Plagiarism Index
To help those who wish to maintain just one link for accessing all of my posts on plagiarism, I'm here providing links to all five posts in the order that I wrote them:
The Folly of Online Plagiarizing
Be sure to give me credit...
Most Egregious Plagiarism Ever!
The Cleverest Plagiarists...
Netting Plagiarists
Now, Jim Davila of PaleoJudaica will have an easier task linking to them next semester when he teaches his Old Testament 2 course.
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 3:32 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
Last year, I caught the stupidest plagiariser of all. He was supposed to hand in an essay on 'Beowulf', but instead downloaded an essay on the novel Grendel by John Gardner. You fully deserve to fail if you cannot even spot the differences between those two works.
It does take up a lot of time to check all the suspicious cases out, and it's becoming more and more off-putting...
That is pretty stupid. Should that student even be in college?
On the time taken for confirming plagiarism . . . I've heard that software is being developed to do this. Catching plagiarism might become quite simple in the future.
Jeffery Hodges
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Hi, Jeffery -
I found this page following a link from Todd's blog. I've felt some of the same frustration as you have about plagiarism but couldn't find any sastisfactory free solutions for it. Google searches were getting tedious, so I decided to create a tool that would make the job easier. Like you, I want to have a reputation as a tough teacher who cares enough about academic integrity to check students' work for potential cheating.
The site I created is a free check for plagiarism. It's at www.PlagiarismChecker.com. I'm also working on adding handouts about plagiarism and academic honesty; if you have any suggestions, please let me know.
Thanks for being one of the teachers who really cares. God bless you!
- Darren Hom
Teacher at Highlands Christian Schools
Darren, thanks for the comment and the link. Your plagiarism-checker search engine is a great service to provide for the rest of us. It's simple and effective. I'll definitely use it in my plagiarism checking. The best feature is its ability to perform complex searches without requiring double quotes.
I admire you for taking the trouble to learn enough about computer programing to design your own search engine.
Jeffery Hodges
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I have two favorite 'stupid plagiarism' stories, neither of which happened to me.
1. My colleague discoverd that the plagiarist, a nun, had copied the full headnote from a Norton Anthology for an essay on Chaucer. Confronted with the evidence, the nun insisted that she had not copied it. My colleague asked, "Sister, do you believe in miracles?"
2. An adjunct who also taught in high school told me of a colleague who had received a paper from "Frank." After a few paragraphs, he was convinced that Frank had plagiarized the paper, but he read on to the end when he encounterd this typed comment, "Harriet, you did not write this paper."
When confronted, the student laughed and admitted he had copied everything he saw on the page, including the hand-written comment without really reading it. Hard to believe this story, but I do.
Anonymous, those are pretty funny stories. I wish that all plagiarism were as simple to trace.
The stupid plagiarists are so easy to catch. Much harder are the clever plagiarists who need take only one extra step to have a good paper but prefer to cheat instead. Maybe they think it's clever to cheat and not get caught.
Speaking of clever plagiarists, here's a recent one:
Student essays can be so depressing...
But I also get some good student essays:
"William Shakespeare's Discovery"
"Time that with this strange excuse..."
Thanks for the anecdotes.
Jeffery Hodges
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I just stumbled upon your interesting blog.
Plagiarism is becoming a problem, yes, and the students more daring.
Last year I had a student who blatantly plagiarised his essay from some source on the internet. When I confronted him with the fact and the consequences for this dishonesty, he insisted that it was all his own work. Yes, sure. So I decided I would give him one more chance to submit his own work. The replacement essay was yet once again plagiarised. I gave him zero. Great my disappointment and thereafter I did not feel much for the student. Blatant dihonesty should get them nowhere.
Thanks, Ms. Gisela van Reenen, for your story of yet another foolish student's plagiarism.
Most mysterious to me is the student's even more foolish denial even upon being confronted with the overwhelming proof of plagiarism.
Perhaps it's a case of invincible stupidity.
Jeffery Hodges
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