Time spent grading student essays.
picture: dunno source, via our GraphJam builder. lol caption: xunil2
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Let that be a lesson to you, always change your fonts.
P.S Wikipedia is not the only source of information.
orly
Don’t bother using spell check though, that is always your “cohice”.
and misspell random words!yay!
EPIC WIN
Perhaps in high school. But most universities have a policy of expulsion for blatant plagiarism.
Yes, because that’s stopping anyone.
Stops the vast majority from doing it obviously.
no, no, no, college students are just much better at editing, then CITING copy and pasted work off the internet!!! And there for it is not plagerism, its called “using and citing a sorce”
The sad fact about most universities is that is doesn’t matter if you get caught, as long as you can whine about it to enough faculty and staff who’re scared to be “the bad guy”. No prof wants to get a bad student review, because THOSE are what get you tenure now…
Pathetic really.
I hate to burst the self-esteem bubble that has obviously been painstakingly nurtured around you, but student evaluations do NOT count toward tenure; no university makes money or gains prestige from internal self-assessments–tenure comes to those who publish and make a name for the university in the academic community.
As for why many students manage to get away with plagiarism, it likely has to do with the professor being tired of turning academically dishonest students in to an ineffective remediation process: that student’s tuition, room and board money is far too valuable to lose, and so nothing ever improves.
Besides: plagiarism doesn’t hurt us… it only hurts you. I find failing students to be much more effective than turning them in; since money is the governing factor, I can at least make your parents pay for the course again.
* Just because I teach English doesn’t mean I can spell…
I hate to burst YOUR bubble, but at the University that *I* work at, student evaluation scores ABSOLUTELY count on your tenure application process. I had to summarize them all and even provide quotes from the written portions. The overall course scores are also used in a very complicated spreadsheet that we must complete at the end of every year, determining a “workload score”. The higher the score, the harder we must be working. Or so the administrator that designed the form thinks.
Cheating = failing in my classes. No second chance, no discussion. And they back us up, very simple. We use Blackboard extensively in all our courses, and have a module called SafeAssignment installed on it. We can create assignments that students must submit electronically so they can be evaluated by SafeAssignment. It’s not perfect, but it does a pretty darned good job. We don’t even have to do any Google searches, it does it for us.
You obviously don’t work at an R1 institution.
They have one, but its rarely used. I’ve used it as a possibility when students come complaining to me about having gotten a 0 for an essay they plagiarized, even though I’ve stapled the original material right to the top of their essay, but, for your everyday regular essay assignment – I don’t know anyone that’s ever kicked someone out for that.
I had a professor who would change the Wikipedia articles to say something completely outrageous and see how many people quoted him back to himself. It was pretty amusing (and a little depressing) to see how many people in COLLEGE would still use Wikipedia as a source.
And why shouldn’t they? Sure, it’s not primary, but for subjects that are specific in nature, especially technical ones, Wikipedia is still really solid.
If you’re concerned about accuracy, well…I’ve seen plenty of actual books be flat-out wrong, too.
Yes, but essays aren’t technical in nature, so an encyclopedia is virtually worthless as a source. At best, an encyclopedia can offer brief context and background.
Yeah, exactly.
1)”Hmm, here’s a topic I don’t know anything about. Lemme get a broad overview….”
2) *Browses Wikipedia*
3) “Oh ok, I have a general outline in my mind now, lemme find some sources to fill in the gaps and add detail….”
What the hell kind of college professor would let you use Wikipedia as a source for ANYTHING? Every single prof I’ve had would fail people immediately if Wiki was a source for their paper.
Encyclopedias and dictionaries cannot be considered sources because they
are common knowledge.
So completely untrue; college professors who are active in their fields tend to write a small hanful of encyclopedia articles; anything BUT common knowledge.
Unless you meant an encyclopedia written by one or two guys. Which wouldn’t make sense to purchase.
Isn’t that kinda like warning somebody that if they aren’t careful crossing the street they’ll get run over, and then waiting in your car while they’re debating?
The trick is to use Wikipedia, but cite the “real” sources they used as a source as your sources.
or just read the wiki sources and get the actual information in a completley acceptable way. Oh wait, that takes too much effort…
exactly! wikipedia is useful only as a collection of real sources
LOL. Seen that one more than once.
Failed each one of them.
The trick is to learn to read and write properly.
I don’t believe you. Vandalism is reverted in seconds.
Also, a study comparing Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia found them pretty well-matched.
Sometimes vandalism is reverted in seconds. Sometimes not.
For instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spork has some vandalism that is still there several weeks after it was added.
Sometimes vandalism is reverted in seconds. Sometimes it sticks around for a while longer. That page is far from the only example.
Wikipedia is actually noted to have less errors than Encyclopedia Britannica in some areas.
That is hilarious. He is very clever and those students deserve what they get. It’s a shame that some many people will completely plagiarize something.
No what’s ridiculous is people don’t use Wikipedia despite it having no more serious errors than Britannica
How about time spent wondering why they don’t run a spell check?
…or even notice the little red squiggles!
How did they make it out of high school? That is what I really want to know.
As a HS English teacher, I can answer you. Because when we receive plagiarized work, or sometimes, no work at all, our supervisors threaten our jobs if we don’t pass the student responsible since his or her parent threatened to sue the school.
How can one possibly wonder about that when they obviously don’t know what spell check is themselves? Or is cohice the preferred spelling of choice now?
I was wondering what that word was. I had assumed it was a real world, otherwise this person would look like a real douche of a teacher.
Apparently no time was spent checking grammar and spelling, because even the legend of this graph has a typo in it.
You mean a tpyo.
It’s “plagiarize” not “plagiarise.” Apparently not even University Professors have spell and grammar check.
Or perhaps they just speak English instead of American.
Other countries spell the word with an “s” instead of a “z”.
Not all countries, though. In Danish for instance it is spelled “plagiere” (verb) or “plagiat” (noun).
You get the Captain Obvious award for today, for pointing out that there are languages besides English in the world.
Other countries spell it WRONG!
“S” makes the “ssssss” sound, like in “snake”.
“Z” makes the “zzzzzz” sound, like in “zipper”.
Let me advise you to reconsider your position.
Lies.
.
Notice the ‘z’ sound for the word with an ‘s’.
Other countries pronounce it differently.
Ever stop to think the person who created the graph is British? In which case it actually is plagerise not plagerize.
but choice is not spelled “cohice” anywhere on the planet…
Because, OMG you’ve never made a typo and transposed two letters in your life?
Because, OMG! When your graph is about competence in essay-writing, you should at least attempt to show some competence in spelling, typing, grammar and proofing yourself. For example, I didn’t simply leave the typo I just wrote spelling yourself “yourslef;” I edited it before posting it to a public forum where I would likely be judged on certain factors, such as ability to spell, type and proof. So no, it’s not about being better than someone else and never having transposed letters, it’s about being aware enough to correct it before it’s in a public setting.
Imperialism Fail.
Not everyone who spelling in the fashion of the Empire comes from Britain.
…?
Or speaks english, apparently.
Actually, it’s “plagiarise”, not “plagiarize.”
Yeap I vote “plagiarise” – actually it is only the US dictionaries that
accept “Plagiarize” as the correct spelling- so I think those who say
z instead of s are outnumbered by the rest of the English speaking world.
BTW did you realise that Americans, actually speak a dialect of English,
called Anglish ~EWG~
Internationalisation fail. Note the S.
I made this graph, and I am a University professor, and I find in EVERY class I teach, that people still plagiarise from wikipedia, apparently thinking I don’t know how to use Google.
And our university will not back professors in a plagiarism charge.
you rock.
I agree — this was very, very clever! LMAO!!
That sucks that your Uni will not back up profs, I have had four Honors code violation hearings this semester alone. The student in each case was found guilty and subsequently failed my course.
First offense doesn’t result in expulsion but it is noted on their transcript forever.
If they are dumb enough to do it again, then they get tossed out.
That’s really sad, isn’t it? *sigh*
I’ve failed one student for plagiarism each and every semester I’ve taught (12 semesters). I even tell them that I fail one student a semester. The only exception is when I promised a class coffee and donuts for the final if no one plagiarized. $60 later, I’m much happier failing students.
I like the coffee and donuts idea better. I’ve worked training animals, and I’ve worked training students, and positive reinforcement works. I teach a biology lab and every few weeks during the semester we have a lab that is messier than most. Rather than taking off points if they don’t clean up the lab (which doesn’t work, cause there’s always some frat-boy-athlete group that doesn’t care and leaves their area trashed), I offer everyone extra credit if they really work hard to clean up after lab. And lemme tell you, they do.
Wikipedia has yet to fail me, I know how to spot a change.
“And our university will not back professors in a plagiarism charge.”
That’s appalling.
Keep fighting the good fight.
I really hope one of the things you don’t teach is grammar. I’m referring to the last example listed (red).
This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.
Grammar and spelling have nothing to do with each other. Nothing.
One student I busted for plagarizing not only retyped the whole article, she was also courteous enough to correct the original source’s spelling errors. She was still in trouble, but we were so amused by her innocent thoroughness she only flunked that one assignment.
Didn’t someone once say to steal one person’s work is plagiarism, to steal many people’s work is research? Unless you meant C&P when you said retyped.
No, it was retyped. The student was only 11 or 12 and didn’t know how to c&p until I taught her. It’s only stealing if you don’t credit the source; judicious use of quotation marks and a good bibliography are beautiful things.
High School teacher here. I caught one student and he was very angry that the paper he paid for online was copied straight from the Microsoft website. Awesome.
Hopefully he learned a valuable lesson. That if you’re going to pay for a paper off the internet, get references as to how solid a paper it is before you do it.
I call a teaching fail. “Cohice”? Really?
Yep. “Cohice”, realy. Evn educmacated induhviduals someitmes maek mitsakes.
Maybe “cohice” could be the “morans” of 2009.
I’m pro-cohice myself!
Exactly: what about “Time spent creating an original assignment that can’t be plagiarized because it’s not a book report or an ‘all about my favorite topic’ essay”? There are ways to design writing assignments that discourage plagiarism (I tout John C. Bean’s pedagogical help-book _Engaging Ideas_).
I issue such assignments but haven’t checked the source you mention. There’s really no defeating laziness and apathy. 90% of students really get into the creative and personal elements of writing while the rest just look at it as a hurdle that can be best cleared through the use of “copy & paste.”
I’m a student, and I have to say, it would be hard nowadays to create a paper topic that one could not use plagiarism. There are so many different sources out there on so many different topics that one can easily find what one needs in order to get the paper done. That being said, I have never plagiarized. I have, however, turned in papers, half of which were quotes from other sources. At this point, plagiarism isn’t even laziness about doing the assignment so much as laziness about citing where you got your information.
urg god i **hate** going back through a stack of papers and references trying to remember where I first read something that I have just cited in my paper….
But then you can’t sell the newest version of your book with only the cover picture changed for US$ 190 (or so I am told).
Not true. You have to change the copyright date as well.
The Industrial Revolution was neither industrial nor a revolution. Discuss.
Back in my day we didn’t have any of dem fancy new fangled computin’ devices! You went to the library and cursed at the typewriter for days on end.
I say take the class to the library and make them write an essay that way! That’ll show ‘em! Darn kids these days! ‘Copy and Paste’ my ass!
Good idea.
You joke, but it’s one of the most effective methods of improving your writing style – having to write it out longhand does rather make you think twice, write once.
The thing I hate, and something I’ve found to be a little ridiculous in cases like this, is having most professors demand you bring in a typed essay. I can understand why, at least in the concerns of poor handwriting and trying to give a more professional look, but I always have preferred to handwrite my work. I actually nearly failed an assignment for turning in a handwritten essay, despite the prof. never stated it had to be typed. Only reason I didn’t fail was because I fought like hell against the BS grade.
There are other concerns than poor handwriting. Some people have big handwriting, so if you give them a 5 page paper, they’ll fit maybe two typed pages worth of work onto those 5. Others have very small handwriting, so they end up doing twice as much work as would be needed. By making an assignment typed only, it ensures that everyone is on equal legging as far as writing the paper, especially if the professor specifies a font, font-size, and line spacing.
We were always given word counts rather than number of pages and
we couldn’t count the words we had quoted. Much fairer way of handling
it…..
Damn you stereotypes, DAMN YOU!!!
Haha! I was kind of hoping someone would do something like this after that graph about “time spent writing an essay” the other day. You have been pwnd, plagiarist graph creator.
I had a roomie in college that was caught c/p’ing for a mass media class he was taking. He found a site that was a collection of electronic publications, and allowed for a global search. The catch was that the key words used in the search appeared bold-faced. He never changed them back (the same words were in bold through his whole paper), and was consequently busted when the professor found the same web site and searched using the same key words. Good times….
i actually looked up “cohice” thinking it might be a word about fonts i didn’t know.
*facepalm*
I actually thought that, too…*headdesk*
Make that three… *some form of bodily harm*
I just added “cohice” to wikipedia. So cohice is now a word about fonts (note that I did not use quotation marks the second time – that proves that it is a real word now).
I think Wiktionary would have been the better location.
Awesome.
Ah … yes, well I would agree with that analysis for the most part except that the time spent reading ‘literate, original work’ seems a little on the large side to me – sadly more so with every passing year. OTOH, I spend almost no time at all explaining about why they fail for plagiarism. It doesn’t take long to type: ‘PLAGIARISM: you suck and BTW you fail.’ It’s true, Google *is* my friend (and very handy – also there are other online plagiarism-checking methods, many of which are most effective, and which I use freely, just in case any of you were wondering. Oh yes.)
So basically all US students are just way below normal standards then?
Why not use your brain when writing papers? Got me all Bs…but wait.. I’m from a different age – the time when people actually were smart!
Mostly because education standards (not the students themselves, necessarily) in America have dropped so low, and God forbid some uptight parent finds out their sweet baby boy or girl who never does anything wrong failed a class. They’ll be breathing down a teacher’s neck in a heartbeat to get the grade over turned because they can’t believe their little spoiled delinquent is actually just lazy and doesn’t care.
I get the feeling the professor who made this is British. Is that to say he wasn’t teaching in America? I don’t know. But this graph by no means directly states that it is US students and US students only. But thanks for the over generalization. You should visit my campus some time. You will meet a bunch of people that actually give a rat’s ass about their grades and spend countless hours typing papers and reading. During this school year alone I’ve pulled many all-nighters trying to finish one of as many as 4 papers that were all assigned in the same week and due at the same time. And those papers don’t even count the fact that I had a large part of my thesis due at the same time (which was over 50 pages at the time), along with finals the following week.
To sum up briefly, you are a jack ass.
From one smart college student to another, WORD. Keep fighting the good fight Gio.
also, friends plagiarize eachothers work and then hand it in their work together so that you end up reading one after the other, thinking ‘hmm this sounds familiar..’
BTW this happened in Northern Europe
LOLE I once had a group of frat-boys turn in a short assignment that they copied word for word off each other. I had quite a lot of grading to go through and wouldn’t have noticed, except they guy they copied from used a very technical engineering term to explain a complicated concept and i KNEW the other three boys did NOT know that word. Went back and checked all their work. Busted.
My favorite plagiarism was a 12 year old who could barely spell “airplane” wrote a paper using aeronautical terms that surprised me. Busted him. Called his mom, she pulled him from my class. I had hoped that she would have punished him but nope! (This was a class I was teaching for a home school group so no principal or administration to back me.)
lol That’s pretty much the comment I just posted a few posts up. About parents in denial about their children doing any wrong so it’s obviously the teacher’s fault.
Sorry to hear that happened to you, but honestly, with a parent like that you’re better off not having him in your class.
This is from a paper for sale (41 dollars) on the Essay Town Website:
the paper is called ‘Plagiarism: An overview of the types and prevalence of plagiarism, as well as what can be done to avoid plagiarism’
“The Internet has also introduced the purchasing a paper from an online term paper service as another form of plagiarism, as is turning in work that was located on a ‘free term paper’ website (“Avoiding Plagiarism”)”
http://www.essaytown.net/lib/essay?KEYW=plagiarism
The worst (or best, depending on your view) thing about this is that this graph popped up on my RSS feed as I was online finding the source of a student’s plagiarism.
Note to students: if you’re going to copy/paste from the internet, use “paste special” to remove the formatting. If you fail to take this crucial step, your stolen paper will be filled with blue underlined words. This will not help your grade.
The fact that “paste special” doesn’t have a hotkey by default – and that there is no hotkey for “paste unformatted” is such a painful flaw in MS word that it cannot be accidental. I hate configuring it on every new computer and MS application, or even worse crawling through the menus to get at it.
They did it deliberately just to make it obvious that you copypasta’d.
YES…
I’m a grad student at a big research university where I work as a teaching assistant (read: grading slave) for three undergraduate classes. I am actually developing grading injuries.
And I’ve had TWO students who didn’t even change the font.
I am grading undergrad papers right now. Made me laugh. Thanks.
what about ‘time spent looking for spell-check fails’?
mean?
*Yawn*
I’ve had several students in the last few years who’ve forgotten to remove the hyperlinks from sources they’ve plagiarized before printing (in color no less) and submitting.
YAY! Thanks for this. I would like to inject some hope that there ARE good students out there who are trying to improve themselves and there ARE good teachers out there who spend a lot of time trying to create authentic work for their students so they aren’t tempted to plagarise. On the other hand… we all need to vent, especially after finals, and this was AWESOME! =)
*sighs* because I post so much of my own work on the web under a multitude of pseudonyms, on several occasions I’ve been accused of plagiarizing myself.
it’s amusing every time.
In terms of classwork, turning in work you’ve done for another class, or turning in work you yourself have published anywhere else also fails…
I don’t know; if I were a teacher, I think I’d rather see good, original work a student had done previously than a lame mashup of largely irrelevant information in four different writing styles as an effort specifically for my class. Now me, I was the kind of student who really liked writing research papers, so it was a moot point, but I’d certainly not call that cheating. And there’s little I hate more than cheating.
What exactly is the purpose of posting it under another pseudonym? Or is that your way of telling people that it really was you who put it up there, not someone else. “See professor. I used a fake name on this paper online. It really is my work, but it’s not under my name. I know it sounds sketchy, but you’re just going to have to believe me on this one.”
For those of you instructors/professors/teachers/etc out there who are frustrated by students that use C&P as their primary research tool… our high school uses “turnitin.com” to combat such cheaters. I highly suggest it as it cuts down the leg-work for the instructor and puts the burden of proof back on the student.
Cheers!
Tava
Yeah my uni uses it. I once turned in a paper that was my own work, and panicked when it came up as 20% copied. Turns out it was just registering the works cited sources as copied from other papers.
But the question is how long does the creator of this chart spend using spell check before submitting something? CHOICE not COHICE….
It’s fairly obvious that I didn’t bother to check for the little red squiggles. I have a lot of work to do and this wasn’t exactly important to my career. I needed to vent, I vented, and didn’t care a whit about it.
My peer-reviewed articles rarely get this much attention, though. Perhaps I should create Graphjam graphs for a living. The more typos, the more interest they will generate.
p.s. I am not British, or a product of any once-imperial nation. I just think the UK spelling is more elegant. So suck it.
People always and only notice the small little mistakes that don’t mean anything, and miss to see the point. It’s very frustrating.
Well, whenever you can’t argue a counterpoint, argue against a non-point.
My favorite part is that the teacher who made this graph misspelled the word “choice” in the legend.
My favorite part is when people criticize something without reading the whole thing. This has been addressed enough times, let it go people.
WHOA! seriously – cohice – I hope you grade better than you graph
Shut up about the “cohice” I think it’s been thoroughly covered and you geeks that all spell (and sometimes pronounce) “the” “teh” have no room to say anything!!!
I feel weird for actually doing legitimate research for my studies.
Why would anyone go to University if you don’t really want to be there? Are people that stupid? And in that case, how did they get in? It boggles the mind *rollseyes*
I worked on a Summer Uni last year and one of our key objectives was to try and get it into the student’s heads that YOU DO NOT PLAGIARISE at university! This is tolerated in secondary schools / high schools and that is why it still happens at university. The students really cannot see that what they are doing is wrong so how can they be blamed. The system allows them to profit from plagiarism. When I was in school you knew that if you cheated by copying another pupil’s work or by cheating in an exam then you would fail. Full stop. No arguments. That should be the line. Cheating = failing.
No, it’s not allowed in schools either. At least not in my little corner of the world.
Some more free tools to cut down on the time spent finding the sources students copied from are: http://www.textbroker.de/uncover/ (a program to download and install) or http://plagiatcheck.de/ (online check). Both are easy to use – even though not in English (neither British nor American).
Plagarism is just wrong, you are taking someone else’s work and claiming it to be your own. If you did some actual work and happened to quote/paraphrase from the original than that’s ok.
Besides, Its not only essays that get plagarized…
http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=3305368
Cohice was Cochise’s little brother….
“font cohice”? If you’re going to make fun of compositions, please be correct. That’s original content, too
you fail at spelling “choice”
What really sucks is when you have been given a “group” project where one of the members decided to copy something they googled word for word. Invariably, they are the one who when you set 10:00 deadline so that you can have it finalized by midnight send it to you at 12:01, so you can spend the rest of the night rewriteing their sections. (Note for any spelling or grammar errors: Chemistry Majors are not supposed to be able to write coherent sentences)
(From a 45 year old college student) I have been involved in the business community for 25+ years. Now I am back finishing something I started 27 years ago. Why does every college class contain a requirement that essays or “papers” be the norm to learn? Is there no learning done if information is studied and then tests are administered? Work? Not to be redundent but at my age, I have more than enough to keep me busy. I want my degree and I will finish. In my view the requirement of essays in the college world could be considered a lazy instructor who does not want to spend time on teaching material and preparing tests.
This class is terrible! They make a lot of bad cohices.