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Online Plagiarist Sues University

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-that's-one-way-to-approach-things dept.

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."

4 of 693 comments (clear)

  1. There is an issue here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:He knew the consequences... by pedantic+bore · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?
  3. Solution? by Potor · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I am an university instructor, as well as an admissions officer. Feeding everyone's papers through a plagiarism detector is probably going help, especially since the process itself will act as somewhat of a deterrent. But my own simple rule is as follows: if an essay sounds professional, it probably is. The writing standards of most undergraduate students are so low that anything well written really stands out. I simply run these through google. It is amazing how many of these turn out to be plagiarized (right now, in a program of about 60 students, I am dealing with three plagiarism cases - this does not include the handful of applicants who submitted plagiarized writing samples).

    As a corollary, it is amazing how stupid today's plagiarist is.

  4. Online cite-checking services by raistphrk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.