Wednesday, October 17, 2007
More on Plagiarism...
After class today, I have a newfound respect for teachers/professors. After going through what many professors go through with every assignment the give (checking for plagiarism), I have come to the conclusion that I don't have the patience necessary to do this. It's probably a good thing that I have no intentions of ever being an educator, because I would probably be the one with which students knew they could get away with this sort of thing. It could be pure laziness, however, it could also be that I wasn't very familiar with the topics I was reading. Checking for plagiarism in a paper that, to me, sounds like it's in another language, is extremely difficult. I didn't know what the language used in specific topics was like, and didn't know how to go about finding the sources that my fellow plagiarizers stole from. I have to say that unlike mine, the 2 papers I read (by Emily and Patrick), were very well thought out, as far as sources go. I couldn't find ANY passages in Patrick's paper that were plagiarized (although he said about 65% of the paper was unoriginal), and could only find a couple passages in Emily's paper (I got lucky with those). However, with my paper, my sources were discovered within minutes of searching. It just goes to show, it can be possible to get away with plagiarism even with all the new technology and resources available, it just takes a lot of hard work, more than it would just to write an original paper.
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4 comments:
I agree! Class today made me realize that it is much harder to locate plagiarism than I thought it would be. I think not knowing much on the topics contributed to this along with the fact that I was not familiar with the writing style of my group members. This made it difficult to find passages that were directly quoted.
I definitely always had a pretty high opinion of educators, but I think the difference between this paper and others is the fact that we KNEW something had to be plagiarized in it! Most teachers don't have that luxury of "trying to find" the incidence plagiarism and then its source. For instance, (not to BRAG), but I exchanged my paper with someone else (that was obvious, considering it was supposed to happen in class), and he said that it was more difficult to find mine than the others because it all seemed in the same style...
just something to think about.
You're point is interesting. I agree to a point about how hard it was to locate plagiarism, but I think being an educator and having to deal with this issue is tough. It's hard to find where they've plagiarized. Also I don't know what I would do if I caught someone doing so. Would I fail them in the class or give them a warning?
I think that's very astute; it probably becomes easier to spot plagiarism as you become more well versed on a subject. If, in the academic setting, you're reading student's work regularly, you should have little trouble separating what's written from what's within his or her ability. Perhaps we should ask Scot tomorrow.
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