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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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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