Slashdot Mirror
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."
Burgulars will start suing homeowners for unsafe conditions. Oh wait ... nevermind
Got hosting
this reminds me of that woman that sued mcdonalds for "making her fat"...how could this guy not realize that copying papers and turning them in as his own is wrong?
should have stopped him?! The world is going downhill when people begin to reject common sense in favor of outrageous accusations such as this one.
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.
I saw this a couple of days ago (at a site with more details).
...
How any person can get to university without realising that plaigarism is wrong is beyond me. How an *English* student can try to argue that he didn't know what the word meant (as per the student handbook that explained this)
This person is so stupid that he doesn't deserve a degree. I think how he got his A Levels (pre-university exams in England) is also rather doubtful as well.
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
Where I went to college, the Art department chair was caught many years after that fact for plaigarizing his dissertation for his Ph.D. He lost his doctorate and his job, and probably faced legal actions as well.
Better to get nailed for plaigarism before you have your degree like this guy at the University of Kent did than to build a career around a falsehood like the department chair.
A love beyond compare...
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
No it isn't. Read the article.
The basis for the suit is: "I've been plagarizing for 3.9 years, and right as I was about to graduate, you told me I couldn't. You shouldn't be allowed to kick someone out for plagarism after they pay you for 4 years of education."
This is a very silly argument, but if the student can find some evidence that the administration had knowledge of the plagarism scheme, led him to believe he would graduate, he paid all his fees, and *then* they pulled the plug, that would probably be just as immoral as the plagarism itself.
Lets be honest with ourselves. Who plagarizes anymore and thinks its okay?
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?
OTOH, nice troll.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
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.
- infringes on music copyrights... applaud
- infringes on non-GPL licensing stipulations
... applaud
- infringes on GPL licensing stipulations
... flame
- infringes on website owner copyrights by reposting text that requires free registration
... flame
- infringes on website owner copyrights by putting up an (unauthorized) mirror of the same material
... cheer
- cheats in class by using a graphing calculator's memory functions
.. cheer
hmm.. it's not here.writes in additional line
- plagarizes in class by plagarizing from the web
... flame
glad we got that sorted.He admits he plagiarised. From the article:
"But they have taken all my money for three years and pulled me up the day before I finished. If they had pulled me up with my first essay at the beginning and warned me of the problems and consequences, it would be fair enough."
He's complaining that he spent 3 years and lots of money submitting stolen papers and that the University should have made him understand EARLIER that submitting stolen papers would REALLY get him kicked out of the program.
His case is that no one at the university REALLY explained to him that stealing papers was not acceptable and what the ACTUAL consequences would be. Or at least that they didn't do it early enough to satisfy him.
Whether he wins or loses that case, you have to ask yourself, would you want to HIRE him to work for you?
There are two reasons.
1) Citations are useful for people doing research. If I read your paper, and I want to know more about a specific item, I will look at your references and get other related books. This is not applicable or useful in this case because the only purpose of the paper was to demonstrate the student's abilities, NOT to create a work that will be read and used by others.
2) To make a clear distinction between what is YOUR thinking and what thinking you BORROWED from someone else. This is the primary reason why plagarism is frowned upon; you're tricking the teacher into thinking you did work when all you did was copy someone else's. However, this isn't applicable here either, because the student actually did the work.
Really, this is just the product of a paranoid administration more obsessed with the letter of the law than the purpose.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
"This is like a murderer saying they should have warned me earlier that I will kill a person and go to jail?"
It sounds more to me like a serial murder that killed 4 or 5 people over three years suing the police departments who investigated the case for not catching him after the first one thus stopping him from serving time for and additional 3 or 4 people.
Writing a good term paper actually IS about taking constucted pieces and putting them together.
BUT YOU HAVE TO CITE YOUR SOURCES.
Any moron can take someone elses hard work and put their name on it, it involves no creativity, no intelligence, and no skill.
The only thing this guy has going for him is that he feels the world owes him a living for no work of his own. Frankly if you're too fucking lame to get an english degree, there is no place for you in college. (Before all the English Majors start whining, I should mention that I have an English BA, which I picked up accidentally while working on my CS BS, so I know what the hell I'm talking about.)
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
While I understand what you're saying, you're A) oversimplifying and B) assuming Slashdot thinks as a single hivemind. (Which, while more true than may be optimal for true arguments and discussions, is NOT as true as your little quick-reference sheet makes it seem.)
The first point is a gross oversimplification as, while SOME people here have said specifically 'All copyright is wrong and should be abbolished," MOST people have expressed something more mild. Along the lines of, "The current copyright system is extremely unfair. However, I do understand the possible good uses for copyright as an idea, just not how it is currently implimented. Because of that, I have more sympathy for those who chose to ignore the unreasonable restrictions used for copywritten entertainment (usually music) than those who use the copyright system to impose unreasonable restrictions on media." Which, in your mind, gets boiled down to all Slashdotters saying, "Infringing on music copyrights is good." This isn't even true for all Slashdoters, though, as every time music copyrights come up there are well-spoken arguments by artists (or even just those who disagree with downloading music without paying the artist, or programmers who apply the argument about music to software) who explain why they believe the copyright system is valid, and you're an ass if you "pirate" music or software.
The second two points ignore the type of licensing stipulations. You seem to have a missunderstanding you seem to have on how (many) Slashdoters view software licensing. The issue (as I understand it) is that the GPL grants privledges BEYOND what would normally exist for code. As such, violating it makes you look like an ass, because you're already being given allowances you wouldn't have had without the GPL. On the other hand, the software licenses which are "applauded" when broken (usually) impose a restriction that (by Slashdot hivemind, popular concensus, the phase of the moon, or whatever company is currently in or out of favor) have been deemed unreasonable and overly harsh. For the most part, these software licenses impose restrictions vastly beyond what 'normal' copyright law would suggest is standard, and often due so in a questionably legal fashion (click through licenses, EULAs, popup browser downloads that say they are "required," etc.) So violating the GPL makes you look greedy while violating 'standard' software licenses (according ot Slashdot groupthink) can be the "right" thing to do.
I don't even understand your points concerning mirroring and reposting text. Karma whores or ACs will often copy-and-paste text from Salon or the NYT and get modded up for it. Likewise, posting mirrors often gets you modded up. The idea for the first is that many (not all) people feel the registration systems imposed for some news sites are overly harsh and appreciate not having to give up such info to read what - in the newsstand print edition - would require no personaly identifying information. The logic behind mirroring is that many of the sites Slashdot posts about are, by their nature, hobby sites with low bandwidth and the webmasters appreciate not having their site hosed. When an entire word has been devoted to the negative effect of having a website posted on Slashdot, I don't think mirroring is unreasonable. For small sites, it's often considered a polite way of being helpful, rather than copyright violation...
Maybe I missed a story, but how is the graphing calculator even slightly on topic? Because it's a story about school? I admit I don't read every story and don't have them all memorized, but I don't recal seeing a story about some kid getting in trouble for using a graphic calculator. (I wouldn't be copmletely surprised if it happened, but I think you're jumping the gun by posting about it.) That said, as a student... graphing calculators are tools and, if the teacher allows their use, I'm going to damn well use every tool I can to make my life easier. I'm not writing papers by hand because computers make it easier. Lik
The student's argument only has merit if the University is selling the degree for the money. However, this is not the case. The money is for attending classes and for the educational services of the University. The money is NOT for grades or a degree. The student received the classes and the educational services, therefore the student was not deprived of anything he was entitled to for the tuition money spent. The degree is awarded for meeting the academic requirements of the University, not for paying tuition. The student, because he cheated, did not meet the academic requirements, and therefore is not entitled to a degree.
I have an English BA, which I picked up accidentally while working on my CS BS.
Response 1:
So you're the bastard whose got it! I just put it down for a few minutes beside the printer in the computer lab, and when I got back it was gone!
Response 2:
Lucky sod - the rest of us have to work at picking up girls/guys.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.