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revdorothyl at 05:37pm on 13/05/2008
revdorothyl at 05:37pm on 13/05/2008My boss forwarded this item from the online version of The Chronicle of Higher Education, just for the sheer horror/humor of it (a fictional conversation set in 2030, leading my boss to adopt the voice of a super-ignorant PhD of the future and exclaim, "Dude! That's like . . . 10 years from now!"):
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/05/2008051301c/careers.html?utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
Just makes me want to go "aaaghh!", because way too many of the students I and my colleagues have taught in college classes over the past ten years seem to be not only plagiarizing badly (appalling as that is), but also in many cases plagiarizing with a bit more finesse, and doing it all as a matter of course.
I feel like joining the "Old College Curmudgeons' Club" (O.C.C.C. for short), with the other grumpy 'old' men and women who gripe about what a college education used to be about, before college became exclusively about vocational training and learning how to be a better liar than the next person.
Oh, alright, I admit it -- I used to 'lie like a rug' in college about some things (trying to seem smarter and more experienced and better than I actually felt myself to be). But to take someone else's work and thoughts and claim it for my own . . . ? It never occurred to me to cheat myself (and lower the standards of my work, to be honest) like that.
But then, my options for plagiarism were limited to books in the library and anything that might've been written by some idiotic fellow student. With the internet, it's a whole new deal.
Perhaps what upsets me most is that, in my work on big reference projects for the publishing house, I too frequently find that people with Ph.D.'s who have actual teaching jobs at respectable institutions of higher learning are willing to turn in other people's work as their own, and that by and large it's too much trouble to call them on it, so we just re-write the articles for them, paying them for work they didn't do and letting them take credit in print for work our editors have actually done.
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/05/2008051301c/careers.html?utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
Just makes me want to go "aaaghh!", because way too many of the students I and my colleagues have taught in college classes over the past ten years seem to be not only plagiarizing badly (appalling as that is), but also in many cases plagiarizing with a bit more finesse, and doing it all as a matter of course.
I feel like joining the "Old College Curmudgeons' Club" (O.C.C.C. for short), with the other grumpy 'old' men and women who gripe about what a college education used to be about, before college became exclusively about vocational training and learning how to be a better liar than the next person.
Oh, alright, I admit it -- I used to 'lie like a rug' in college about some things (trying to seem smarter and more experienced and better than I actually felt myself to be). But to take someone else's work and thoughts and claim it for my own . . . ? It never occurred to me to cheat myself (and lower the standards of my work, to be honest) like that.
But then, my options for plagiarism were limited to books in the library and anything that might've been written by some idiotic fellow student. With the internet, it's a whole new deal.
Perhaps what upsets me most is that, in my work on big reference projects for the publishing house, I too frequently find that people with Ph.D.'s who have actual teaching jobs at respectable institutions of higher learning are willing to turn in other people's work as their own, and that by and large it's too much trouble to call them on it, so we just re-write the articles for them, paying them for work they didn't do and letting them take credit in print for work our editors have actually done.
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http://www.newsweek.com/id/94543/page/1
Thanks for sending me the article! I should have replied, but I've been spending so much time staring at computer screens something's had to give, and one of those things is my email inbox.
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I remember much ado about that news story on NPR, and being astonished (like everyone else on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" or whatever program was featuring it at that moment) that something that so obviously didn't belong in a romantic novel (no matter how poorly written) would've gotten into print in the first place. That has to go in the hall of fame of "What was she THINKING?!"
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Here are a few choice anecdotes from colleagues who also received this email:
I had a student once who had plagiarized a paper. When I confronted him with this fact, he honestly thought that's what using sources meant.
And
Three of my favorite plagiarism stories are from friends who taught courses in ethics at [name of state university deleted].
The first was a medical ethics course. One of the students presented a paper on marijuana and the use of x-ray machines to find it at airports (no medical tie-in given). The student turned in an article printed from Time Magazine. Left the author's name on it, too.
The second was an intro to ethics student. My friend googled a sentence, found the paper, and called the student in. He generously gave the student a chance to turn in a new paper. The new paper was also plagiarized.
The third was the student that plagiarized an article on abortion from Landover Baptist (http://www.landoverbaptist.org/), thinking it was a real source.
This almost makes me feel kindly towards some of my students who've been less than careful with their citations (except for the one who tried to turn in a Wikipedia article on Christ figures in LotR as his own work -- I'm still shocked that he thought I'd fall for that).
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