pz

Yes. I've never had any difficulty catching plagiarists in my introductory classes. Often you don't even need the internet: you see an abrupt shift in style and quality between papers, or even within a paper. Google is just useful for confirming the suspicion.

I've never had any problem with plagiarism in my upper-division courses, because I'm fortunately involved in a rapidly changing field. It's easy to be creative and unique in making writing assignments -- I just say, "Hey, here's this cool new paper by McGinnis on the role of Hox genes in macroevolution, and look, here's this neat-o older paper by Akam on Hox genes in the evolution of arthropod tagmosis. You guys start there, pull these ideas together and write a paper on patterns of morphological change in the insect thorax. Due two weeks from Tuesday." Although the general subject (Hox & segmentation) is broad enough that they will have no problem finding plenty of sources out there, by constraining the focus with enough specific elements, I can be sure that no one else out there has ever done this very same paper.

I'm less interested in tactics for catching plagiarists than I am in seeing teachers use enough imagination that plagiarism becomes futile.

Proxima Centauri

I fully support your post, PZ. One of the anti plagiarism web sites I acessed said, "Prevention is better than punishment." Sorry, I couldn't track it down. Several of us have been treated to the saga of the Blue Metal.
The girl has been put through hell. Yes, I know she did something wrong. She knew what she'd done. Why else did she choose that title for her thread.
She was put under stress. Her Dean and her Professor who had to deal with her were probably under stress too. Her RC College has a wonderful honour code. Wouldn't it be more honourable if the lecturers and professors phraised their questions in such a way that students like Blue Metal weren't tempted? The whole sad story could have been avoided.
Are there any American academics who could get that message across to that College?

Proxima Centauri

It could also help if lecturers, tutors and others made sure students know what they may and may not do.
Blue Metal knew. Others may not.
I got the following quote from this web site. They seem to call themselves Research Resources.

Here' their home page.

Explaining to students what they shouldn't do before they have done something unacceptable looks less hard than punishing them afterwards. Those who misbehave although they have been told what is not acceptable need to be dealt with.

Silent Dave

I was once involved in an online written debate where the guy started off by ripping off an entire William Lane Craig paper and passing it off as his own. The ruse lasted about thirty seconds. To this day, the guy doesn't realize why what he did was wrong.

Speaking of cancer, Pat Robertson has prostate cancer. I wonder what God is trying to tell him . . .


Dave

Proxima Centauri

Try giving the guy this from Research Resources. There's people who just can't make it out when they've done something wrong.
He quoted William Lane Craig. Is this dishonest guy a Christian then?

tk

turnitin.com is a resource for thwarting plagiarism.

I happen to disagree that project assignments are preferable to supervised examinations. The oft-quoted reason I know of is that projects are more "similar" to the assignments one gets in real life. To me, it seems projects are just as different from real-life assignments as examinations.

Richard1366

There used to be honor codes that helped to prevent much of this. When I attended Va Tech there were 4 violations to the honor code and by doing any one of them you could be expelled from the school, the 4 violations were:

Lying
Cheating
Stealing
Failure to report any of the above


If you knew someone plagarized and you didn't report him/her, you were in violation and could be expelled. This happened 4 or 5 times while I was there.

Proxima Centauri

I think it very important that young people understand how to access information, how to evaluate information, and how to make up their own minds about information.
The world is changing faster than ever before. We cannot possibly teach children and students the things they will need to know in the course of their lives. We cannot now guess what they will need to know in the course of their lives. The best way we can prepare them for the new situations they will experience is to help them develop the skills to learn for themselves.
When I was at school and at University nobody taught me about the Internet, for example. Nobody had any idea that it would happen. How well I understand the Internet depends quite significantly on my research skills. Young people will need similar research skills even more than I do.

Silent Dave

How did you know!?


Dave

tk

Well... even if this is true, shoving lots of project assignments down students' throats doesn't seem to be the right way to do it.

The most important reason is this: accessing and evaluating new information is not very critical to survival in our current society. Millions of people manage to get by their lives with whatever stale knowledge they have. At the end of the day, any motivation to research into new things must come from within -- and being equipped with research skills doesn't mean a person will actually use them in the real world.

A less important reason: Students aren't taught any research skills (at least where I am). There's no "How to do Research" course or anything similar. Students are just left on their own to figure them out. In the end, it all boils down again to one's own motivation, curiosity and aptitude for research. Nikolai said that postmodernism is another Cancer of the Academic World. This is in fact a case in point: even though we agree it's important to know how to evaluate information, the field of postmodernism is so filled with bogus stuff that I wonder how it could become a field by itself.