Plagiarism

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Anything You Want to Talk About?

(No.)

Midsemester Feedback

Your suggestions, and my responses, to the midsemester surveys as of this morning.

I’ll try to check in on these periodically through the rest of the semester if you want to add anything.

Stop Doing

4 point grading scale, more nuance at the upper end would be better. It’s not practical to change the grading scale in the middle of the course, but this is something to think about for the future (so maybe if you take a course with me later you’ll reap the benefit of whoever made this suggestion). But things I need to resolve before I do this include equity (making sure that higher grades don’t partly reflect whether you went to a strong high school, have more than the usual amount of time to work on essays, etc.) and subjectivity (if there are too many possible grades, differences between them are subjective).

Classes that “just go over homework.” I agree with this, although some classes that seem to just go over readings (e.g., some of the discussions of Enigma or maybe “The Gold Bug”) might be that way because very few people seem to be ready to talk about the readings. You have the power to make those classes more interesting by saying what you think of a reading, idea, etc.

Keep Doing

Meetings re draft & final essays (2 people said this). I definitely agree that this is an important part of this course, and will definitely keep doing it.

Classes that present new material or practice things learned in readings. I’ll try to do as much of this as I can.

Other

Final essay grades should replace draft grades. To some extent they do, considering that your “average” grades are averages of only the most recent grade and the highest 2 previous ones. So if final versions of essays generally get higher grades than drafts do, those higher grades will push lower ones out of the averages. And if final essays don’t get higher grades than drafts do, it’s probably in your interest for the final versions not to replace the drafts grade-wise.

The “average of most recent and highest 2 previous” scheme is deliberately constructed to make the mastery grading scheme focus on the best work you do all semester, with a little bit of concern for keeping up with new material.

Plagiarism

Based on “Defining Plagiarism” and “Avoiding Plagiarism” in “Conventions of College Writing.”

Examples

Claim: the World Wide Web is rife with apparent plagiarism.

Exercise: find a Web page on any topic you like that a reasonably large number of people are likely to write about. Then pick a distinctive phrase from it, copy and paste that phrase into your search bar, and see how many other pages also use it.

Discussion

What did you find?

• A definition of “renewable energy” on the National Resources Defense Council site also appears on others, including one for a textbook published considerably more recently than the NRDC site.
• Text about caffeine on the Mayo clinic web site is repeated in a coffee blog and by USA Today.

Is what you’re finding plagiarism?

Yes, it meets the definition of using someone else’s words without attribution

What if what’s being reused is the author’s own words, e.g., the same person wrote two or more different Web pages?

It’s still “self-plagiarism,” i.e., not acknowledging that things you write or say in one context have already appeared in another.

Is what you’re finding a problem? Why or why not?

The standard answer for why plagiarism is a problem is that academia largely runs on trust, i.e., people learning new ideas from someone else need to trust that those ideas are really new and really do come from the source they seem to.

But beyond this, there are lots of other reasons why the plagiarism you’re seeing on the Web causes problems:

• Some Web material is distributed for profit, so copying it to elsewhere interferes with the original author’s right to profit from their work.
• Related to this, copying other people’s material generally runs afoul of copyright or other intellectual property laws.
• People who use plagiarized information from the Web without realizing that it’s plagiarized could themselves be accused of plagiarism or at least mis-attributing their sources.
• It makes Web-based research harder to do, because information that seems reliable because many people “independently” express it might actually come from a single source that many people have uncritically copied.

Next

Peer editing of Enigma draft essays.

In class.

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