Nailed (short)

[ralerin]

I am very proud of the fact that in both high school and college I wrote every damned assignment and paper and essay myself, no matter how bad a job I did on it.

And don't get me started on the Blackboard system, I developed a very healthy dislike for it. It was great when it worked, but it experienced frequent issues, maybe they've made some improvements by now.

Quoted because I second it, except for one paper. I did a paper on subliminal messaging for high school and when I had Intro to Psych my freshman year of college, I used the same topic and the same sources, but rewrote nearly the entire paper except for a few sentences that I couldn't reword any other way. Both teachers used Turnitin and I guess nothing got flagged. So

Also-yes, Blackboard has improved. It's still a pretty meh system though. I use it only if I have a mass emailing to do.

[BookstoreEscapee]

They didn't have those services when I was in college (I graduated in 1997...never turned in a paper online, either). I never cheated, but when I was a senior I was looking through a box of stuff from freshman year, and I read a few of my papers and thought "They gave me an A for this?! Utter crap. And I was an English major!

[Stid]

When I was in class we had an international student who copied a graphics program wholesale from another site. It basically took a cube with whatever image you wanted to paste on it and allowed you to change the rotation, the speed, etc.

When the time came to present her project, she couldn't control anything that the project was supposed to do, and when she pulled up the source code....

It still had the original comments, including the original programmer of said program, in the source...

That was her last semester in the States.

Why anyone would do something that crazy with so much on the line, I do not know.

[Alpha Strike]

Since we're on the subject, will one of you English teacher types explain why it is considered verboten to re-use your own material?

(Had a situation years ago where I took a class, wrote a paper and then wanted to reuse it - with updates and re-writing - for a different class and was told that was a no-no.)

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

Since we're on the subject, will one of you English teacher types explain why it is considered verboten to re-use your own material?

(Had a situation years ago where I took a class, wrote a paper and then wanted to reuse it - with updates and re-writing - for a different class and was told that was a no-no.)

There's a general notion, especially among writers, that you should approach every writing project with a unique take, even if you are writing about something you've written about many times before. You can reuse the same ideas and whatnot, but you want to present them in an original way.

Even though it IS your own work, "copying and pasting" still seems lazy and inappropriate.

[auntiem]

Since we're on the subject, will one of you English teacher types explain why it is considered verboten to re-use your own material?

(Had a situation years ago where I took a class, wrote a paper and then wanted to reuse it - with updates and re-writing - for a different class and was told that was a no-no.)

I reconfigured my papers all the time, but it was to use research from one to compare/contrast in a new one - like the paper I wrote about the suicides in Awakening vs. Anna K. (I'd already done a paper on Kate Chopin).
I wrote about Frankenstien so often that I was able to quote entire paragraphs to support my thesis in blue book (in class) essays.

To the teachers - are the students you catch with these programs kicked out of school?

[cawaker]

I thought about going back to school, but I dread the thought of having to go back into english.

I suck, SUCK at writing. But at least the internet does make it a lot easier to do research (or easier to cheat i suppose). When I was in HS we hadnt started using the net for research yet (i graduated in 1997)

[Kogarashi]

Those are two classes where Snopes.com came in VERY handy....and it helped that my Urban Legends professor was the source most often quoted by snopes...lol!

Was your professor Brunvand?

[Kogarashi]

That's still pretty neat. I took a folklore class during undergrad but didn't have any professors nearly so well-quoted.

[Broomjockey]

Since we're on the subject, will one of you English teacher types explain why it is considered verboten to re-use your own material?

Even though it IS your own work, "copying and pasting" still seems lazy and inappropriate.

Actually, my post-secondary institutions have always classified it as "academic dishonesty." The general philosophy behind it seems to be that you won't put in the full effort, and just do barely enough to get the paper in to line with what the new assignment is, thus you're cheating by not needing to put in the same level of effort in as your classmates.

[casey13]

High school used a cheating checker. It was set so sensitive that it was ridiculous. I had a misspelling of Ethan Frome (Froam? From? I have a poor memory for names) and then my next sentence started with the same word that the person did. That added to the plagiarism count. Then the next thing was hilarious. It highlighted various words in a sentence that weren't even close to the source. Then quoting didn't matter, it sitll marked it off.

[One-Fang]

I am very proud of the fact that in both high school and college I wrote every damned assignment and paper and essay myself, no matter how bad a job I did on it.

I'm not.

Through high school, university, and the college where I got my business and teaching quals, I wrote all my own papers. I'm not proud of that.

I'm not ashamed of it either. I just don't think it's something to be proud of.

Since we're on the subject, will one of you English teacher types explain why it is considered verboten to re-use your own material?

I'm suspecting that they're expecting you to show some sort of learning from the recent material through the application of new knowledge or techniques. Something you wrote two years ago would not show any 'new' knowledge, even if it somehow matched the themes the class was supposed to be teaching you.

[tamezin]

Found one. A student literally copied the entire entry on the topic from Wikipedia, eliminated the topic headers, and added two paragraphs to the end. The reference page was (again) literally the external links area of the Wikipedia page.

Please...if you must plagarize, at least find a good source.

My last year in college I was involved in a huge team project, where part of the final output was an intense research paper. We were working on a voice over internet protocol project. Each of us had to research a different section for the paper and submit to the team for review and compilation.

Cerner has a bountiful bunch of documentation about VOIP. They had published a 500 + page report on the protocol and different implementation scenarios. One of my team members copied Cerner's entire 500+ page report, submitted it to the team (didn't even bother to try and fake it) and said this was his research.

I immediately flipped, I told him if he wanted to get kicked out for plagarizing, that was fine with me but not on my project. I was too close to graduating to jeopardize my GPA and standing. He acted like he had no idea what I was talking about. I told him unless he worked for cerner and was the primary author of that document there was no way that research was his work. The sucky thing is, if I hadn't actually used that specific source for some of my own research, I might not have caught it.

[Stid]

There's a general notion, especially among writers, that you should approach every writing project with a unique take, even if you are writing about something you've written about many times before. You can reuse the same ideas and whatnot, but you want to present them in an original way.

Even though it IS your own work, "copying and pasting" still seems lazy and inappropriate.

I'm a programmer LOL, we reuse code all the time

I fail to see how other peoples interpretations should effect how I do a job.

If I have already done research on a topic, and written a paper on it, I would look over it, probably make sure the data I used was still current, but mostly I would reuse as much of my earlier work as was pertinent.

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

I'm a programmer LOL, we reuse code all the time

I fail to see how other peoples interpretations should effect how I do a job.

If I have already done research on a topic, and written a paper on it, I would look over it, probably make sure the data I used was still current, but mostly I would reuse as much of my earlier work as was pertinent.

Reusing perfectly working code is a bit different than what I was talking about.