Plagiarism in the Pulpit?

The Christian German-language online news portal idea.de has a story about plagiarism in the pulpit. Seems many preachers do a lot of "borrowing" from the Internet. I know my pastor does, I sometimes note down a few good words from his sermon and google where he got this one from.

It seems, though, that there are portals that are expressly made for copying sermons from: Göttinger Predigten, for example. They even now have a weekly Lutheran sermon in English available free of charge.

idea.de goves the theological basis for sermon reuse:

• Jesus notes in Matthew 10:8: "Freely you have received, freely give." [Note: this is, of course, the basis for the Open Access movement]
• Irenäus von Lyon (135-202) noted that a preacher is not the owner of his sermon, since God is the Creator.
  
• The Heidelberg theologian Rudolf Bohren records in his book on sermons, Predigtlehre: "Since there is no intellectual property in the Church of Jesus Christ, I am free to take from others what I need." He also advises that "an ungifted preacher will work much more and better if he uses a good sermon from someone else than if he fails with a self-written one."
  
• The Lutheran pastor for City-Church and Publicity in Esslingen, Peter Schaal-Ahlers deduces from this: Plagiarism from the pulpit contributes to quality assurance within the German Lutheran Church.
  

I don't think it is a problem to get inspiration from other's sermons, but to copy & preach does seem a bit distasteful. In any case, an interesting defense.

Outsourcing Programming Assignments

My previous post this morning sparked an interesting discussion on outsourcing homework. I started googling around and discovered that I seem to have completely missed these two discussion waves:

• Jan 18, 2006 Wall Street Journal: Some Students Use Net
  To Hire Experts to Do Their School Work

• Jan. 18, 2006, RealTechNews : Students Using Rent-A-Coder.com to Outsource Programming Homework
• Jan. 18, 2006, Slashdot:
  Computer Science Students Outsource Homework
  
  
• June 26, 2008, Tom's Hardware: I outsourced my homework to India
• June 26, 2008, a blog: My Homework got lost in India
  
• July 4, 2006, India edunews: Students in Australia outsourcing homework to India

So maybe personal interviews or program-while-we-watch is the only way to go?

Ghostwriters

The ghostwriters seem to be getting more and more brazen - and seem to be earning lots of money.

The plagiarism conference I attended last month in England noted that there was a rising tide of ghostwriting that we needed to be fighting. The only question is: how? It is legal to pay someone to write something. It is just not legal to submit it to a university as your own work. Not only do you not learn what you were supposed to - and that might end up being very costly when you enter your profession - but you cheat.

I just discovered that a magazine that is put out for free at all German universities and colleges, Unicum, takes open advertising for ghostwriters and prints ads for ghostwriting services. I have written to the magazine to ask why they accept such advertising. If I do not get a satisfactory answer, I will request my school to forbid this magazine from distributing to our students.

Of course, that doesn't hurt the ghostwriters. But maybe it gets the ball rolling. What strategies can we come up with to combat the ghostwriters? Perhaps apply to be a ghostwriter ourselves and then hide a "bomb" somewhere in the text, as was done in the case described in 2005 in Inside Higher Education. Any good (legal) ideas?

The Plagiarizing Star

As a preparation for my trip to England I purchased a "Times" at the Schipol airport. The format and the style sure have changed, but at least there is a lot of opinion still in the paper. And lo and behold, one of my favorite English commentators, Libby Purves, had a comment about the English university system and a current plagiarist who is a TV star, Raj Persaud. The piece is called "The shame of our lap-dancing universities."

The plagiarist in question was also a hot topic at breakfast, except that no one could remember his name, it was just "that TV doctor guy". His license to practice medicine as a psychiatrist has been suspended for three months on account of blatant plagiarism. Persaud has admitted to publishing the works of others, for example a paper that had to be withdrawn from Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry after the real author of the piece on the Milgram experiment, Thomas Blass, noted that over 50% of the paper was lifted from his work. Persaud didn't understand the fuss, it was just a "typographical error" here.

For another paper, Persaud had asked a colleague for permission to use his works - and then copied it word for word without quotation marks or source.

He was only suspended for three months - and continue practicing after that - because he didn't actually harm a patient, didn't gain financially from the plagiarism, and didn't defraud any funding organizations. They are also sure that it won't happen again, which is rather surprising, seeing that he seems to be a repeat offender. He stepped down from his radio show in 2006 when accusations of plagiarism arose, but returned in 2007, the BBC reports. I wonder if anyone had checked up on his thesis work? Do we really want plagiarists practicing medicine and building bridges and airplanes?

Third International Conference on Plagiarism

I attended the Third International Conference on Plagiarism in Newcastle, England this past week and presented a paper there on my 2007 test of plagiarism detection software. Since the conference was sponsored by one of the large PDS systems used in England, I was expecting more of user's group meeting than a real conference.

And there were, of course, quite some papers that appeared to have been accepted only on the basis of them reporting something positive on the use of this system. But there were some very interesting points made and some interesting talks given, I want to put down some pointers here.

• One of the major discussion points was the shift perceived in student cheating from copy & paste to purchase of term papers from paper mills and ghostwriters. Since there is not a chance of detecting this kind of cheating with software, there is a call for more education about plagiarism. The University of Derby has a system it calls PLATO - Plagiarism Teaching Online that is designed to fill this gap. I will be evaluating this system in the near future.
• Another point was the topic of self-plagiarism. Tracey Bretag from the University of South Australia has been doing a lot of research on the topic.
• Fintan Culwin from London South Bank University did an empirical study on letting his students use a plagiarism detection service as a learning tool for their own writing. He measured the amount of "dirt" = plagiarism in the first drafts submitted and in the final versions of their papers - and was amazed to see them introducing "new dirt" while getting rid of some of the "old dirt".
• John Lesko runs a combined print and online journal on plagiarism calles Plagiary.
  
• There was a rumor that there exists a system that automatically grades essay questions, and a bit of a discussion on the ethics and legalities of using such a system.
  
• Jonathan Bailey of PlagiarismToday spoke about how copyright applies to web sites and how to go about getting takedown notices served.
• Garry Allen of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia had some interesting graphs from Google Trends. You can query "plagiarism" and see how often people search using this term. More interesting is a search for "free essays" - you can literally see the end of the terms on the graphs! But the peaks are going down, there is no proof that this is because more plagiarism detection systems are being used. This could be because there now exist many link lists for students with relevant links, so they don't have to search Google. Interesting enough, the most such requests seem to come from India....

England itself has become a scary place, I was last there 20 years ago. The place is infested with video cameras. They were in the elevators, at breakfast, in the classrooms, outside the classrooms, all over the streets. I couldn't find one in the bathrooms, but I'm sure they were there. Gave me the creeps.

Update: Will Murray, one of the conference organizers notes: "the main sponsor was Ofqual (an independent UK national regulating body), iParadigms only sponsored the dinner on Tuesday and an independent academic committe decided on which papers should be included."

A Ghostwriter's Tale

The Berliner Tagespiegel reports on a case of ghostwriting.

Eight years ago, an out-of-work biologist was hired by a surgeon to write a book together with him. The surgeon delivered the data and explained the procedure, the biologist wrote the book. It was to be published together.

But there were disagreements after the manuscript was finished that were so massive, that the two met again in a courtroom. An agreement was made, the biologist was paid, and the surgeon had the "author's rights" to the book. But in the EU, the author's rights are only the rights to publish and sell the material and to reap the rewards - not the right to say that one is the author.

But the material turned up again - this time with only the name of the surgeon on it - as a habilitation thesis. In Germany, one doctorate is not enough, you have to submit a second thesis as a post-doc in order to be considered for a professorship at a university. Officially, this has been done away with, but in reality, you are nothing without a habilitation in many German universities.

The Charité, the medical school to which the habilitation was submitted, has started an investigation into the matter. The dean of the medical school quickly took action after he finally learned of the accusations, that apparently had taken some time to find their way to him. Not only the procedure must be from the person submitting the habilitation, the text must also be written by that person. It will be interesting to see how this well-documented case progresses.

Another verion of the article can be found offline in the weekly newspaper Rheinische Merkur number 22/08 from May 29, 2008.

A Strange Tale of Plagiarism

A professor of English at a Midwestern university, Kevin Kopelson, writes in the London Review of Books about plagiarizing his way to the top. A strange tale, in that he got away with all of his plagiarizing because nobody actually read what he wrote, apparently.

He does write rather well, the piece is nicely worded, if it indeed from him. Bad enough that he has gotten away with so much blatant plagiarism, why on earth is he confessing all? How can he insist that his students do not plagiarize when he plagiarizes himself?