on graphjam.com:

That seems about right.

If you go looking, you will find.

I shared a concern that I had with a student this week that his exercise was a plagiarism. It consisted of two parts, one part was barely in coherent English with many misspelled words, the second (set in a different typeface) was nicely written with only the occasional misspelling.

I couldn't find anything with a search machine, but I suspect it was borrowed from a previous year's course. I tried to confer with the teacher of that course, but she is on vacation this week, so I attempted to communicate with the student.

He erupted into anger - was I calling him a criminal? No, I was curious as to the explanation for the surprising differences. He berated me, insisted there was no difference. This made me analyze the parts: part 1 was half a page and had 18 spelling errors and badly structured sentences. Part 2 was a page and a half, had correctly structured sentences and only 12 errors in total, or 4 per half a page. That's a power of 10 difference.

I asked the student for patience and told him that if the other teacher does not recognize the paper, he will get the normal amount of points for the exercise.

He threw back an email (the question of how reasonable it is to fight with a teacher in a tone like this is beside the point) saying that if I look hard enough I will find plagiarism everywhere I want to. He said it rather nastily, but he does have a point: If you find a lot of plagiarism, do you start (wrongly) thinking that most students are plagiarists and seeing plagiarism everywhere?

Or is plagiarism just so rampart that we absolutely must suspect it everywhere?