Steal away, the time is just right

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Here's the latest on plagiarism. I'm glad I'm an instructor on strike right now, or I'd be boiling.

Anti-cheating database banned at NS University

I'm sorry, but I don't give a rat's fucking ass about "undergraduate content rights." If someone wants to publish something and they can't do it without lifting fewer than eight words from someone else to do so, then they have a little more of life to fucking digest and move on from. Jesus, kids, step up to the fucking plate, already.

I was going to say more, but I hope to fuck that that's enough.

[ollie]

This is reason enough for me to think the database is a bad idea:

Students at several Canadian universities that use the service have objected to the practice, saying an American company is profiting by fostering an atmosphere of distrust at Canadian campuses.

They also don't like the fact that their own work becomes part of the database when it is submitted.

I wouldn't like this either. Unless of course the database company compensates students for their work, which I highly doubt they do.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

(Note to self: Stop being so full of shit, dem! write that on your hand or something)

Ahem - qualifying comment (in the cold, sober light of day): You're right, Ollie, and that's why I've never used it, even when U of T and WLU not only had a license with the site, but we were instructed to put a line (threat, as it were) about it in the syllabus for our courses. I always went that far, but never further. I'll be the first to confess that it's an ad baculum sort of argument for students not to plagiarise, but it pretty much worked (it was either that, or the fact that the assignments I set were so idiosyncratic that you'd never be able to plagiarise them from anywhere).

And anyway, without full compliance from everywhere, and retroactively, there's no guarantee that every paper in the mills would turn up in a scan. I've always found that the imagination of students that do plagiarise is limited enough that I can find lifted passages by a combination of recognising their good grammar and taking a second to run a phrase or two through google. The ones that kill me are the ones that have blocks of their papers in different fonts.

But apart from that, yes, there are property concerns; these may be a non-issue, though, since any time you submit a paper for a course it becomes the property of the institution (though the intellectual property rights still belong to the student, so that plagiarising it is an offense against both).

[Jaimoe]

History papers should all be scrutinized with a little more zeal by professors.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

My favourite story of plagiarism was of a TA at McMaster who'd given a philosophy paper a failing grade because he'd found it absolutely impenetrable, written in this absurdly convoluted style, running around in tortuous logic, and using hopelessly anachronistic language. The student, disappointed with the mark, went and complained to the prof, who, after a while reading it, thought he actually recognised it, so he went and looked it up, and sure enough, the student had copied half a chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and submitted it as his term paper.

As the guy who told me this story, it's hard to say who deserves more ridicule, the student or the TA .

[Jaimoe]

I guess the educational/literary world is no different than the musical world regarding plagiarism.

[mattm]

Wow, I really don't like this thing. Plagiarism isn't exactly good but man, the chance of 8 consecutive words showing up out of 4.5 billion papers has to be incredibly high, plagiarised or not.

That is the american way though, fear and threats to control your population, wether it be your country or just your class (not saying you Good Dr Evil Mouse).

If I submit a paper and someone else submits a similar one in a college on the other side of the country (we've never met and the paper obviously has never been published), how could it possibly be construed as plagiarism?

What about copyright? Something tells me that when an assignment is submitted it becomes copyright to the school and not the student but should schools not be slightly pissed at the fact that these companies are using their material to make money (add to that they are paying the companie to make money off them)?

I submitted an assignment two semesters ago. It was a 3d game demo I had made but far far exceeded the requirements of my course so I insisted that I keep the copyright. I already had over 100% in the class so I didn't care about handing in the assignment or not but they wanted it for a demo to get new students to join. What I'm getting at is that they agreed that I could keep the copyright so if they checked it against that database and that database used it for further comparisons, should I not be compensated? I'm sure there are other scenarios which are the same.

This argument is actually quite sound -- given enough time and enough monkeys, one could eventually produce "Hamlet" by accident.

from here

What about the monkey's? I bet they wouldn't have a clue they'd plagiarised Shakespeare but they'd get booted from school?

I'm going to stop now and think about WTTS and MSS this weekend and other happy thoughts. Good topic Doc.

[zero]

absolutely impenetrable, written in this absurdly convoluted style, running around in tortuous logic, and using hopelessly anachronistic language.

Sounds like Heidegger (but I love him).