SCENES FROM A COLLEGE CLASSROOM, PT. 2
Best plagiarism story ever: guy copies paper directly off of a website (a simple cut-and-paste job) and subsequently submits a paper with html tags in the text. So at the end of paragraphs the reader would find phrases like [imgsrc="nixon_main.jpg" align="center"].
And yes, he actually had the nuts to argue with me about my shocking, tenuous conclusion that he had plagiarized.
May 14th, 2009 at 10:31 am
"I don't know which is worse; your cowardice or your incompetence!"
May 14th, 2009 at 10:42 am
As children and GOP so often do, they believe their own hype. Too ignorant to realize how transparent they are.
May 14th, 2009 at 11:20 am
HA, that is awesome!
May 14th, 2009 at 11:41 am
"How can it be plagiarism if I *would* have said the *exact* same thing anyway?"
May 14th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Cheating is something that makes my blood boil. I'm actually the type of person who ratted out someone cheating on a college test in a 100 level class I was taking.
If you have to cheat in an extremely easy 100 level cultural geography class are you cut out for the university setting?
May 14th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
This shit starts at the HS level or earlier. A lot of my students just don't understand that to copy and paste is plagiarism…or, more likely, they do understand and know that most HS teachers are willing to let that shit fly if only to get them out the door. I have a few seniors who might not be graduating because they ran into a teacher who refuses to be insulted like that.
May 14th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Awesome!
I imagine there is a way via HTML to embed "This was plagiarized." into anything so that it doesn't appear in a browser, but when copy-pasted will show up.
Humans get themselves into such intriguing situations.
May 14th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
I might just copy this over to my blog . . .
May 14th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
We had one this semester. Kid copied everything out on his hand. I know, how Old School, right? Prof dragged the kid to the copy machine…not literally dragged but walked him with all respect and not in any way harming the child…where was I? Oh, right…gently brought the child to the copy machine and copied his hand.
May 14th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I suppose that if they weren't muddleheaded cheesewits, they wouldn't be plagiarizing in the first place.
May 14th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Please tell me the paper had a comments section.
May 14th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
This kid has a bright future at the RNC.
May 14th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Wow. It shocks me that people actually do that. I imagine his argument was something along the lines of:
"Yo bro, listen, I wanted to include pictures, bro and Word screwed up somewhere. bro."
"I at least deserve an A-"
Unbelievable.
May 14th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Mike….lol about the comments section. I am actually hoping to see that next year now.
May 15th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
And that young man's name was…Ben Domenech. And now you know the rest of the story.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:32 am
I've seen that in high school too–only this kid copy/pasted Wikipedia.
Me: "Student, why are there a bunch of blue underlined words in your paper?"
Him: "Uh. I… thought it looked cool?"
FAIL.
May 17th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
I hope he copied it from wikipedia.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
That's pretty good.
I had a student copy directly out of the textbook this semester. I almost didn't believe it at first.
January 30th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Jeez. He didn't have the foresight to go over it and remove the tags prior to printing? Sloppy. A true dodge is often harder to pull off than just doing the work legitimately.