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Online Plagiarist Sues University
raistphrk writes "The Reg reports that an English student at the University of Kent has sued the university after the university caught him ripping his papers off the Internet and kicked him out of the English program. I guess the stakes are now being raised for universities that use services to check for plagiarized papers."
I'm a student at a university in the UK, and was recently done for plagarism, on the basis that I had lifted a paragraph from an internet source. I freely admit that yes, I did lift the paragraph from the source, but the unreasonable part is *I WROTE THE SOURCE*. That's right, they stuck my essay in google, my website came up, with an old, largely unrelated essay on it, and, because the essay is on the internet, it's copying from an internet source, in spite of the fact that it's my own site.
There's catching people who are attempting to plagarise, and just being silly.
His problem, then, is not that he was caught, but that he was caught too late. He argues that the university should have warned him of the consequences earlier.
* CAUTION: Coffee is hot, do not store between legs while driving.
* DO NOT stop chainsaw with HANDS.
* DO NOT TOUCH SERVER
And new to this category:
* IF YOU CHEAT THROUGH SCHOOL, WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO PULL THE RUG OUT FROM UNDER YOU AT ANY TIME, INCLUDING AFTER YOU'VE PAID US 4 YEARS TO PLAY ALONG WITH YOUR LITTLE SCAM( but just before we hand you your diploma).
-Adam
...because even though he plagiarized from teh get go, they waited until teh day before he graduated to kick him out, in effect, leaving him with no degree, and them with all teh money.
It doesn't say wether he wants money, or his degree, or whatever, and it doesn't say how long teh Uni knew about his plagiarism before giving him teh boot.
Does anyone familiar with UK courts think he can win this ridiculous case?
Welcome to the Real World, kid. You break the rules, you get caught, your own damn fault.
Plagiarism is an offense in which nobody wins. People who actually do the work are hurt because they won't rank as high (most Universities run off bell curves). The University gets themselves discredited and the value eof everybody's degree goes down if it happens too often. Everbody ends up with paint on their faces.
Only person possibly standing to benefit from it is the Plagiariser. So if you go down, it's your fucking problem.
This kid really needs to grow the hell up.
Karma: Non-Heinous
The analogy to that would be seeing a burglar in your house, and sitting there as he took almost everything (and he knows that you're there watching and not saying anything about it). When he goes to take the last valuable item in your house, THEN you pull out your gun and shoot him in the face.
Now granted, what the kid did was stupid, and his excuse is lame ("I didn't know it was wrong"). But if they knew that he had been plagarizing the past 3 years (as the article incinuates), then they should have kicked him out immediately. Doing otherwise does kind of look like extortion, or rather making someone pay money under false pretenses.
That being said, I don't feel sympathy for the kid. You lost money? Too bad, you shouldn't have been plagarizing. You're 21 years old, you should know better.
-Vendal Thornheart
Yeah, I know of similar instances, a professor was found plagerizing many years later after he got his Ph.D when a student did research on him. He was fired, his Ph.D was invalidated, and all the student he taught had to retake that class or their degrees would also be nullified. That guy was probably sued for millions by his students.
At my school a student was kicked out for cheating. The parents came to complain to the headmaster. "How could you do this, after $X of our money?" they argued with him. He responded by nothing that since most of his tuition had actually been paid from the endowment, the school had actually paid $X+Y of their own money, and were also sad to see it go to waste -- but not as sad as they were that they couldn't have given his spot in the class to an honest student. The parents backed down.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
As a corollary, it is amazing how stupid today's plagiarist is.
...is that many countries no longer have public canings.
Like they do in Singapore
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
As a lecturer, I've found the level of plagerism from the internet as worrying. I've always warned my students that I will take random sentences from their reports and plug it into Google to check for unreferenced and unmodified sources.
Turning a blind eye to plagerism devalues the quality of degrees. I feel no pity when cheats are caught out.
In a course in computer engineering, we once had to do group presentations and reports on some research topic of interest. We were a group of 3 so we divided the three reports with each person being the primary writer for one of the reports. I knew my teammates from other classes but imagine my surprise reading the report of one of them. I was just amazed at the quality of the report and his command of english given the limited experience that he had. But he didn't cite any quotes in the report for all the references that he used. So I decided to do a google search on a few key phrases so they could he properly cited. Then lo and behold I enter one phrase and the entire first 4 pages of the report are literal cut and paste from something on the internet. Overall on the 10+ page report maybe 90% was plagerized. I was freaked out a the possiblity of putting my name on the report as a team project. I tried to get him to understand that what he did was wrong but he didn't think it was a big deal. Eventually we did pressure him to rewrite it in his own words. I shudder at the thought of what he did for his master's thesis!
In the case of this kid, I think it's pretty cut-and-dry that he should bite the bullet. If you get caught plagiarizing, then you get busted. The fact that he didn't get caught before isn't evidence of negligence or discrimination, but rather his own luck in previous instances.
When I submitted the story today, I had hoped to generate a debate about the rights-and-wrongs of plagiarism, but also about the issue of whether or not universities should be requiring the usage of online plagiarism-checking services.
I'm pretty torn about online plagiarism-checking services. I think plagiarism is bad. I mean...every style book has a reasonable method of documenting where you got a quote from, and you can quote a whole paragraph in if it's relevant. For that matter, for most university papers, you can paraphrase a paragraph as long as you (a) cite the original source after you do so and (b) provide some more analysis to suppliment the material you used.
On the flip side, I do feel a bit violated when I have to submit these papers. One at least one site, the user agreement you MUST agree to states that the site basically inherits ownership of the paper. Now, that really bothers me. I post all of my academic papers (as well as personal poetry and other writings) on my own personal website. Based upon those user agreements, this site could post my paper, with our without indication that I authored it, or even sell it, without even informing me. Worse, if a professor requires that I use the service, I don't have a choice in the matter. I am forced to either (a) take a failing grade on the paper (and potentially the class), or (b) give up what intellectual property rights I have over my paper. That really irks me.
I don't have anything to hide; I don't rip off other people's work for my papers. At the same time though, I know other students DO rip off other authors' writings. I don't think it should be a professor's responsibility to be a source checker. If a fifty page paper has forty to eighty sources, the professor shouldn't have the responsibility to hunt down all of those sources. At the same time though, schools are putting their students in an academic guilty-until-proven-innocent situation.
Quite true! It's amazing what kind of things you can find in student handbooks. I once learned that it's still rape even if she says yes while drunk (at least according to the school rules).
Dare I say it, I enjoy reading such things just to see what has been slipped in over the years and what can be used to ones advantage. I once had a complaint against me thrown out as the school violated its own rules with regards to handling it (ie they were required to deal with my 'offence' within 10 working days and instead took 3.5 weeks).
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
If you take a look at the projects on RentaCoder, you will find that a good amount of them are homework assignements from students in the US and the UK. I find this ironic due to the fact that they are making themselves less prepared for a job that will probably get outsourced anyway. And they wont be in a position to try to find a better job.
Whats even better is how some poeple make it easy to track down thier professor. They post a pdf or word document given to them by thier professor, some people forget that it automatically stores the name of the person or orginization where it was created. A simple email to the professor of the course, and that cheater is history.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Now, im going to play devils advocate here. The guy claimed that they should have stopped him sooner, and as, if you say, he can come up with evidence that the administration had knowledge of his actions well before they approached him, then I *might* think that the administration was obtaining money from him under false pretences.
He was paying the University money for a BA qualification, which he was never going to obtain. Now if the administration KNEW early on in the course that he wasnt going to obtain the qualification due to plagarism, then allowing him to pay for further years would, in my book, be fraud.
Please note that I think this guy is an idiot, and should definately not be allowed into another University in the country, but if he can come up with evidence that supports his beleif that the administration could have dealt with this sooner, rather than letting him complete the course and then pulling him up on it, then I might just think he has a case.
After all, if you are paying money into an endowment fund, or savings fund, and the bank knew that, because of some of your actions, all of your money isnt going toward anything, they have a legal obligation to tell you that and stop taking money from you.
This guy is an idiot, in any case.
you just dont make it through primary AND secondary english classes without hearing about plagiarism. there is no excuse not to know about it by the time you are a senior in college.
The university also can, and should, withdraw an awarded degree even years later if it was discovered that the student cheated.
Yes, but the serial killers aren't paying the police large sums of money.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
These essays were obviously read by the student's teachers. Some students from the same class obviously prepared their essays together. Did the teachers just not care? Do they realize that next year those judging the competition will not take their students seriously. I was put off by the experience, and don't really want to judge again next year. When I was that age, we didn't have online sources for this kind of thing. I guess I'm naive to be surprised by the sheer percentage of kids cheating. I know there have been articles recently that cite studies that have found extremely high percentages of kids cheat, I just figured that these numbers applied to a kid's entire academic career - I can see someone cheating once or twice in the period of time from kindergarten to the end of high school, or until the end of college. Apparently, I was underestimating the problem.
The way my undergraduate university dealt with this was to have an honour code. We signed an agreement on our first day of school that we wouldn't cheat, and if we did, if we were discovered, if we knew that someone else cheated, and we didn't do anything, there were clear penalties. The code was clear and as far as I know, the implementation was fair. There was a case of a fraternity getting copies of an exam before it was given, and those involved were punished.
I indirectly caught someone cheating once when I found their class notes in the bathroom while they were taking an exam. I knew that it was early in the exam period. I didn't follow the honour code, but just took the notebook, kept it for a few days and then dropped it off with the professor, not telling them when or where I'd found it. I felt bad for the student, but I figured that when they went to the bathroom and found it missing, and then had it returned to them several days later by the professor, they would be freaked out enough. Yeah, that was probably mean, but I could have been meaner.
I am not sure about the paying him type of hiring...but he has shown initiative and would have a great deal to contribute to open source development (especially, if he wings a job in a company with a good repository of juicy proprietory code.)
Actually, the poor guy is falling into one of the great dilemmas of the modern world. While there is still a need for people creating new content, there is also need for people who excel at taking constructed pieces and putting them together.
You're conflating two different ideas: criminal law and contracts. Killing people falls under criminal law, requirements for graduation falls under contract law.
To take your (extreme) case of serial killers, the courts in the USA have often held that an unenforced law is unenforable. If no one has been prosecuted under a law for many years, the law is usually considered obsolete. E.g. if cars fall under the same rules as horses, failing to tether your car to a post when you go shopping is not going to get you convicted of a crime. The courts are highly suspicious of selective prosecution using old laws that are still on the books.
Non-criminal behaviour requires prompt action if a party wants to preserve its rights. If you keep a dog in a "no pets" apartment, but I ignore your action, you get to keep doing it. If I ignore you using my front lawn as a shortcut to the bus-stop, yet take no action, after a while it becomes a right of way. If I let you camp in my back yard for a year, it's your dwelling.
Filing suit seems reasonable here: it lets the plagurist find out what the school knew, and when it knew it. If there was bad faith, he has a good chance of winning, if not, then end of suit. Bear in mind that the school's role is more than just the awarder of a diploma, it's also meant to educate him. If it failed to educate him in the subtilties of copying, then it failed.
It seems this chap's whole case is that the university should have noticed his cheating and confronted him sooner.
The timing of the disciplinary action is irrelevant. He knew that cheating was liable to get him disciplined and/or dismissed, and he even admits that. Does he seriously expect the university to check every piece of work he handed it, at the time he hands it it? Does he expect them to do the same for every student?
Surely, the more likely situation was that a few of his later pieces of work aroused suspicion. This then led to a fuller investigation to assess the rest of his work. Then once the investigation had been completed, and a clear case could be made, he was confronted by the evidence.
When I was at University, one of the student's had managed to cheat in each formal set of exams in a full 6 year medical course. She was only dismissed after the final exams, days before graduation, and after paying fees close to 100,000.
The cheating only came to light when one student who was absolutely certain he had passed a certain paper (it was his 2nd attempt and he had worked like a dog for it) was told he had failed. He was called up before the Dean a couple of days before the results were published. He asked to see his paper, and it wasn't his - somebody had switched the answer papers.
Subsequently, there was a full investigation and several other exams were scrutinised - evidence of cheating was found throughout the course. Suspicions were also raised about some informal 'prize' exams during the course, but this could never be proved as the papers were destroyed after marking.
Now that we are really off-topic... Here are some points to consider.
1. It's easy to get scalded. Ever wonder why they suggest you turn your water heater temp down to 120 degrees? To prevent scalding (and to save energy).
2. Coffee is supposed to be brewed between 195 and 205 degrees (you DID know this, didn't you?), so it is likely to be HOT, REALLY HOT. Hot enough to cause third degree burns.
3. To summarize, the coffee wasn't "too fucking hot", she was a fool who didn't deserve ANY amount of money for burning HERSELF (or at best did something really foolish).
4. There is a reason for health insurance, so when you do something foolish or something bad happens to you (bad things happen to good people all the time...) you don't have massive medical bills.
He went to school and paid money where they educated him. He indeed to learn something for his money, not to plagiarise. Class is now over. He got what he paid for.
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Sad thing is the kid does have a point about universities not being aggressive enough about cheating and plagiarism. The fact that he got away with it for so long is symptomatic of cheating at many universities here in the US. I taught a summer course at a prestigious university once (I teach full time at a not-quite-as-prestigious one normally) and there were 11 students in the class. Several were students at another big well-known school in the midwest. I caught 6 of them plagiarizing, cases that ran from a couple students who had no idea they were plagiarizing (I didn't believe them at first but after talking to them I actually believe them; they basically did clip jobs of stuff from other sources, a paragraph here, a sentence there) to a couple who openly admitted that they plagiarized.
The ones who admitted it were from the midwest school; I had a long chat with one of them afterward and she told me that she and everyone she knew cheated on just about every assignment. She said she didn't want to at first but when she saw her friends getting away with it and getting better grades than her, she changed her tune. She was kind of blown away that she had gotten caught - she said professors at her university simply never made much attempt to catch cheaters. If students are being essentially rewarded for plagiarism, they may not have enough incentive to avoid it.
I had another case a few years ago with a student who looked up to me a great deal. After I caught him he was extremely apologetic and embarrassed. But he said the strangest thing in an email to me -- he basically said, "I'm a Marine, and I learned in the Corps to do whatever it takes to get ahead. If I was in the same position again I would do it again." Now, I've never been in the armed services, but I can't imagine the USMC is teaching him to cheat in school. And the idea that he would do it again if he was in the same position -- what the fuck? He got caught. He flunked the course. He didn't "get ahead." You'd think he would learn from the experience. But I think the problem is, when people get away with it so many more times than they get caught, they really believe it is in their best interest to cheat.
I'm all for giving people a second chance in many of these situations but I think professors should always document instances of academic dishonesty at the university level (our university requires it; I think all should) so that students who do it in different classes do not keep getting "second" chances.
When you go to uni, you don't pay for a degree. You pay for tuition (and other related services) and the twit recieved these services. There was no contract that said he had to get a degree. The fact that he elected to not bother to do the work that would have led to a degree is his affair -- the contract between him and the uni is intact.
He doesn't have a case, unless there was something really odd in his contract with the uni.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Those funds would be better awarded to a burn unit at a local hospital or some other worthy cause.
Just today, there's a story in the New York Times about a law being introduced in California that would give the state 75 per cent of punitive damages. The story says:
One of the side effects of giving all the punitive damages to a single plaintiff is that in cases where the company is much less successful than McDonald's or might be bankrupted by the award, the money for future settlements has been reduced. For that reason, some argue that punitive damanges should be set aside to compensate victims in the future. The approach of turning over punitive damages for public purposes doesn't address this problem.
McDs sold over 100 MILLION cups of coffee the previous 10 years. Were none of these consumed?
exactly what it was that was stupid that she did
Check out 1b: "acting in an unintelligent or careless manner". I think putting a hot cup of coffee between your legs, where it can easily spill and burn you is "unintelligent", or at least "careless".
Do you think it's a SMART thing to do??
The Real Stella Awards (named after this case) gives a good summary of the arguments for and against the ruling.
And even they they have this to say:
Yeah. That's how rape is defined by law.
Usually, it does go the other way, too, just to be fair; if a girl orders you a few drinks, takes you home and you say yes, and then you wake up the next morning and realize, "Oh my God, what the Hell was I thinking?" then, technically, she raped you.
Of course, arguably, at what point someone transitions from the thinking-clearly stage into the unable-to-decide-what-they-really-want stage is personal and subjective, which is why this law is somewhat controversial. For example, what if a girl really does have the capacity to say yes, says yes, and then later decides that the guy is a jerk, or she finds out that the guy scored better on an exam than her, and then she cries RAPE?
But anyway, that's why, whenever I go to pick up girls, I make them sign a waiver before I will order them any drinks, just so I know ahead of time (and have it in writing) that they're really ready for sex, and not just going to be easily swayed because of a chemical in their brain.
Maybe that's why I never get laid. Hmm. Nice guys finish last.. *Sigh*
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Given full disclosure up front (as cigarettes sort of feature now), I'm more willing to blame the users.
Consider the character of "Joe Camel" who was specifically tailored to attract those presumed to be too irrational to be trusted to guide their own lives (minor children).
In a logical sense, they were warned. But they were blandished with targeted emotional seductions. Evil is not too strong a term, though amoral is probably slightly more accurate.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This is probably one of the worst things I could say, but I'm actually a student at the University of Kent.
In fact I am doing a Computer Science and as such, I do assignments as part of my degree, in the same way that the student in the article would have.
Now, this is potentially the reason why this may be why I shouldn't post this, but I have sort of plagarised.
As part of one of the assignments I needed to submit I was conducting research to answer the question, and as such I looked at a few of the examples given by one of the lecturers. The main issue is that one of the examples was a complete replica of the answer to the question. Now after reading the example my thoughts were tainted and as such I could not think of any better way to answer the question.
Now this is neither here nor there, but as a computer science student we have always been told that if something has already been done before, i.e. someone else has written a function to do x, then why produce our own version to do x. I've been very close at times to submitting some work with a note suggesting I didn't write the code but merely copied it, with the previous statement attached.
I understand this is quite an aside to the article, but I felt obliged as a fellow student to post this.
Is there reason to believe that the jurors selected for this case were less informed than the standard population?
:-) ) Short version- guy left the crosswalk about 1/3 of the way across to go toward a store 2/3 of the way down the block. Didn't look around, and walked into the path of a minivan that was backing up. Sued the driver, asked for $550,000.00 for "pain and suffering". (Medical expenses and lost income NOT included. He had insurance, and owned two stores and a factory.)
The 'standard population' is stupid enough.
A few years ago I was in a civil jury in what I thought was an open and shut case. (I went into it a few weeks ago in T.P.G. if you want to see the ascii disgrams I drew.
Open and shut, right? I mean, he _admitted_ he wasn't in the crosswalk, and wasn't looking around for vehicles. He purjured
himself twice (in my opinion)- Firstly by contradicting his deposition, and Secondly, by saying he "never saw" the mini-van, when (at the angle he must have been walking) he had to have passed literally within arms reach of it.
The driver, on the other hand was somewhat hesitant and quiet. She was unclear on some details, but never contradicted her deposition.
She pulled up the block, thinking she saw a parking place. It wasn't one, but she had passed one down the block. She looked over her shoulder out the rear window and backed up "a car length to a car length and a half" before hearing a thud.
He had popped up out of her blind spot (left rear) and was knocked to the ground, suffering a broken clavicle. But he stood on his own
before the ambulance arrived. Some surgery took place _a month later_ to 'tie' some pieces of bone together so they could heal.
The rest of the jury evidently thought the driver should have been looking backwards out her left side window, instead of reasonably looking over her right shoulder out the rear window (toward the
space she was backing towards). They seemed wayed by the man's injury, and seemed to attach great importance to the 56-year old man's "mild weakness" in one arm. They ignored the deposition where he said "there is nothing I did before (the incident) that I cannot do now".
They arrived at their award rather illogically, too, I thought. They picked an amount they thought was "adequate to fully compensate him for his pain and suffering", then multiplied it by 65% because they figured he was 35% responsible for the accident. Then they multiplied it by 1.33 "because we know the lawyer is going to take a third of the money"!!! (Points to anyone who sees the problem with that.)
I disagreed with the whole process. However, in a civil trial, only 5 out of 6 jurors need to agree, so they went ahead and awarded the
guy $260,000.
The kicker? I was the foreman, and had to read the verdict in court!
If this idiot were to win this lawsuit it would be pretty scary for our University system.
This reminds me of the cheating scandle at Georgia Tech a few years back, where a bunch of whinny bitches got F's in a CS class because the professors setup a way to compare peoples programs to see if they had cheated. (I was a TA for one of those classes and I had less then a 3 or 4 students ever ask for extra help all semester.. and shocker.. those that did go the material and weren't caught for cheating).
The idea behind school is not to see how well you can avoid doing any real work of your own, but to learn something.
There can be no guarentee that because you paid to take a class means you paid for the right to pass that class. The last thing we need is for college level eduation to be reduced to the level that grade school education has in many places.
The teachers should have to kept to certain standars, but ultimately the burden should be on the students to learn.