plagiarism 2.0.1

Jonathan Adler, critiquing a New York Times article on the ostensible rise of plagiarism, writes:

The problem is not that academic standards are too strict for the Internet Age. Rather, it’s that students are not taught that such standards really matter.

Or, from this teacher's perspective, students aren't always taught why such standards matter. We stop just short, teaching them the correct citation style, and perhaps even telling them that plagiarism is wrong, and that they'll receive a zero for a first-time offense. But that's only a threat without a reason.

Why does plagiarism matter? In this teacher's perspective, the educational reasons come before the ethical.* In a classroom where assessment is at the core of instruction, and I establish and maintain the expectation that I need to know what you know, then the corollary is that plagiarism defeats that purpose. There simply isn't room for it.

It's doubly important for an English teacher; our focus on "papers" should be on the process, not merely the product. If we have an eye on each draft, especially with amazing digital tools like Google Docs, plagiarism should be nipped in the bud. Nearly all of the (very few) incidents I've seen in the past few years involved students who hadn't turned in their drafts on schedule. For them, plagiarism was a desperation move.



*Regardless of the varying ethics practiced by students--they're not all going to be Kantians, after all--the classroom ethos of purposeful learning must be foundational.

stolen words, stolen deeds, stolen accolades

A fabulizing triptych.

Gerald Posner, compulsive plagiarist.

Posner has offered a variety of defenses. He apologized after Shafer's stories and blamed the "warp speed of the Net" for screwing up his Beast stories. He told us this past May 16 that a new system of "trailing endnotes" may have caused problems in Babylon. By our third story, Posner said there was a "concerted effort" afoot to "discredit" his work.

Now comes new evidence, again courtesy of Gelembiuk. The 48-year-old Wisconsin student purchased ebook copies of Why America Slept and Secrets of the Kingdom, and ran them through Viper, a free online plagiarism software.

The program found Posner had taken from 24 sources in the two books. Most egregious seems to be his theft from a 1998 book by David Hoffman called The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror. Posner appears to have lifted three passages from the book totaling 927 words in Why America Slept.

Richard Blumenthal, hypocritical pseudo-Vietnam vet.

Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut, has a problem. He's running for the U.S. Senate, and he's been caught on video implying falsely that he served in Vietnam. He'd like your understanding as he explains that he simply "misspoke" about his service. He'd like you to give him a break.

But Blumenthal has never given anyone a break. He has made a career out of holding others to the strictest standards of truth—and mercilessly prosecuting them when they fall short.

Adam Wheeler, faux super-student?

Prosecutors said that Wheeler defrauded Harvard out of over $45,000 in the form of an $8,000 research grant, $6,000 in English prizes, and $31,806 in financial aid.

"Mr. Wheeler pled not guilty. He'll have his day in court," said Steven Sussman, the defendant's lawyer, who was surrounded by a thick crowd of reporters and cameramen. "He's not convicted of anything."

breakfast sandwich piracy

"It's not that original, but it's only a buck."

I haven't decided whether Burger King's winking-but-honest approach is to be jeered or lauded. Maybe it's a form of post-ironic whiplash.

plagiarism charge hits Seattle pol

If there's an excuse for plagiarism, Seattle mayoral candidate James Donaldson is going to find it:

Seattle mayoral candidate James Donaldson rolled out a 32-page plan of his ideas for Seattle last week. He called it, "James Donaldson's Plan for Seattle."

But parts of Donaldson's plan are copied verbatim from a similar plan released last year by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, who, like Donaldson, is a former NBA player.

Donaldson's campaign consultant, Cindi Laws, said she modeled the plan after Johnson's.

"People make these assumptions about athletes being dim ... so I looked at how it had been done," said Laws. "Kevin broke out of the pack by issuing a policy-heavy plan."

Laws said the similarities simply show that Donaldson knows a good idea when he sees one.

He just forgets the part about giving credit where it's due, right?

Throwaways:

1. When asked his opinion of Seattle's proposed plastic bag tax, Donaldson said, "Hold on, I'm Googling it."

2. Obviously, the way to combat stereotypes is to live them out. A warning, though: cognitive dissonance has a wide radius.

3. Remember, it's not the quality of the plan. It's the combined weight of its policies.

Update: Not the only time Donaldson's gone cut-and-paste happy, I'm afraid.

not a good excuse for plagiarism

The situation:

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has admitted to using a paragraph virtually word-for-word from a prominent liberal blogger without attribution.

Dowd acknowledged the error in an e-mail to the Huffington Post on Sunday, the Web site reported. The Times corrected her column online to give proper credit for the material to Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall.

The explanation in Dowd's own words:

josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.

but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

How not to excuse your own plagiarism: "No, I didn't copy it from that guy. I copied it from somebody else."

assisted self-plagiarism

Compliments of the Comics Curmudgeon, a look into the creative process.

April 4, 2008.


September 1, 2008.


You can't entirely blame the cartoonist, can you?

principal and student caught plagiarizing

In the same graduation ceremony, no less.

Naperville Central High School Principal Jim Caudill isn’t the only one Naperville School District 203 is punishing for plagiarism.

During a Thursday afternoon press conference in which District 203 officials announced that Caudill would likely be “reassigned” due to his admitted transgression, Superintendent Alan Leis revealed that portions of the commencement address delivered by Central’s valedictorian also appear to be plagiarized.

Leis would not identify the valedictorian by name, but, in covering Central’s May 21 graduation ceremony, Central administrators reported that Steven “Hankong” Su was the valedictorian for Central’s class of 2008.

Someone will be exposed as a plagiarist somewhere in America each commencement season. It's a graduation tradition. [via Obscure Store]

cover me

The Gnarls Barkley cover of "Gone Daddy Gone" infuriated me. Not just that it didn't tread any new ground, either in rhythm or style or musicality, but that it also substituted drum machine polish and a soulless voice for the raspy angst of the original. (Go ahead, check out the cover if you must. It's YouTube "related." Don't be surprised when you're disappointed.)

Generally, though, I find the cover ethos defensible. Put your own spin on the work, in homage to the original; what comes out is good, a fresh way of seeing the original. Call it the Shakespearean aesthetic.

But where is the line between mimicry and imitation? The Romantics think they've found it:

Copyright isn't the issue for the Romantics. The band's attorneys said Activision properly secured permission to use the song What I Like About You, which allowed it to record a cover version. But by creating an imitation so much like the Romantics' original, they said, the company has infringed the group's right to its own image and likeness.

Guitar Hero representatives did not return calls for comment.

Artists such as Tom Waits and Bette Midler have won legal victories on similar grounds for sound-alike recordings used in TV commercials. In those cases, the imitation recordings were ruled to have infringed the artists' rights to publicity by leading consumers to associate the artist with the advertised product.

What I Like About You was recorded for the game by the San Francisco music firm Wavegroup Sound, also named in the suit.

"It's a very good imitation, and that's our objection," said Troy attorney William Horton. "Even the guys in the band said, 'Wow, that's not us, but it sure sounds like us.'"

The lawsuit threatens sales of Guitar Hero, itself a meta-cover experience.

[Via BoingBoing]

shameless self-plagiarism

Oh, Curtis. What have ye wrought?

when ghostwriters plagiarize

While we're thinking about libraries:

Katie Couric has fired Melissa McNamara for copying parts of the commentaries McNamara ghostwrote for Couric to read on-air. As Timothy Noah points out, there's "deeper fakery" at work.

A counterfeit memory like "I still remember when I first got my library card" can easily be assigned to someone else. A real memory like my long-held prejudice against all librarians and the petty tyranny that led me to it cannot. This leads us to the deeper phoniness that hobbles the assembly-line anchorperson-commentary racket CBS News has been running for decades. If person A is going to express a personal memory or opinion on behalf of person B, and person B is not someone who identifies publicly with specific positions on matters of public debate—something network news anchors (outside of Fox, anyway) are discouraged from doing—then person A will hew carefully to anodyne sentiment. The result is commentary devoid of any substance or interest.

The antidote is a splash of cold blogging.

the sincerest form of flattery

Jason Kuznicki was searching for an old post of mine and discovered that it was also showing up at a completely different domain, pkblogs. He sent me an email warning that spamblog clones were on the loose. Curious and a bit troubled, I did a little research and discovered that, through the magic of syndication, my entire site is being mirrored there.

I couldn't get angry, though, even if they started beating me in the search rankings. Why? pkblogs is an aggregator for blogs that are banned in Pakistan, India, Iran, and China.

Maybe it's just a way to steal content, make advertising dollars, and pretend to be doing it for a greater cause. If so, it's a price I don't mind paying. I don't advertise, nor will I ever.

Oh, and why was Jason looking for that old post? To steal the idea, of course.

plagiarism and labor

Long-time reader and all around good guy Josh sends a link to this Slate piece on why we don't like plagiarism. The demands of originality are addressed first. Especially in creative contexts, we like our authors to be original. "Distribution of labor," the plagiarist as slacker, is discussed second.

In fact, labor and plagiarism were entwined from the start. The word derives from the Latin plagiarius, referring to "kidnapper." Around the first century A.D., Roman satirist Martial gave us its modern sense when he wrote an epigram complaining that another man (whom he labeled a "plagiarius") had kidnapped his writings (which he metaphorically labeled his slaves) and was passing them off as his own. What had been a metaphor for a slave-stealer—someone who got labor for free—became a symbolic expression for the theft of words.

The academic sin of plagiarism is only partially described by this framework. From a teacher's perspective, plagiarism destroys the ability to assess a student's work, making meaningless half the labor of teaching.

be sure the facts will find you out

Remember the false plagiarism charges that Joe Carter, echoing (but certainly not plagiarizing) the Discovery Institute, leveled against Judge Jones, he of Dover renown?

Ed Brayton reports that fellows of the same Discovery Institute tried to republish part of a book as an original law review article.

Following Irons's revelation of the virtual identity of the Traipsing book and the MLR article, DeWolf, West, and Luskin agreed with the the MLR's insistence that they write a new article, which was finally submitted on September 28, with the new title, "Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover." This "new" article borrowed heavily from the Traipsing book, but Irons and the MLR editors agreed that it was sufficiently revised to meet (barely) the requirement of "original" work. In response, Irons wrote a rejoinder, titled "Disaster in Dover: The Trials (and Tribulations) of Intelligent Design." Both articles will be published in the MLR's next issue, in January or February, 2007.

Professor Irons concluded his study with these comments: "It seems to me the height of hypocrisy for the Discovery Institute to accuse Judge Jones of copying 90 percent of one section of his opinion (just 16 percent of its total length) [emphasis added] from the proposed findings of fact by the plaintiff's lawyers, when the DI itself tried to palm off as 'original' work a law review article that was copied 95 percent from the authors' own book. Concealing this fact from the law review editors, until I discovered and documented this effort, seriously undercuts the credibility of the DI on this or any other issue."

Of course, to undercut credibility, credibility has to exist in the first place.

Update: According to a U of M law prof, the whole issue is one giant confusion. But Ed Brayton isn't quite convinced.

Update update: It's all just a big misunderstanding based on miscommunication and faulty memory, Ed Brayton reports, hearing from the Law Review editor at last.

where plagiarists dare

1. Is my title, a parody, plagiarism?

2. Are "cover bands" morally equivalent to plagiarizers?

3. What about astroturfers?

4. Is Peter Jackson the world's most successful plagiarizer?

5. Is Ian McEwan a plagiarist?

I'm not a lawyer, I just play one on my blog

Exhibit A for the prosecution: Joe Carter thoroughly mangles a charge of plagiarism. Read later in the comments when a real lawyer shows up.

plagiarism detected, apology made

Over at the Teacher/Ref/Poet's quarters.

students fight back against plagiarism police

For pressuring their school to give up use of turnitin.com, kudos to the students of Virginia's McLean High School.

Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. And they contend the school's action will tar students at one of Fairfax County's academic powerhouses.

"It irked a lot of people because there's an implication of assumed guilt," said Ben Donovan, 18, a senior who helped collect 1,190 student signatures on a petition against mandatory use of the service. "It's like if you searched every car in the parking lot or drug-tested every student."

The issue isn't new--colleges have been wrestling with the legal and ethical implications for over four years now. Apparently the program has an astounding error rate:

Similarly, Virginia's Mr. Bloomfield says it would be an injustice if Turnitin.com was forced to stop providing its service because of a legal complication....

After his own computer program flagged 157 papers at Virginia for suspected plagiarism, the professor turned the cases over to the university's honor committee in April 2001. Forty-three of the students were found guilty after a trial or admitted plagiarism, and 88 were cleared; trials are pending in most of the remaining cases.

He says Turnitin.com and other plagiarism-detection services do more than just ferret out plagiarists: They improve the higher-education system by helping to attach more meaning to students' grades, and they make dishonest students realize that it doesn't pay to use any means necessary to get ahead.

"If copyright problems make it difficult to ensure the integrity of the classroom, how does this benefit society? How does this benefit the students?" he asks. "What important right of students is being preserved by barring a service from retaining a copy of their paper?"

Well, Professor B., if over half the students "caught" by the website were cleared of charges, perhaps it just might sour the relationship between teachers and students? A smart professor armed with Google and amazon.com can catch perps about as efficiently. Teachers who assign the same projects and papers every year are only asking for trouble.

Let me be clear: I despise plagiarism. That presents no justification, though, for republishing a student's copyrighted work without her consent, especially by sending it to a company that will profit from it. It would be like gathering essays for an assignment, secretly publishing them as a book, and pocketing the royalties.

Say no to literary sweatshops. Say no to turnitin.com

for finals week

When one compares "Tuscaloosa Knights" to "Tuscaloosa Nights," it becomes very difficult to accept Vice's contention that he doesn't understand the meaning of fair use. Not only does he hold a PhD in English, and not only does he enforce university plagiarism rules when he grades papers at Mississippi State, and not only does his employer expect him to model ethical behavior for his students, but his lifting from Carmer is so breathtaking in its sweep that Vice's feigned ignorance starts to sound like that of the 18-year-old college student who, when confronted with a heavily plagiarized paper, sheepishly claims, "I guess I didn't know where to put all of those quotation thingies." You knew, Brad, you knew.

The offender in question: aptly-named Brad Vice.


[thanks, Arts and Letters Daily]

how much is a Ph.D. worth, anyway?

Plagiarism is not just the scourge of harried high school teachers.

Clearly they think it was outrageous that Mr. X plagiarized my work. But they do not yet see that Mr. X got away with what he did precisely because he did not have a professor who checked all of his sources. They do not yet see that I check their sources so that I can teach them a skill and a principle that could keep them from someday losing a degree, a job, or a reputation.

Think the last sentence is overstatement? Read the article. It's not.

"I often quote myself..."

"...it adds spice to my conversation." So said George Bernard Shaw.

Today's topic: plagiarism (also referenced over on Pharyngula; it's that time of year). I teach two sophomore "pre-IB" honors English classes ( precursors to the full International Baccalaureate program). The pressure to perform, laziness, lack of confidence, and 'net savvy often combine into a deadly mix of cut-and-paste essay-writing.

Clever plagiarism is almost indistinguishable from mediocre writing. It is a sin, surely, but forgivable. But bad plagiarism--directly copying an entire essay on the web--is not only unforgivable, but insulting. Do students think teachers can't figure out Google?

The worst culprit, this time out, analyzed A Clockwork Orange through the lens of "the element of choice," compliments of ez-essays.com. The book itself is a red flag--it's difficult for even your above-average high schooler, and if you take a gander at the essay itself, you'll quickly see why I was immediately suspicious.

The last lines, the most banal, nonsensical closing in free essay history:

Through strong symbols in imagery, Alex's characterization, and his point of view, the absence of choice is proven as the most debilitating and most overlooked depravation of man's individual power. In everyone's life, the struggle for power exists in all situations. The decision between good and evil is the power that anyone must have as an individual. The choice of which path to take is dependant on the person and the situation, but the realization that both exist is a power unto itself.

Plagiarism lessens my enjoyment of my truly great students' writing, since I'll chronically have the tiniest sneaking suspicion that their work isn't genuine.

I hate it.