Tales From The College: Assorted Nuts

[Seanette]

I have a "forum memorable lines" file myself. This forum is by far the biggest contributor.

[Deserted]

I've been collecting quotations for a couple decades now. Currently have 16,050 quotes in a 1.2mb text file. Many years ago I started splitting the quotes into separate files (currently 745 files in 34 subdirectories) and wrote:

• a script to combine them into the "master" quotefile
• a program to automatically sort the files for me
• a program to hunt down duplicate quotes
• a program to pop up a random quote on demand (ETA: I started work to let this grab a random quote from Wikiquote but lost interest.)

Quotes from here are stored in "Quotes\websites\Customers-Suck". When I first started visiting here, everything I grabbed went into one big "Customers-Suck.txt" file; more recently I've been splitting that into individual files by poster. (Argabarga's is the largest, but Gerrinson has the most quotes, 12. Several from The Chronicles of Cranky Bungler. )

The only problem is, there are many quotes I saved from before the big hack (before I joined as a posting member) where the posts are no longer available anywhere, so I will never be able to properly attribute them. (Seriously, I've looked.)

YEs, I enjoy this kind of nonsense, thank you.

[LadyofArc]

Just saying maybe the teachers can give the students a little bit of credit? Most university/college students don't get where they are by being stupid. Ever thought of maybe sitting down and having a rational conversation instead of running shit through a computer, finding similarities, and assuming that they are purposefully copying another's work just out of laziness?

This is partially why we tend to be fairly generous with our plagiarism policy. Low-level stuff (eg forgetting to cite) results in warnings - we don't give students an automatic fail. Self-plagiarism does result in a somewhat higher punishment (warning + the assignment then becomes pass/fail max, you can't get higher). And yes, we do investigate.

Amusingly enough, the students in the conversion course I help out with seem to be the least likely to plagiarise their work.

[Sliceanddice]

i had to talk to a teacher about a paper that got a high match on plagiarism software. no more than like 40% but still.

It turned out the software was accusing me of plagiarising... myself. Yep like most college students I used similar sources as often as possible, used similar quotes (all properly credited) and used similar language as I wrote. The wording might be different, there might be a new thing added, but when you have to write a paper about the development of children every semester for 3 years, you wind up with papers that just show the evolution of writing about the topic.

since the papers were different lengths, had different wording for the most part were formatted differently and talked about different subjects she couldn't fault me for just going back to the same peer reviewed articles, books and nationally accredited sources. Because if i didn't use those sources I would stuck with the NAMBLA's book of good adult/child relationships (that's a lie, i would have had to use more PHD level material that was item specific and often would have cause my already lengthy bibliographies that drove teachers insane to new levels)
Since the first paper i wrote was 25 pages long and talked about facts, how to observe and assess based on those facts about x and theories, observations and personal philosophy and resulted in a 75 page paper that was so long the instructor obviously gave up at some point and just skimmed it for high lights cause i later found huge grammatical errors around sections i know i wrote around 3 am but where at least pass the half way point, and the paper I was writing was just i writing about the facts nothing more, just to prove I knew what to look for in each age and area and was 2 pages long (seriously it was like a bullet point list) the fact I came up with only 40 something percent match was because
It was shorter
I reworded stuff to simplify it
It was drier
and I only had 3 references not 30

the teacher realized there was no way I could write the paper without' plagiarizing myself, unless I completely changed my writing style over night and just gave me a C.
Because I technically did copy myself, even though all i did was pull up the bibliography I used before, found the relevant sources, and wrote based on what I already knew and could verify through them.

Dam being human and having a style

[wordgirl]

It turned out the software was accusing me of plagiarising... myself. Yep like most college students I used similar sources as often as possible, used similar quotes (all properly credited) and used similar language as I wrote. The wording might be different, there might be a new thing added, but when you have to write a paper about the development of children every semester for 3 years, you wind up with papers that just show the evolution of writing about the topic.

The ironic thing is, once students get out in the real world, the idea of self-plagiarism flips completely on its head. Now it's called "efficiency" and "not re-inventing the wheel" and it's a good thing.

Don't get me wrong - I write for a living and my bosses don't want me just copy-pasting the same exact blocks of words time after time - but using the research I did for a piece that was published six months ago is expected and appreciated, so long as I check to make sure everything is still current.

Just one more way that academic life =/= the real world.

[Sliceanddice]

Don't get me wrong - I write for a living and my bosses don't want me just copy-pasting the same exact blocks of words time after time - but using the research I did for a piece that was published six months ago is expected and appreciated, so long as I check to make sure everything is still current.

Oh they expect you to use the same sources over and over again in this program, with a new one added for the book du jour.
I had a class what even provided us with the properly annotated and formatted references that we where expected to use.
I even had teachers say to use our old work so that we didn't have to 're-invent the wheel'.
I couldn't get in trouble for plagiarism, the policy in the COE was too open for using self works over.

[Racket_Man]

It turned out the software was accusing me of plagiarising... myself. Yep like most college students I used similar sources as often as possible, used similar quotes (all properly credited) and used similar language as I wrote. The wording might be different, there might be a new thing added, but when you have to write a paper about the development of children every semester for 3 years, you wind up with papers that just show the evolution of writing about the topic.

I find myself LMAO. As a computer programmer I guess we too would be pinched for self-plagiarizing. I reused so many snippets and sections of code, general concepts of coding, etc.

[Nunavut Pants]

Please tell me you don't do copy-pasta coding!! I am getting so very tired of trying to beat the concept of "method extraction" into the heads of some of my coworkers....

[Racket_Man]

Please tell me you don't do copy-pasta coding!! I am getting so very tired of trying to beat the concept of "method extraction" into the heads of some of my coworkers....

In some cases YES because why reinvent the wheel again and again and again when you already have it in front of you. There are standard things that get done in a programming/coding situation no matter the language.

Yes I have done really creative coding and used " tricks" inherant in a particular language but some stuff is boring cookie cutter stuff.

[Jetfire]

Copy and Pasting code between different unrelated projects is fine and to be expected. (Bonus points if you can turn it into a library that you can include into both projects and use with the same code. )

I think what Nunavut Pants was complaining about was the habit of reusing code by copying a method in one place and pasting it in a different area of the code, instead of refactoring it into a method that can be called by both places. That is a bad habit that needs to be stomped out before it starts happening.

[dalesys]

Please tell me you don't do copy-pasta coding!! ...

Isn't that how you get the best spaghetti... code?

COMEFROM, GONEAR, ONMAYBESO...

[Nunavut Pants]

I think what Nunavut Pants was complaining about was the habit of reusing code by copying a method in one place and pasting it in a different area of the code, instead of refactoring it into a method that can be called by both places.

Exactly so. If you have twenty-seven different pieces of code that are doing
Thing A
Thing B
Thing C
Thing D
Unique stuff
Thing E
Thing F
Thing G

--then you should pull out A/B/C/D and E/F/F into one or more functions that are used in twenty-seven different places!! That gives you one thing to test and maintain, instead of twenty-seven....

[dalesys]

...Thing A... Thing B... Thing C...

That calls for the Suessical Paradigm.

[Buzzard]

I'm just remembering one of my programming classes (Fortran or Pascal, I can't remember which) to print a something on the screen at a certain spot, there were 2 separate commands, one to locate the cursor to X,Y, and then the screen print command. One of my classmates made up a subroutine "Printat" that would take the coords and the text and make it all happen. Saved lots of lines of code doing it that way, and even impressed the instructor.

[Bumbershoot]

I get that plagiarism is a big deal and all. Nobody wants their hard work stolen. But in a world of easily shared information and a huge amount of people living on this planet, do you really think that nobody has ever had a similar idea as you at some point? And consciously or unconsciously we all assimilate new information everyday. Which means our understanding and grasp of the world around us is constantly changing moment by moment. It's not hard to imagine that someone might see an article online, delve into it and come to conclusions based on numerous sources that lead to new information or a new perspective on that same information. It's how we evolve as a society. Look at what they did, see what works what doesn't and what can be improved on, then move forward from there. Is it so hard to believe that two people might come to similar conclusions without ever having heard of each other based on the wide variety of easily accessible information in this Age of Technology? When there's such a huge population?

Just saying maybe the teachers can give the students a little bit of credit? Most university/college students don't get where they are by being stupid. Ever thought of maybe sitting down and having a rational conversation instead of running shit through a computer, finding similarities, and assuming that they are purposefully copying another's work just out of laziness?

Another aspect of the stupid university mindset? If you copy, you are condemned forever. If you come up with an original idea? Forget it. You don't have any peer-reviewed articles to cite.