Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for January 19, 2013

Didn’t some idiot do that just recently in reality?

One of these two kids is being genre savvy. IT’S NOT THE BIG ONE.

See even Alix knows that’s a bad idea.

Holly may be the older sister but Alix definitely is the smarter of the two.

This is gonna be good…

I’ll say it now. Holly don’t do it. But I know it will make no difference. She will do it and get caught and make a fool of herself.

My daughter, who graduated from high school in 2010 did some term papers where she was required to have two book sources. She didn’t procrastinate like holly is doing, so she had plenty of time to get to the library. She and her older sister would start work right away on their papers. I was more of a procrastinator, but not as bad as Holly.

Uh-oh is right!

As a retired teacher, I know exactly where this is headed. Holly, at least do a bit of a re-write!

Oh, Alix! You said such a LOT with those two syllables!

I had a student at university who copied a summary of a book right from the internet, put her name on it and then still wouldn’t admit it. She copied the whole summary, just copy and paste. Sad

Back when I was teaching, I got so I could often identify which of my students had written something, even when the text was typewritten (we didn’t have computers back then).

Once a C student’s paragraph began, “Presently I chanced upon the carnage.” It continued in a similar vein. The student claimed that he had composed the paragraph himself. Then he said his father may have helped him a little. I hied myself to the school library and finally found the offending paragraph. I don’t believe that student tried plagiarizing in my class again.

To plagiarize effectively enough to be sure of not being easily caught actually takes more work than just writing the paper.

Savvy teachers these days also do Web searches when they receive a paper that seems to be too far above the student’s normal work. Holly would have to dumb down the paper, something she’s far to lazy to bother doing.

Well, now we know what next week’s plot will be about….

Hm this is sure to be a F- (yeah thats right). The first sign its plagerized will be its good. She should have Max do it for her since she has the same IQ. The teacher wont know the difference. Incorrect spelling on almost every word, mostly gibberish, off topic in a lot of places..yep she did it

Oh boy, this SO isn’t going to end well.

A lot of colleges now have where the students write a brief paper and submit it online. When they submit their papers for their classes, the paper are compared to the one they first wrote to check for style, etc. for possible plagerism

and they are checked for plagerism on turnitin.

Don’t sell yourself short. Creativity is a gift!

All kidding aside, when I had to write a term paper in second year university, I lucked on an article that WAS the term paper I was trying to write. However, I knew not to copy it. I did use it as a model for layout and used some carefully cited references from it, plus references from other articles. I managed an A on that.

It wasn’t plagiarism, but in one of my courses the final exam essay question was word for word identical to the subject I’d been assigned as a term paper topic. Needless to say i was able to put quite a bit of detail into the exam answer!

I remember an episode of Welcome Back Kotter where the sweathogs bought their term papers. When Kotter was going through the papers he recognized the paper he’d turned in for his own high school history class. When he didn’t auomatically fail the kids his wife asked him why he was giving them another chance to write their term papers he told her, that was the paper I turned in – I never said that I wrote it.

My profs told us they’d put phrases from our papers into search engines. Anything that wasn’t listed as a citation. If they got a hit they’d read what they found and see if it was chance (only so many ways to say a general’s decision lost the battle) or plagarism. And probably they’d have checked to see if we combined a few on-line articles if we seemed to have used part of one. Hmm. Dad teaches the writing course in the sciences. Don’t know what he does…

back in my day … God, I’m dating myself … used a selectric typewriter … then my first college term paper … did not want a typewriter so went to the computer lab … could not handle the requirements for Word-Star on a PC or Apple-write … but they had a brand new WYSIWYG computer on a little box … only 3 of them … called Macintosh 1.0 … most amazing thing I ever saw … did my report – still got a C or something but there was no “copy/paste” – if you plagarized you had to retype it anyways … only had a couple of courses during my college career (of expanding 4 years into 8) that required term papers but computer majors did not need it … needed 2.1 GPA to graduate … I had 2.15 – whoo baby!