In September, 2003, I was blogging about What the NY Times called the “campus fad” of Internet plagiarism. “What Does a Professor Do All Day?” (Clearly we are wasting our time whenever we are not standing in front of a classroom.) “Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables“ Leni Riefenstahl Dies (although she distanced…
Jonathan Bailey writes: In short, Bello, an author who admitted to plagiarizing in her now-cancelled debut novel, wrote an article about the experience and, in that article, included poor paraphrasing without attribution of an article that I wrote over a decade ago. It’s a moment that even 16 years of work in this field did…
As a college English teacher, I come to the table with a nuanced professional stance on the value of originality in writing. In a given discourse community, I can refer to common ideas without making it look like I am claiming original thinking. For example, when I was an undergrad with a work-study job in the…
In 2012 my former Slate colleague Farhad Manjoo revealed that several of BuzzFeed’s most popular listicles were lifted in large part from other websites, including Reddit. In the years since, the site has been hit with lawsuits and public accusations from people who feel it has exploited or flat-out stolen their work. Last month the…
“If we really are trying to teach the world, including people from other cultures, we have to take a responsibility to educate people about plagiarism, not just vaporize people for it,” said Mr. Severance, who is also a clinical associate professor of information at Michigan, in an interview on Wednesday. —The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In 2008, when her scientific publication, the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science, became the first in China to use CrossCheck text analysis software to spot plagiarism, Zhang was pleased to be a trailblazer. But when the first set of results came in, she was upset and horrified. “In almost two years, we find about 31 percent…
Jerz > Writing > Academic > Plagiarism is an academic or professional misrepresentation, in which a writer takes credit for someone else’s ideas. Avoid plagiarism by submitting your own work giving proper credit to other people whose words and/or ideas appear in your work recognizing that direct quotation (with citation) and paraphrase (with citation) are both acceptable ways to use…
That reminds me. I have a couple of academic integrity reports to file. The Washington Post has suspended a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for three months for lifting material from another US newspaper. Sari Horwitz, who won America’s top journalism award with a colleague in 2002, was found to have used “substantial” parts of two articles…
Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that. But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that…
Chris Anderson is best-known for championing the long tail (marketing to the niche customers who fill out the trailing end of a demographics chart, rather than trying to create products to please the mass market) and has been promoting a book on the topic. One of the early reviewers for his book identified great swaths…
I remember the Biden law school incident. Not long after that, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, I remember reading that law school students were secretly photocopying homework assignments submitted by their arch enemies, in the hopes of one day using that information to torpedo a big political appointment. By choosing Joe Biden as his running…
Politico: Wolfson made the explosive charge in an interview with Politico after suggesting as much in a conference call with reporters. On the call, Wolfson said: “Sen. Obama is running on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises and, as we have seen in the last couple of days, he’s breaking…
The student paper at Southern Illinois University publishes an analysis, assisted by an anonymous source, of evidence of plagiarism in the dissertation written by the SIU president. “I could have made a mistake,” Poshard said. “I’m not saying I didn’t.” The Daily Egyptian recently obtained copies of Poshard’s dissertation and original works from a source…
“The Little Book of Plagiarism” is inspired by several recent literary scandals, starting with the Kaavya Viswanathan affair. At 17, Viswanathan was paid a $500,000 advance for a deal that included a “chick-lit novel,” but when that novel was published, attentive readers noticed that she had copied at least 13 passages from a novel by…
In my discussions with opponents of [plagiarism detection services], it’s unclear that any methods of plagiarism detection at all are acceptable. Too much zeal to trust students can lead to a tacit “look the other way” practice which is naive, irresponsible, and just as likely to breed resentment among students who do the writing as…
“The number of term papers assigned over the years has decreased significantly,” said Herman Clay, director of history and social sciences at Los Angeles Unified School District. Instead, Los Angeles teachers are assigning more in-class written exams, oral reports with visual aids and PowerPoint presentations, said Clay, a former principal of Van Nuys High School.…
“A lot of students in their early education do not get a very good grounding from their instructors about when it’s acceptable to use somebody else’s material,” says Jane Kirtley, who teaches Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota. “There’s also a sense among students today that if it’s something they can find…
A recently-published novel by Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan ’08, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” contains several passages that are strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty — the 2001 novel “Sloppy Firsts” and the 2003 novel “Second Helpings.” […] Little, Brown signed Viswanathan to a two-book, $500,000…
Why Plagiarism Makes Sense in the Digital Age: Copying, Remixing, and Composing (CCCC 2006 Chicago — Day 2) This was a jam-packed, no-downtime, hardly-time-to-breathe presentation. I’m posting the notes that I took while the presenters were speaking, very lightedly edited afterwards in my hotel room. I hope whatever inadvertent remixing I did while taking these notes…
—Reading, Writing, Plagiarism, and Academic Honesty (CharlesLipson.com) Nothing really quotable on this page — it’s a very useful portal designed to promote Charles Lipson’s book, Doing Honest Work in College.
