There is a recent controversy surrounding a reviewer for IGN who got fired because he blatantly plagiarized his review of a game from a YouTube reviewer, who had published his video a couple of weeks prior.
This got me thinking about one event that happened back many years ago when I was working as a teaching assistant at the university here (I worked for many years as a teaching assistant for many courses during my time there and some years after graduating.)
I was reading through and evaluating submissions by students of some kind of essay assignment (I don't remember any specifics about the subject anymore), when one of these essays seemed a bit strange to me. It just didn't feel like any of the other essays I had been reading so far. The wording was, in a way, perhaps too advanced, and there was a kind of bad flow between paragraphs. I got the feeling, or hunch, that most of these paragraphs were directly copy-pasted from somewhere else, and simply slapped together with only minor regard to the flow of the text.
30 years ago this would have been extraordinarily difficult to prove, but in this day and age a quick Google search corroborated in seconds that yes, the vast majority of the essay was directly copy-pasted from online articles on the subject, with little to no modification.
Of course there's nothing wrong in quoting other sources verbatim in an academic paper, provided that it is indeed clearly and unambiguously presented as a quote from another author, clearly distinguished from the rest of the text, and with the original source clearly provided. However, this wasn't the case: The majority of the text was copy-pasted from diverse sources as if it had been written by this student himself, with no indication that the original text was from someone else, and no references nor citations to these original sources.
I informed my "boss", ie. the professor running the course about this.
I feel that this professor overreacted quite a lot. He responded to me that this was absolutely unacceptable plagiarism, and that he would see that there would be consequences from this to the student in question. If I remember correctly, I think he even mentioned something about expulsion.
I never got info on what happened in the end, because I was just a teaching assistant and not in the loop of what happened in the management levels of the school, but I really hope the student wasn't actually expelled. I think this professor overreacted quite a lot. I think that the student should have been given a stern warning, and demanded to rewrite the essay. Any consequences more severe than that would have been disproportionate, in my opinion.
After all, these were just first- and second-year students. It's not like they were professors and doctors. They were fresh from high school, where there might not have been such strict standards.
In fact, and quite curiously, even though students would need to write dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of academic or semi-academic papers during their time in the university, at no point was proper academic writing conventions taught at this university. I studied at that university, and I don't remember even a single course on how to properly write academic papers, even though one would think that it ought to be one of the first mandatory introductory courses.
High schools in many countries are rather infamous for this kind of essay writing, where students will just blatantly copy text from somewhere (especially in the age of the internet), perhaps at most changing a few words here and there. A practice that many high schools probably don't teach the students out of.
This got me thinking about one event that happened back many years ago when I was working as a teaching assistant at the university here (I worked for many years as a teaching assistant for many courses during my time there and some years after graduating.)
I was reading through and evaluating submissions by students of some kind of essay assignment (I don't remember any specifics about the subject anymore), when one of these essays seemed a bit strange to me. It just didn't feel like any of the other essays I had been reading so far. The wording was, in a way, perhaps too advanced, and there was a kind of bad flow between paragraphs. I got the feeling, or hunch, that most of these paragraphs were directly copy-pasted from somewhere else, and simply slapped together with only minor regard to the flow of the text.
30 years ago this would have been extraordinarily difficult to prove, but in this day and age a quick Google search corroborated in seconds that yes, the vast majority of the essay was directly copy-pasted from online articles on the subject, with little to no modification.
Of course there's nothing wrong in quoting other sources verbatim in an academic paper, provided that it is indeed clearly and unambiguously presented as a quote from another author, clearly distinguished from the rest of the text, and with the original source clearly provided. However, this wasn't the case: The majority of the text was copy-pasted from diverse sources as if it had been written by this student himself, with no indication that the original text was from someone else, and no references nor citations to these original sources.
I informed my "boss", ie. the professor running the course about this.
I feel that this professor overreacted quite a lot. He responded to me that this was absolutely unacceptable plagiarism, and that he would see that there would be consequences from this to the student in question. If I remember correctly, I think he even mentioned something about expulsion.
I never got info on what happened in the end, because I was just a teaching assistant and not in the loop of what happened in the management levels of the school, but I really hope the student wasn't actually expelled. I think this professor overreacted quite a lot. I think that the student should have been given a stern warning, and demanded to rewrite the essay. Any consequences more severe than that would have been disproportionate, in my opinion.
After all, these were just first- and second-year students. It's not like they were professors and doctors. They were fresh from high school, where there might not have been such strict standards.
In fact, and quite curiously, even though students would need to write dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of academic or semi-academic papers during their time in the university, at no point was proper academic writing conventions taught at this university. I studied at that university, and I don't remember even a single course on how to properly write academic papers, even though one would think that it ought to be one of the first mandatory introductory courses.
High schools in many countries are rather infamous for this kind of essay writing, where students will just blatantly copy text from somewhere (especially in the age of the internet), perhaps at most changing a few words here and there. A practice that many high schools probably don't teach the students out of.
Comments
Post a Comment