Plagiarism is bad, especially when you're stupid

[Flying Mullet]

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 <b>not</b> 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...
• <b><i>Last, but not least:</i> Don't copy the dumb kid's homework</b> - 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.

[Rye]

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

[fire_of_avalon]

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.

[Rye]

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.

I did that in High School!

[Jiro]

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

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

[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.

[rubah]

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

[Raistlin]

Then why are they in grad school?

[rubah]

because foa does good work

[Burtsplurt]

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.

[Bunny]

I plagiarize everything I do.

[SomethingBig]

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

[krissy]

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

[Kirobaito]

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.

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?

[Shiny]

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.