Plagiarism is bad, especially when you're stupid

So I'm taking some summer school courses for my Master's degree and in one of the courses our midterm assignment is to do peer reviews of other student's work from the first half of the semester. I'm here to provide some protips on what not to do if you feel you must cheat and copy someone else's homework.

• Don't copy someone else's work verbatim - Because you're submitting work electronically, the professor has the opportunity to run a diff on your homework against the other students. When your homework has a 97% match rate with another student, that's not good.
• Don't copy unique, eye-catching words - I read someone's homework regarding a computer algorithm and it mentions how it will help with counter-terrorism. Two papers later I see "counter-terrorism" again. Then again on a third paper. Dumb asses. Did they really think unique words like that won't stand out between papers?
• Don't copy link examples - For one homework we're supposed to give example URLs with our answers. Three papers use the same URLs. And I'm not talking about common ones like Google or Yahoo. I'm talking about obscure web pages and documents buried in random sites. At least change your links.
• Don't be lazy, change the formatting - Three students homework is completely identical, formatting and all: Same line spacing, bolding, italicizing, tabbing, etc...
• Last, but not least: Don't copy the dumb kid's homework - Again, four students all turned in identical homework. The problem is that of the two problems on the homework, one had all incorrect answers and the other was only a quarter finished. What were they thinking: "Hey, go copy the stupid kid's homework and we'll turn it in!"

Anyway, I wanted to post this because I couldn't believe how lazy and stupid these students were in their copying of each others work. I understand people will cheat on occasion, but this is just embarrassing. And this is grad school. How they made it this far is beyond me.

By the time you're doing your MASTER'S degree, you'd hope people don't copy, or at least do it with discretion. xD

I have a confession. I've written term papers for money. But they were GOOD term papers. They all made B or above. I can't believe some people would be so stupid.

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Originally Posted by foabi_wan_kenobi

I have a confession. I've written term papers for money. But they were GOOD term papers. They all made B or above. I can't believe some people would be so stupid.

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I did that in High School!

I've never directly copied someone else's work. If anything, I use their work as an outline and completely rewrite it.

Finding sources is the fun bit, so I never mess up there :D

EDIT: Wait, what? I could have been charging money? Goddammit.

I dunno about at your place specifically, but college and beyond the punishment for plagiarism is generally pretty harsh (at my undergrad I think it was auto-failure of the course minimum for first time offence, if not outright losing the entire semester). So it's beyond me not only why someone would cheat, but why they would do it in such a half-assed manner.

Well, maybe they're just not good at writing *or* plagarism?

Then why are they in grad school? :p

because foa does good work

Ack, and I got caught copying one paragraph from a website for an assignment that didn't count for any marks. The professor had obviously just made up the essay on the spot ("Yes, your homework is to write about how one fish has changed the world..."), and there's only so much one person can write about the huge effect of herring on humankind. I had a lot of other assignments on at the same time, it didn't count for any marks, and it was such a pointless exercise that I almost felt justified doing a bit of plagiarism.

But, yeah, it's not worth it. It's just a bit galling that other people do blatant copying and don't get caught.

I plagiarize everything I do.

How the hell did they manage to get into grad. school? This hurts my brain farts.

hey guys, i think this is an important thread so i just wanted to add some points to it from myself

• Don't copy someone else's work verbatim - Because you're submitting work electronically, the professor has the opportunity to run a diff on your homework against the other students. When your homework has a 97% match rate with another student, that's not good.
  
• Don't copy unique, eye-catching words - I read someone's homework regarding a computer algorithm and it mentions how it will help with counter-terrorism. Two papers later I see "counter-terrorism" again. Then again on a third paper. Dumb asses. Did they really think unique words like that won't stand out between papers?
  
• Don't copy link examples - For one homework we're supposed to give example URLs with our answers. Three papers use the same URLs. And I'm not talking about common ones like Google or Yahoo. I'm talking about obscure web pages and documents buried in random sites. At least change your links.
  
• Don't be lazy, change the formatting - Three students homework is completely identical, formatting and all: Same line spacing, bolding, italicizing, tabbing, etc...
  
• Last, but not least: Don't copy the dumb kid's homework - Again, four students all turned in identical homework. The problem is that of the two problems on the homework, one had all incorrect answers and the other was only a quarter finished. What were they thinking: "Hey, go copy the stupid kid's homework and we'll turn it in!"
  

i just wanted to post these tips cause i think they're important and i felt i should share these tips that i have made

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Originally Posted by Raistlin

I dunno about at your place specifically, but college and beyond the punishment for plagiarism is generally pretty harsh (at my undergrad I think it was auto-failure of the course minimum for first time offence, if not outright losing the entire semester). So it's beyond me not only why someone would cheat, but why they would do it in such a half-assed manner.

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They send us a report of all cases of plagiarism each year, and they're all at minimum a failure of the course, but a lot of them involve suspension for a semester.

I don't know how this makes me feel about grad school, worse or better. Are these people expected to actually participate in original research or whatever?

I used to plagiarize a bit (quite a bit) in middle school, but I'd change words around to more flowery language. Once high school came around I stopped because many teachers introduced a new system of being able to input all of their student's papers on this site (forgot the name) and I was like oh snap. It was the best thing that ever happened though because it encouraged me to take my essays and research papers to a whole new level. Senior year of English was amazing for this reason.

krissy: that reminds me of an article I read where one school had plagiarized the rules against plagiarizing from another university. It ended up being a non-story because such standards are apparently copied almost the same all over, but it still sounded amusingly ironic.

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Originally Posted by Flying Mullet

And this is grad school. How they made it this far is beyond me.

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Classical Arts majors...

I plagiarize everything I do.

Only cool kids plagiarize. I don't. I edit.

Only cool kids copy. I don't. I modify.

I don't copy, I modify. Only cool kids modify.

Speaking of plagiarism, back in February I was done for plagiarism, wrongly I might add, when I left 3 footnotes from a Jurisprudence essay. I was livid! When I went to meet the head of the law school about it he said on scale of 1-10 my plagiarism was 1.5! I mean wtf:mad2:

I handed up the repeat Jurisprudence essay on Monday it had 21 foootnotes I missed nothing:D

I never plagiarism, I simply rewrite, phase out and input my own...


Never really did like to cheat but I remember during Art history examinations ALMOST everyone cheated Yes including me...Infact I'm pretty sure our Professor was on to us but did diddly squat...He's paid too much to care about such things...

Oh he has caught me several times..But I'm a charmer so I use to look at him with such doe eye looks o my face as if I never even thought I would ever do such a thing! Oh I pretty sure he had a crush on me cause I could have gotten away with more than cheating...However I never was a swinger....


Like I said never did like to plagiarize but I'm really lazy and couldn't give two f.arts and nickel to properly reference something....


Come to think of it.. I hope they published my dissertation..... Now I'm worried !!! 0_o

Thesauruses are awesome. I did a whole year of university using someone from the year above work. No one even batted an eyelid. And it's not like I could not do it I just could not be bothered. But perhaps that was a waste of time considering the reason I couldn't be bothered was because I did not like the course and ended up dropping out 2 years later.

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Originally Posted by foabi_wan_kenobi

I have a confession. I've written term papers for money. But they were GOOD term papers. They all made B or above. I can't believe some people would be so stupid.

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I did a kid's biology project for $10 and he got a higher grade than I did. Wtf?

It's ok if you use quotation marks.

I cheated twice in tests, but that's not really the same, is it? ;)

Everything I do, I plagiarize.

I used to edit and revise papers for $3 a page in school. As far as plagiarizing, I never did. I was always good at integrating another person's words into my own as well as referencing their statements correctly.

Though, MLA style is so stupid to use when compared to Chicago Style, and why they even continue to use MLA baffles me.

I never copied anyone's work. Given my grades I probably should have.

Oh man you would never believe what I did once in uni...

Anyway plagiarism just seems like a low-scale arms race to me. Students will always plagiarise and the school has to keep up with trends.

Do away with research papers and do final exam essays. I know it's not practical...I can't really take this seriously.

When I was at uni I stupidly let a guy see the assembly code I was writing for an assignment, and he took a copy of it when I wasn't looking and submitted it. Luckily though, I was only half done with the assignment and he submitted it thinking it was the full thing, and took all the blame and got booted out of the course for submitting half of another student's assignment. :D

Plagiarism gets you passed high school just fine! We'll see about college : D.

I didnt plagiarise but i did have "group study sessions" where I would milk every student i knew for all the information they had on the subject while pretending to provide information on the table as an act of "helping them" when really I held everything I really knew inside. I usually got good marks so being the 'smart' one they didnt expect that I was the one benefiting most from the situation. Thats research.

In 6th grade we had to write these mini-essays for my English class. I copied entire paragraphs from Britannica and he didn't bat an eyelash. In fact, all A+ papers.