Yawn. Been there, done that. Really. Pity I didn't patent the technique or I'd have made a mint.
Now this year was truly special: I had two losers who wrote, baaaaaadly the same paper. Really. When I told the first one, he laughed and said "Damn, I told Charles we was gonna get caught!"
Well, Charles denied it, so I turned the experience into a teachable moment. Copies of both papers were prepped for an in-class exercise on editing one's work before submission (names removed, of course, so as not to violate student privacy). Both students were made to read from each other's papers at some point, and when one protested that I was using HIS paper as an exercise, I pointed out that he was reading the other student's paper.
I guess you win, since I've never had a pair who were dumb enough to hand the same paper in to the same class. Most of what I got was Googleable plagiarism.
One handed in a paper that he bought from a paper mill--then claimed that his girlfriend printed the wrong file. He said he was going to use the mill paper to base his off. That's the most "clever" I've seen...
Mother always wins. It's the numbers and the location. New York City peeps? Hand down!
What I find frustrating, though, are the ones who pull up the free teaser paragraphs from the papermill sites and put several of them together to make one paper. The way they intersperse their "borrowed" work makes me wonder what they could do if only they applied their powers for good.
My favorite one, though, was the student who turned in the same online paper another friend used in a faculty development course on preventing plagiarism. Ain't it a wonderful coinkydink that both you and a student at the Univ of Vermont wrote the same paper using the same resources, same quotations, same same same? Better than Shakespeare's monkeys!
I always used to see this excuse trotted out....
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This was my standard procedure for dealing with plagiarists...
It made for good stories once the confrontation was done. :)
I can do evil, yes I can... ;)
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Now this year was truly special: I had two losers who wrote, baaaaaadly the same paper. Really. When I told the first one, he laughed and said "Damn, I told Charles we was gonna get caught!"
Well, Charles denied it, so I turned the experience into a teachable moment. Copies of both papers were prepped for an in-class exercise on editing one's work before submission (names removed, of course, so as not to violate student privacy). Both students were made to read from each other's papers at some point, and when one protested that I was using HIS paper as an exercise, I pointed out that he was reading the other student's paper.
Reply
I guess you win, since I've never had a pair who were dumb enough to hand the same paper in to the same class. Most of what I got was Googleable plagiarism.
One handed in a paper that he bought from a paper mill--then claimed that his girlfriend printed the wrong file. He said he was going to use the mill paper to base his off. That's the most "clever" I've seen...
Reply
What I find frustrating, though, are the ones who pull up the free teaser paragraphs from the papermill sites and put several of them together to make one paper. The way they intersperse their "borrowed" work makes me wonder what they could do if only they applied their powers for good.
My favorite one, though, was the student who turned in the same online paper another friend used in a faculty development course on preventing plagiarism. Ain't it a wonderful coinkydink that both you and a student at the Univ of Vermont wrote the same paper using the same resources, same quotations, same same same? Better than Shakespeare's monkeys!
Reply
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