Plagiarism and How to Avoid It

Ditto.

I once help out a co-worker with his homework dealing with simple electroinc circuits and he afterward informed me that the instructor told one look at the paper and then ask him who did he get to aid him.

Off hand I would guess if you are doing you job you would know the level of work that any given student would likely hand in along with his writting and thinking style.

One of the cheaters ended up with a Federal holiday name after him it would seem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.


Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School. He skipped ninth and twelfth grade, and entered Morehouse College at age fifteen without formally graduating from high school.[6] In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology,[7] and enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951.[8] King then began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Doctor of Philosophy on June 5, 1955.
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A 1980s inquiry concluded portions of his dissertation had been plagiarized and he had acted improperly but that his dissertation still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship".[9][10]
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King married Coretta Scott, on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama.[11] King and Scott had four children; Yolanda King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and Bernice King.[12] King became pastor of

Why not get them to do a critical review of plagiarized essays on said topic?

Mame I can not help but to laugh as I picture a flood of requests going into such papers writing firms for reviews of the plagiarized issue!

Over four decades ago a home encyclopedia set that my parents had kindly purchased for my benefit came with a fair number of coupons that allow you to request research papers using the coupons.

I would not had been surprise if some of our founding fathers had this form of service available to them<grin>.

No one wish to comment on the subject of MLK being guilty of achieving the doctor title before his name by Plagiarism?

The only American with a Federal Holiday name after him.

Yes to downgrade or question this man is to be a racist it would seem on it face and is therefore forbidden even in this group.

Sorry I always did question the man morals as in placing children in the front of marches to get hit by the fire hoses and the dogs for the TV news cameras to record.

Eh, you can learn a lot from doing a critical review of anything and as a first assignment of the term, it'd be a great lesson for the students. The prof could pick apart various plagiarized essays and get the students in on it. He/she could also show how easy it is for profs to spot plagiarized stuff - wouldn't the students learn an important lesson?

And frankly, morality aside, I rank plagiarized work at the same level of importance to me as athletes on steroids. Hey, if you're the type of person that decides he needs to cheat, go ahead. You won't get my respect but it's no sweat off my nose. Your behaviour always comes back to bite you in the butt.

Edit: If I were a teacher and concerned about this, I'd start the term by saying plagiarized works abound, I'm familiar with them, and anyone getting caught plagiarizing gets a ZERO and I'd attach a copy of the work plagiarized to theirs as proof. That'd stop them in their tracks.

Google is a useful device for weeding out plagiarism, but it doesn't do any harm to lay down the law at the beginning of term, let them know that plagiarism is a criminal offence, that might put some off. Sitting down with a student and their essay quite often sorts things out.

I once had a very weak student submit a very good essay on Of Mice and Men. He used the phrase 'Crooks has a caustic sence of humour.' I asked him what he meant by that sentence, or if he could explain what the word 'caustic' meant. He didn't have a clue. I didn't accept the assignment as coursework. I can't remember whether or not he sumitted something else or if his coursework folder was incomplete. Most plagiarists are quite clumsy.

had the student attributed the phrase to its proper source you probably would have patted it on the back for going so many extra miles to see what others gave said and to make sure that the student understood what was in the review literature already. If its attributed , the student isnt trying to pass it off as its own.

Writing is a big part of my craft and we have style manuels that give all sorts of hints on the emns of attribution and how far back the attribution goes before its considered something like common knowledge.

I once had a kid write a paper on strctural geology of the Appalachians and he attributed the laying out of the first T/R grid ranges that sepoarate the midwestern Us from the east. Wholly unnecessary

He was trying to pass the whole thing off as his own. This wasn't a case where someone had forgotten to use quotations, it was out and out fraud. Someone else had written the essay, he had copied it out, and did not understand what he'd written.

the whole thing eh? Wow, in my field, publication is so fast and furious that (it may seem counterintuitive) its rather easy to discover concepts and phrases and sometimes entire paragraphs that are lifted . Very rareley though do I get them without attribution.


Ive seen these ads that appear in writers magazines and several other "fringe to the science publications", where someone has an ad that promises to do your MS Or PhD papers. Jeezus, wheres the grad committee that someone could even think this would work? Unless a "for profit" university operates on a different hard-wiring system and this kind of **** isnt even noticed.

ers

Honest, it was clear he did not write it, we're talking about a very low ability student GCSE level E at best, submitting an A grade essay. He could not explain anything in the piece he had handed in, caustic is the bit I remember in particular.

One of them even had gotten a US holiday name in his honor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr._authorship_issues

Boston University, where King got his Ph.D. in systematic theology, conducted an investigation that found he plagiarized major portions of his doctoral thesis from various other authors who wrote about the topic.[4][5]

According to civil rights historian Ralph E. Luker, who worked on the King Papers Project directing the research on King's early life, King's paper The Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism[6] was taken almost entirely from secondary sources.[7] He writes:

Moreover, the farther King went in his academic career, the more deeply ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation seemed to be, by then, the product of his long-established practice.[7]
The incident was first reported in the December 3, 1989 edition of the Sunday Telegraph by Frank Johnson, titled "Martin Luther King — Was He a Plagiarist?" The incident was then reported in U.S. in the November 9, 1990 edition of the Wall Street Journal, under the title of "To Their Dismay, King Scholars Find a Troubling Pattern." Several other newspapers then followed with stories, including the Boston Globe and the New York Times. Numerous newspaper editorials defended King, saying he was still a great man regardless of his academic fraud.[citation needed]

Boston University decided not to revoke his doctorate, saying that although King acted improperly, his dissertation still "makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship." However, a letter is now attached to King's dissertation in the university library, noting that numerous passages were included without the appropriate quotations and citations of sources.[1][8][9]