for 29 November 1999. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Hit & Run I'm not sure where John Barrie found the statistics to claim that "[we] are catching 20 to 25 percent of all AP high school students" who plagiarize, for it is certainly not like that at my school. As a senior in a northern Virginia high school taking three AP classes — government, English, and calculus — (as well as taking two as a junior: chemistry and history), I know firsthand that plagiarism in AP classes is out of control. Almost every single student either regularly copies another's work or hands out their own work to be copied. While some classes are next to impossible to cheat in, such as English, classes like government and history are incredibly easy. Essays, charts, outlines, you name it are typed up by one person and forwarded to the 60 other members of the class. No one ever gets caught. My history teacher from last year proudly boasted to us on the first day of class, "This is not a class where people cheat. In the past five years that I've taught AP history, only two people have ever cheated. They were both demoted to standard history and suspended from school for five days." By the next week all of his students had traded and copied papers almost a dozen times. Cheating will screw people over in the long run, though. A college may be impressed by an A+ in calculus, but when they see a 1 on the AP exam, their opinion will change immediately. More than likely, Mr. Barrie got the statistics on high school AP classes from Florida, where the government pays for all students exams. Students who usually fail can take the classes for free and, with the help of the weighted grade, end up with a D even if their grade average for the year is a 2 percent. I admit to plagiarizing work in my AP classes. Sometimes I am just too busy or too tired to do it myself. It still pisses me off, though, to get back an essay I wrote and get a B, and turn to the person next to me who copied my essay, and see that they got an A. Oh well. Matthew McCluskey <anthonyblaine@hotmail.com> It's your last name, man. Put a "sky" on the end of any last name (and, double screw-job, a Mc- at the beginning) and boom, instant prejudice. Lower grade. Less respect. Loogie burger. You name it. Suck: Cultivating your delusions just like a shrink, but with faster, friendlier, and cheaper service and without all that discomfitting fake empathy. the Sucksters  In response to your issue today about plagiarism: A couple of years back I had a student plagiarize one of my own published articles as one of three he cut and pasted into his term paper. Reading the paper and realizing I'd read some of this before, I cross-checked. My response to the student: "I couldn't have said it better myself, but it's still an F!" This is no urban myth; I have the term paper somewhere in my files. Brent McClintock Associate Professor of Economics Carthage College Kenosha, Wisconsin 53140 <mcclin1@carthage.edu> Seems like teachers have this passive-aggressive thing going on where, when you plagiarize, they don't tell you, they just give you an F without explaining it. I mean, no one every really knows for certain whether or not they got caught, but then the teacher tells his little story to generation upon generation of students to follow. Why are the actual plagiarists so often left out of the loop? These probing questions and more, if the price is right. Free, the Sucksters Sucksters, Egads, what are college grads to do now? For that matter, what are college professors to do now? One question I would like to have seen addressed is if this tool can be used to keep the professors in line. Too many handouts for Class 101 are mere photocopies of other texts, and some textbooks seem to be iterations of the same work. When can the students demand that the teachers live up to these standards? I had one assistant professor claim that her handouts were her own work, when in fact they were retyped sections of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Apparently she felt that no one was going to read the book closely enough to discover her charade. Taking down students shouldn't be the only application of this tool. Russell May <russmebs@hotmail.com> Go after the professors all you want; you'll get nowhere. Tenure is a funny thing. My dad, a professor of economics back in the day, used to ask me (very smugly, chuckling all the while), "Do you know what I'd have to do to get fired? Commit a felony. Do you know what a felony is?" I didn't. "Like, for example, murder is a felony," he'd reply. For a long time I was praying to God that my dad wouldn't go and murder someone because, I mean, why would that come up, just out of the blue, if it weren't a possibility? Wait, why are you listening to this highly personal revelation? This has nothing to do with you, OK? Mind your own business. Queen of emotional plagiary, Polly Subject: Violent, glassy-eyed babbling I'm glad someone besides myself recognized the genius in the famous "crack versus the Web" quote mentioned in the plaigerism article. I have had that Suck article bookmarked for the past three years, and my only regret is not having been caught plaigerising the quote myself. There is still time, it appears. Regarding catching plaigerism of undergrad term papers, if you have ever read a bunch of said papers, one cannot help noticing how badly written most of them really are. Stolen phrases and sentences may be difficult to pick out, but a largely plaigerized paper sticks out like a sore thumb. The only difficulty comes in actually proving that it was stolen by finding the source. I can't believe 45 students got caught in one class. Back in the pre-Web days of the mid-1980s when I was at Berkeley, I knew lots of boneheads who handed in verbatim papers and never got caught. This always made me feel like a chump for actually writing anything. I say throw those bums out. Turns out that covering your tracks while stealing intellectual property is the most valuable skill of all. Probably always has been. Yr pal, Cameron Geiser <cameron@ slip.net> Is plagiary the hardest word to spell, or what? The best is when a plagiarist plagiarizes all the idiosyncratic spelling errors of the original writer. Now that's thinking. Plagiarists are not thinkers, though, let's face it. Personally, we'd rather write a hideously rambling, fact-free diatribe than copy over a fact-loaded, well-presented paper someone else wrote. But that should come as no surprise. the Sucksters You mentioned in Hit & Run, 11 November 1999, an urban myth about someone being given an essay to mark that was plagiarized from his own work. Well, I'm here to tell you it's no myth. It happened to my father, who is a university lecturer. He was marking a master's thesis (not from one of his own students), thinking, "Gee, this is great stuff, I totally agree with what this person is saying," when it finally dawned on him that what he was reading was, in fact, a large chunk, almost word for word, of his own PhD thesis. I guess the student figured that since the thesis was more than 10 years old and written in another country no one would notice. Caitlin Fegan <greebo@mad.scientist.com> Oh yeah, your dad, Brent McClintock, wrote to us already. So did Mikey. Did you know he's still alive, but he's sworn off Pop Rocks for good? More than 10 years old and not funny, even in another country, the Sucksters Filler Polly, Yeah, the seven deadly American sins story is not unlike the Moose Turd Pie story. If you aren't decisive, secure, optimistic, serious, smelling fresh air, calm, and unsuspicious about the pie you're eating, you'll have to go out and find the turd the next time. Then you'll have to move up your own ass. I hear they love slick, worthless, nasty pieces of shit up there. Smelling roses, Jeepy PS Canadians are like the guy with the smallest dick in the locker room who keeps saying, "But ... but ... but ... I'm captain of the chess team! I'm the leader of the badminton team!" "Yeah, yeah, OK mister shuttlecock." Tiger Pounce <pounceandkiss@yahoo.com> Hey now. Let's not go and gang up on the guy with the smallest dick in the locker room. I mean, really, who's keeping track? Answer: You are. I may be insecure, but I do trust the pie. How far will you get in this life, spending all your time second-guessing the pie? Polly Dear Polly, While I bet you thought you were being funny, Wednesday's Filler is one of the most eloquent pieces I've ever read. Is France as cool as you made it out to be? <suicide-machine@ anti-social.com> That depends on how much you like titless, creepy, disaffected types. Hell, I don't know shit about France. Veronica's got my number. Damn, baby girl. Yikes. Ooch. Zoinks. Anything but eloquent, Polly Subject: Better every time Your work just gets better and better. You must really be a sick person! :-) Farouk Rojas Mustafa <farouk@ acnet.net> I must be getting sicker and sicker every day. Keeping this job depends on the dissolution of my mental health. I wish my friends and family would be more supportive about that little fact. Damn them! A time to bitch, a time to blame, Polly Dear Polly Esther, Are your Web visitors panicked about Y2K? Help ease their millennial fears by selling them Rolling Stone and other great magazines that will take their minds off of imminent doom! You'll be able to earn a 15 pecent commission from now until 1 January. Your site will lose no traffic. We are Enews.com, the Internet's largest vendor of print magazine subscriptions. John Kelly <John.Kelly@enews.com> Excellent. Online content used to be king; now it's just an outlet for selling print magazines. If I could sell Web visitors anything, it would be little booklets of tips on surviving in a world made for those without the capacity for critical thought. Lord knows I've been much happier since I sold my brain up the river. I'm selling myself out as we speak, and losing no traffic in doing so. I'm cleaning my oven as we speak, and losing no brain cells in doing so. What was I saying? Panicked, Polly Subject: McSweeneys Have you made fun of these smirksters? http://www.mcsweeneys.net/ Andrew Hazlett <awh@manhattan-institute.org> Those little pants-crappers get more good press than Yahweh. Those whippersnappers get more positive word-of-mouth chatter than a tearful Virgin Mary. Why should I add to the din? That earnest little smartass has slept with half the devastatingly beautiful women I know, and I must know about four devastatingly beautiful women. Why should I ramp up his mojo, I ask you? Some pies have all the luck. Then again, maybe they'll publish my crap when Salon kills it. Smirking but pieless, Polly |
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