for 30 November 1999. Updated every WEEKDAY.
|
|
Hit & Run Subject: Taco Bell standard "... and the papers were graded by me, who at the time was making the equivalent of a Taco Bell salary." I was surprised to discover that someone else actually judges their economic well-being on the Taco Bell standard. The current consensus amongst those of us working in sort of high-tech fields is that we're doing almost as well as a Taco Bell night-shift manager — stalled after having surpassed "certified crew member" and "team leader" in rapid succession. Of course, since we invented the standard some years ago, he's likely plagiarizing us. However, I'd hate to subject someone to citing a group cliché, so I'll let him off easy. Erik <dr.feinstein@mail.utexas.edu> Come now. How can you possibly quantify all that free food? How can you possibly put a numeric value on all those dizzying combinations of beans, meat, and cheese, night after night, like an old familiar friend with a limited yet fabulously versatile wardrobe? Some things money can't buy, buddy. Made of meat, the Sucksters  I have to ask, how do you guys manage to pull off writing like that? It seems so well thought out but jumbled that at times I'm not sure if I'm reading something that is utlimately profound or just scribbled notes and mutterings. Regardless, I've enjoyed reading a lot of what you guys have had to say. Keep up the good work! Gregory Sterling USG <sterling@hunch.zk3.dec.com> Scribbled notes and mutterings, ho ho ho. Our profundity is eluding you, eh? You must be really, really stupid, because what appears to be random, thoughtless crap to you is meticulously mapped-out, erudite, lucid brilliance. Ho ho. The key to pulling it off is believing that your combo burrito is filled with filet mignon and not DelMeat. Cultivating delusions is a way of life. A good one. Get with the program, buddy. Meaty and deliciously deluded, the Sucksters ADVERTISING IN OUR SCHOOLS: A Suck Insider special report Subject: SVT Cobra Deft, brilliant handling of an important issue. Thanks. Eric <corpstratcom@cantv.net> Speaking of deft, brilliant handling, have you taken a test-drive in an SVT Ford Cobra yet? You wouldn't believe how it corners! Huck Subject: Re: "Suck Insider Special Report" Full kudos, hurrahs, and yeehaws on today's Suck piece! Truly amazing work. Addressed about 15 social idiocies in nine panels! Who's da wo/man? You da wo/man! Stunning! <James.Wisdom@gecapital.com> You must have gotten the enhanced version. I only remember writing eight pages and addressing about two or three social idiocies. But I'm always willing to take more credit than I'm due, so thanks! Best, St. Huck Subject: Yer Wrong It's actually a lot safer to be in a Ford Explorer. SOHC six-cyl engine, handles like a sports car, and in a tête- à-tête with a Mustang, I'll always win! Bottom line of traffic safety: The bigger, heavier car wins! And as far as advertising in schools goes, if the porno Web sites advertised in my high school, I would have cut class much less. <me@davidtuchman.com> David, In a traffic accident, nobody wins. St. Huck 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 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||
   |
||||||||||||||||||||
 |  |
|||||||||||||||||||
 |   | |||||||||||||||||||
![[Tim Cavanaugh]](/fish/staff/images/tim.gif)
![[Copy Edit]](/fish/staff/images/copyeditors.gif){kind=small}
![[Phillip Bailey]](/fish/staff/images/phil.gif){kind=small}
![[yes, it's
a plunger. i'll l
eave the rest up to your imagination ... ]](/fish/staff/images/erin.gif){kind=small}
![[Brian
Forsyth, " we're just spanning time "]](/fish/staff/images/brian.gif)
![[the fixin'
pixie... ]](/fish/staff/images/emily.gif)
![[Ian
Connelly]](/fish/staff/images/ian.gif){kind=small}