When citing papers, you’re typically doing so in order to acknowledge results from previous findings / arguments and then steer a paper in a different direction taking into consideration those previous findings. Plagiarism would be taking their work and then using it as if it is your own
@petercrane2691 please don't be the exact reason why everyone has an issue with academics. You are not better than everyone else. Maybe a lot of people don't understand because..... I don't know.... it's in fucking text and not spoken. You know what, you're right. People should be ashamed of themselves for not reading a joke from 8 words of a UA-cam comment.
This is a really good professor. Doesn't excuse the behaviour, gives her students consequences, but isn't overly contemptuous and calmly explains what not to do with examples.
Isn't overly contemptuous? She is awful. She Failed an A student for copying a single paragraph in an undergrad class. She is a viscous snake is what she is.
this is why I like Engineering. You don't have to put up with this essay plagiarism bs. In fact, they don't even care about grammar and sources in my Engineering labs. lol. I am glad I am pretty well done with all my gen ed's.
this is why I like Engineering. You don't have to put up with this essay plagiarism bs. In fact, they don't even care about grammar and sources in my Engineering labs. lol. I am glad I am pretty well done with all my gen ed's.@@anonymous-cq7wj
One time in college I plagiarized off of myself accidentally. I was writing a paper when I found I could reuse a couple paragraphs from another paper that I'd written and submitted to the university. I was given a zero on the paper because once you submit a work to the university, you no longer have ownership over it as your rightful intellectual property. I had to go to the professor and explain that I used my own words from a previous paper. She allowed me to redo the paper, but she told me I was not allowed to cite myself as a source. its a very weird and annoying rule -- kind of a funny story though.
thats bs idk where are you from or what kind of contract or agreements you had to sign to enroll in your university but normally the ownership of your thesis as intellectual property will always be yours as long as you are indeed the sole creator.
Omfg I sorta did this in college once. I wrote a long ass essay for a communications class. About a year later I had a different communications class and procrastinated on a shorter, less formal/important assignment and luckily the 2 assignments were similar enough where I could copy the same points from my other paper. I just summarized my previous paper to avoid having it be the exact same and submitted that with no issues
I agree that self-plagiarism is stupid (especially since you aren't allowed to cite yourself in this case), but it isn't necessarily a result of you losing ownership of your words. Using the exact same words in a different work still counts as copying, even if you wrote the original work that is being copied. It would be like if Shakespeare used an exact same paragraph in Hamlet that had been used in Romeo and Juliet. He still owns Romeo and Juliet, but it would be clear copying of his own previous work, thus having no value in the new work. Getting around this simply requires rephrasing the ideas or indicating he is quoting it to support something new (such as drawing a parallel).
@@1370802Some classes are required for certain majors and others are required for all majors. I assure you, there are some classes where the students don’t really want to be there. Just because you want a degree doesn’t mean that you can’t feel forced to take a class.
The students are "forced" to attend as their grade depends on it, while,alternatively , we are voluntarily watching this lecture as there are no incentives or consequences to watching this in our free time
I never got nailed for plagiarism in my college writing classes, but I appreciate how the professor here allows the students to consult with her before turning in the paper to avoid plagiarism.
@@patches4170 Yeah I feel like none of these other posters ever met my college advisor or the graduate chair of my department... Office hours? Good fucking luck.
@@nicbentulanyeah but they don’t usually mention that students can ask about plagiarism, most students wouldn’t go to their prof if they’re scared that they’re plagiarizing, but explicitly stating that she will help can make a big difference in the amount of students that will reach out
We had a professor once who did this but rather than plagiarism, did it to highlight the importance of proof reading. My favorite example was "Christopher Columbus circumcised the earth with a 100ft clipper."
Plagiarism gets weird sometimes - everybody's constantly trying to say the same things in slightly different ways. Eventually we'll run out of ways to say things, and accidental plagiarism will become increasingly common
This is the problem. You get a word count of 2000 words. It's not a new field, say a first year undergraduate history paper on the Reformation, or the Civil War, you’re given a couple of text books and a list of websites to research. You’ve got a couple of weeks to turn it in. You're not going to go and do original research, so you, and the tens of thousands of other students over the decades, not to mention the tens of thousands of other academics, are ALL using the same sources. You do your due diligence, you’re a good student, you get the subject and you have an idea, you enjoy learning. The problem is that even though you've done the reading done your research, you've had some ideas, it's almost guaranteed that hundreds of others have had the same thoughts, and they've written about them. So you play it safe, you cite, and then you cite some more, and you play it really, really, safe; you don't want to be accused of plagiarism. So at the end of your essay you've got 2000 words, with almost every sentence, point, paragraph, with a citation after it. And it’s horrible. You've just got common use connectives and paraphrases inbetween endless citations. Because the subject has been wringed out of all its originality. You feel your playing a word game, a type of scrabble, not writing a paper to show you understand it. I know there's wriggle room for ‘common knowledge’, but after a few months it just feels like your a human AI, you're desperate to actually get out of writing endless essays playing the citation word game, it gets boring real quick.
One time in college I got cited for plagiarism because I accidentally didn’t put quotes around something that was taken from an article we are all given and told to make a summary of, and even though that it was clearly accidental and I put an in-text citation and reference next to it, the professor gave me a zero, took it to the student disciplinary council, and thus forced me to both complete a stupid plagiarism training I didn’t need and thus left a stain on my permanent record. The original quote was half a sentence on a total absolutely minor and meaningless assignment for a class I was doing well in… Absolutely ridiculous that he not only had to make a big condescending stink over it when I eventually had to meet him over it, but couldn’t even keep it in house and waste everyone’s time over it. Not only that, but the fact that most universities and teachers don’t have different punishments for accidental minor plagiarism versus intentional wide-reaching plagiarism is just dumb
And people think teachers deserve a raise. I’ve only ever seen one teacher in my life that didn't deserve to be paying me to sit through their incompetent ego trip.
Yeah, the emphasis should be on writing good papers, not punishing small careless errors. This is the common sense that a lot of teachers seem to lack. One is much easier to grade though, and the teachers aren't being paid very much for this.
@@coatofarms4439 They fucking do. I do not care how many shitty teachers you have, I know many more who are outstanding at what they do. If you're saying that someone who sits with children (yes even high schoolers count as children) for 8 hours a day, do work BEFORE and AFTER school is over (whether it be prep, grading, etc...), and a bunch of other stuff only deserves $20k (less than a PROGRAMMER), then you're crazy. As a programmer, I see what my mother has to go through as a teacher, and the fact that I get paid way more than her still astounds me (I work as a programmer and the amount of work I do barely amounts to anything compared to what teachers have to do)
You see, there is no way for the professor to verify whether this was or was not intentional, and it also doesn't matter. Teaching you the hard way was 100% the correct and pedagogically justified approach.
I once got yelled at for plagiarism and was given a 50% on the assignment and you may be wondering why not a 0... well I don't know, probably because she couldn't find the source I was plagiarizing from and just expected me to feel guilty and accept the 50% but I wrote the paper to begin with and didn't plagiarize anything. I confronted the teacher and she was the unable to admit she's wrong to a student type of teacher so she held her ground and said it was too well written, and I must've used something to fix it for me. I said I wrote it in a word document and she said, "SEE That is not allowed! It was supposed to be written in the text box with no other resources to help." Keep in mind this was a 'research paper'. We were allowed to use the internet. I went to my counselor and she laughed because she knew me and said that this would only happen to me then contacted the teacher and said to overwrite the grade.
@@shadowpicaro yeah. It was for a course that wasn't directly connected with my school (German 2) so the teacher never met me in person and I found it amusing to be honest. I knew it wouldn't matter in the end and it was such a memorable story. *It wasn't the only time it's happened though* I did once receive a 75% on a paper that was 2.5 pages when the length requirement said "must be a full 2 pages" I complained and she said it was too long. I took it up with the University because this teacher was a TA or something and worked the summer classes
Wait you had a counselor? Back in my day(jk, literally 2 years ago, piece of shit system still vigent) we just had to sit there and eat their whole sermon even when they were wrong
Throughout my undergraduate I wrote largely expansive, technical papers on different engineering projects or topics, to disease solution frameworks and market analysis, to infectious disease. The way I avoided plagiarism, as there is endless volumes of information about such subjects, is to identify the key sources for a topic, aggregate them and sort them by topic. Then, you can create sections in whatever you take notes on for each topic (as it is relevant to your paper of course), and go through each paper and copy and paste the portions that have relevancy to your work. Paste the URL by each quote. Highlight in red the key information discovered in each copied section, and rinse and repeat. Underneath the quote, summarize in as few words as possible the general idea of each quote. As you write your paper, you can reference these notes, and syncretize from your own knowledge or multiple different copied sections the relevant material, and be able to accurately, on the spot, cite multiple sources for your argument and directly compare whether or not you are "copying" what the authors are saying or using their discoveries as evidence for your work.
I had a case where a source I was using was written in a voice and wording exactly identical to the way I write. I _almost_ used the exact same sentence as was in the source, purely through coincidence. Thankfully I caught it and was able to reword my own sentence since this was an assignment where we were not supposed to use direct quotes, but it was a nerve-wracking experience to think that I might get called for plagiarism when I just write in an academic voice by default when I'm doing school papers.
@@stancastan Same, I wrote a psychology page the other day and I put it in an AI detector. It said 99% AI generated content, even though the entire paper was written by me with no AI assistance. I think it's just as foolish for educators to rely on currently faulty AI detectors as it is to use AI to write your papers as a student.
@@abcdqwerty3562 Well that's good. I haven't come across any teachers or professors using them but my opinion stands, if any are using them, they're very much ignoring the reality.
@@stancastan Wow, a group of people notorious for being technologically incompetent… turn out to be technologically incompetent time and time again! Who would’ve known?
That's because handing out zeros for plagiarism is bad policy. It's like shooting a patient in the head because they have a small tumor on their pinky toe.
When doing research, it becomes hard to avoid plagiarism. Especially if you end up reading a lot of someone in particular, you may catch his style and ending up writing almost word for word what he wrote. So there is a dumb strategy: read different people, summarize then let it out of your memory and work from your summaries. But that's some dedication ^^ The other unintentional trick is to do your research in another language. English is not my official first language, but I have a good command of it. So, I end up reading in English and writing in French. Also, I do summaries over multiple authors, so the conclusions and hereabouts are not one of one author, but of the group.
@The Philosophy Guy Like she said, if you use a big quote from another author and cite it correctly, it might be considered overquoting, you might get docked for it, but it's not illegal, and you're not going to get expelled for it.
im reading a ray bradbury book right now and I am not gonna stop myself from using his stlye of writing lol, especially his use of imagery, its really strong and effective
It isn't difficult at all: if you are summarizing, as you say, a point made by another author, you simply source it. Problem solved. I will concede that in many undergraduate classes the idea of providing sources may not be taught as well as it should be. And, having been to law school, sourcing points (or authority, as we'd call it) is second nature to me, so I do speak with a little more education on this subject. But the idea that avoiding plagiarism is difficult is nonsense. Where things get dicey are historical "facts." By that I mean, what constitutes a fact? If a historian writes a book that shows that Abe Lincoln did XYZ on a certain date, something unknown to us beforehand, is that a historical fact now, like his Gettysburg Address or assassination? Or is it something that needs to be sourced since it is little known? That is something I don't have the answer to, but you're always better off sourcing material. For undergraduate work, providing a source should never be an issue with any paper you turn in.
@@scott1564 happens that sometimes, you've a great ides to develop a thesis, because 10 years ago, you read something. The thing is that you've no awareness of that. So, you write it and then get told that it's plagiarism, because you're having the same devlopment than X. So, you need to read others to know that you're too close to be different. Hence, it's not original work. Normally, you've to read different people, summarize their ideas (with sourcing), position yourself then add your own ideas, unless you can show with no uncertainty that you align with each of them. In that case, you use internal references. It's still heavy work.
I really do think we're at a stage in history where it is far harder to reinvent the wheel. You can only use or rearrange words in such a unique way to not "plagiarize", especially for definitions.
I honestly think the idea of plagiarism is skewed, in the sense that plagiarism shouldn't be that big of a deal. I can understand why it does is terrible, but I also think the teaching system takes it too seriously. I've heard of cases of people failing their entire education, of not life, because they took an easy way or forgot to quote an author and some people decided it was bad enough to condemn them to a heavy punishment. Kinda feels like school making their own justice, which should be illegal. It's also becoming increasingly difficult not to copy what someone did, as even of it wasn't necessarily published *someone* must have already formulated it that way. The best example of that is music, as almost every song is documented, and people are starting to buy the rights to string of notes rather than songs because it's used so often.
If the material you “plagerized” is factual then who gives a damn. The goal of information should be to spread knowledge not try to please the ego of arrogant writers who just so happened to write it first. College professors should be fired so they can learn how the real world works.
True. One time in high school i got cited for plagiarism on an essay i had written. The thing is that i had never read any of the texts that i had supposedly plagiarized. My essay just happened to have a few sentences that were similar by coincidence.
@@xavierrecipon6053 Exactly. Back in my schools and university there were rules like, don't cite X%, and I believe it was capped at 20% or 15% relatively... regardless of the subject. And for code I believe it was slightly higher, BUT THATS CODE! They're like, expecting me to create new logics out of thin air sometimes LMAO. Or write up my own syntax, like bro... And now they have something like TurnItIn, or whatever it's called; I putted in a paper I wrote, it cited stuff from sources I never even looked up, let alone read about... it's crazy. And the sources I did cite, rarely picked up on it, maybe a few but generally no. And the teacher was like, "I'll let it slide this time" Like bro. This case was for a biology course, a widely "researched" field with many writings on pretty foundational topics. Rewritten about over and over again... and it's not like the founders of new frontiers in biology decided to come up with alternative terms to prevent plagiarism, like seriously... I do wonder how plagiarism works in other languages far less binary than English. I guess those symbolic languages being Japanese, Chinese, or Korean.
@@Iog In general less spoken languages are easier because you will have less scientific paper in that language. But yeah plagiarism is stupid in a lot of cases, you think about more of avoiding plagiarism than to actually create new things based on already existing stuff. As a software developer plagiarism is my life, i will take bits of code that I can use in my own way. Even though those bits are not mine but the things I build from them is and that what is truly matters.
I'm a musician and basically the art of composing is basically stealing from eachother and making other's stuff yours, as Stravinskij said: "Real artists don't borrow, they steal". Sure, that definitely does not mean you can take a Mozart sonata and "make it yours" but you can base the composition off the style and play around with it or quote passages from composers. I see people saying "it's hard to be original, I can't quote because I'm afraid of copyright". My advice is it doesn't matter. You can take the subject from a Bach fugue and write a new one, you can take any theme from any composer and write variations, the most you can do is specify whose the theme is
Something I tried is stealing the bass from songs. Basically I reduced it down and added figures above the bass, basically turning it into a partimenti exercise. It worked particularly well with Corelli. Definitely suited to Baroque era stuff more though.
@@amandak.4246 Yes, but that also goes the other way around. Copyright of contemporary music is getting way, WAY too strict and starts having the same problem of prohibiting every tiny bit of plagiarism - it misses the point of protecting intellectual property and dissolves into over-pedanticism and killing creativity (resp. obscuring the important information if we are talking about the sciences).
I once had a professor get on my ass for plagiarism. Because they 'had a student say that same exact phrase on last paper.' Turns out that same exact student was me, I basically re-used a point word for word on a past paper for this paper. The assignment was to research a topic that was mainstream, and then come back to it three months later to see what changed. My topic didn't really change at all that much. He was like 'you need to quote yourself, or I'll have to flunk you for plagiarizing yourself.' I was like 'dude, you can but we'll be taking this to someone higherup. It's ridiculous you're being so stingy about it.' He decided that it wasn't worth arguing with me over it, nor was it worth his time to talk to like my parents/his boss. He ended up knocking my grade from an A to a B because that was 'fair.' Still hate that guy, and I made a left him a well worded review on that professors website.
@@jameson1239 Because it's incredibly stupid that an A paper gets dropped to a B over not quoting myself. He also, was a shit professor overall. His lectures covered nothing in the books we were assigned, he gave us homework material that frankly wasn't even remotely close to what we were studying. He also, was just an asshole. There was another student, who generally got C,D grades on most everything. During an important test this student actually got a 94% The professor was so sure this kid cheated, that not only did he write a letter to the dean, but also the counselor, and the students parents. Turns out, that the kid didn't cheat, he just understood the material. The professor didn't offer any sort of apology, and refused to put the students original 94%, instead marking the assignment late, and giving the kid an 80% as a result.
My university uses a plagiarism checker that checks against ALL sources the uni has access to, and one time it said that I had plagiarized something. After checking the source it said I plagiarized I discovered that I had plagiarized from... myself. The plagiarism checker also checked your paper against all assignments anyone had ever turned in, and it said I plagiarized, off of my own previous assignment, from the same class. Edit for clarity: It was a mundane background sentence akin to, "The sky is blue," and I ain't citing or rewording that, nor am I citing my coment that preceded this edit.
This is true. On my current syllabi for all my college courses, they cite plagiarism against yourself as being no different than plagiarism from somewhere else. Packs the same punishment (borderline expulsion) too
@@DueySR I wasn't even copying, and it was a mundane background sentance akin to "The sky is blue," and I ain't citing or rewording that, nor am I citing the edit that preceded this comment.
I could smell the note copying from a mile away. It happens at graduate and professional level. The first sentence, the definition, is now a common expression. If used without the rest of Blumberg, I don't think it would be plagiarism. In that case, I think it is a matter of context whether or not an introductory phrase like "The CDC defines..."
The story/example involving the AIDS paper just shows how ridiculous the obsession with plagiarism is. If a student just turns in work that us simply copying someone else’s work then they rightly deserve a poor grade, but if they show legitimate thought and effort, failing them over quotation marks or a missed citation is asinine.
This. I'm really, really concerned about the upcoming year when I'm going to be writing my diploma thesis and if some program is going to accuse me of even *subconciously* copying something, it's insane.
But what would you do if your work was published and the person you unintentionally plagiarized from caught that? You’d be sued and rightly so. College is a preparation for real world professionals.
I agree. In Sweden, if a teacher has remarks on your paper, if it's slight plagiarism for example, they will tell you to edit it and resubmit it. And then it'll be approved.
@@1370802 Over a single definition from a source you did actually cite, when it's almost certainly an honest mistake? I think the vast majority of scientists have better things to do.
@@1370802 There are 8 billion people on earth. How many words in the english language alone, do you think are spoken every day? The sentence that you just said, almost certainly, has been said, in multiple languages. multiple times before. This paragraph i type right now, has most likely, been typed, at least ONCE before, even if it went undocumented.
I had a senior level, semester long presentation for Virology. It was the terminal class in the entire department of Microbiology, and I was not a Microbiology major. My classmate, who genuinely seemed to have literacy problems, copied and pasted incorrect information from over a dozen of sources for each of his slides, did not modify the references, the diction, the formatting errors from pasting onto powerpoint, nothing. Just straight up copied and pasted. Did not cite anything either, despite there being in-text citation in some of the paragraphs I told him to redo it, and he did not touch the document at all until we presented The thing is, all of the precursor classes to that are -extremely- writing intensive. I don't know how he wasn't caught
@@aw4417 @A W it depends... often yes, intent is part of the 'charge' of plagiarism, but there are different considerations for different circumstances so in some instances intent will be taken into consideration and in others it won't matter
@@erinys2 You have more faith in people than you should. People do really dumb shit knowing full well what will happen when they do. They continue to do it time after time. Someone with tens of DUIs, multiple arrest of robbery, or etc. Common sense shouldn't be taken for granted. It doesn't help that plagiarism is by far easier than all of those. You can just control C and V it on a word document or have the source right next to you as you type. People of all academic levels and social ones all make the same dumb decisions because they always think they can get away with it. That they're smarter than the individuals that are being "fooled".
@notaurenotsure2732 Plagiarism exists. I will refer you to the first example in the video for one possible reason as to why someone would do it. Also, insane people exist. What are you trying to say?
@@fillername236 It happened with me back in 2016. Mine was unintetional and i almost got kicked out of college for it. But they left me off the hook and told me not to do it again.
I used to work as a TA when I was in grad school, responsible for reading papers for the professor in a freshman course. Unintentional plagiarism is easy to spot, I.e student meaning to paraphrase but it is too close to the source material student quoting the author and giving the appropriate in-text citation but forgot to put quotes. Just some examples. I’ve come across intentional plagiarism. I’ve always had the student’s back that I felt, unintentionally plagiarized in my notes due to oversight or lack of writing experience in paraphrasing. However, for the students that intentionally plagiarized, no.
Morally speaking, you might have a point, but in practicality you're going to face the same consequences either way, so it would be doing students no favors to hold them to a lesser standard than they are going to face later in life.
Thankfully didn't have to take a single gen ed prerequisite for college. In high school we had a plagiarism detector that you could simply use as a tool to ensure what you submitted wasn't plagiarised, so it was physically impossible to submit blatantly plagiarized work, but more importantly the way it was presented as a tool rather than "oh you plagiarized, kys, have a zero on the assignment." The things that would set off this plagiarism detector was ridiculous as well. You might think you're writing an original sentence only to to be told that you most definitely are not.
The first example with the parks system paper is a great case in point: all the student had to do was present that excerpt as a lengthy quotation. Had he done that the paper would not just have avoided plagiarism, it would have also have simply been a much better paper.
it would have been intellectually honest but no it would not have materially improved the paper. plagiarism identifies a kind of academic dishonesty, it has nothing to do with quality per se
it wouldn't have been better like the student was right to think that was a quick and easy way to make an A grade introduction, it was j morally wrong and he should have spent some time coming up w something on his own of an equal quality... but not j inserting a quotation
@@andrew2377 Wrong! Your work is your is yours only in the context that you originally wrote it in. When you re-use your words, you need to cite yourself if you are even allowed to do this practice in the first place!
@@theconnotationofmemedealer3795 I need to cite myself? But it's me.. that's just silly. Do I not own the rights to my own words? Explain this in a legal sense.
@@theconnotationofmemedealer3795 What I'm saying is, the idea of "plagiarizing yourself" is just professors trying to make it harder on the students..... My words are my words.. they are mine. I am my own conscious. I am me. My mind shouldn't have to magically change because I need to make sure not to "copy myself". What a complete joke.
@@andrew2377 in academia, uncited postulations/analyses are taken to be new contributions to the field - if you just start copy and pasting your 10 year old ideas into new papers without citation you're just muddying the waters and creating more work for other people who have to track down its origin. it also reflects poorly on your ability to be rigorous, and could even cause others to view your historical and future work with suspicion ("if they copy+pasted their own work, what's to say they didn't plagiarise others?"). in school, if you have perfectly phrased (unlikely) something previously then it should be cited such that it's clear to the reader that you've already done legwork, that you're confident in your conclusion, and that you're about to go on to reiterate it. if imperfectly phrased, this is an opportunity to reassess your original idea and strengthen it and word it more clearly. in any and all cases, simply re-using your work silently is lazy and you only deprive yourself of the chance to improve your analytical skills
I never plagiarized academically, but I do remember an instance where things made me nervous. I was debunking a book and in the process I was looking up a lot of other work on the topic, I wrote my own debunking from scratch and posted it on a forum. I put a lot of effort into it and it was a hit with the crowd there. Someone wanted to put it into a PDF for use and I declined permission. The issue is that I didn't know (and still don't) how much of what I wrote would have been too close too the source. My memory isn't photographic but it is good enough that I wouldn't want to have that work scrutinized. If it had been the night before it was due at an academic setting, I would have had to submit it and hoped for the best. After all I did write the whole thing myself with no copy and pasting. I can totally see that being a trap where nothing was intended but there is no time to go back and vet everything and after all the reading I had done it had sort of blurred together. I didn't have a due date and I had the instinct at least to be worried and so nothing happened, but I still think about it from time to time. The unanswered question.
Despite my anxiety, its better to leave some questions unanswered than have to deal with the truth, be it positive or not. There is a paper I had to write for college that I still get chills thinking about it, had read so many books and despite how I wrote it, it always kept striking on the back of my head how close it is to some of the work I studied for it. I ended giving up and just accepting a certain note reduction by a lot of quoting and adding sources but I still think someday someone will come up in my dreams and put me in dream jail for possible plagirizing
Only once I got close to plagiarizing a paper. I wanted to get better at writing and in my English class I asked my professor to group me up with the best student in the class. She did and we did our next assignment. I read her paper and I was blown away! I only had trouble coming up with a thesis statement, and that was the issue I wanted to work on the most. Our assignment was on "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. We had to write about the symbolic black box. This student described the scene in her opening paragraph something to the tune of, "the flowers were blossoming profusely [. . .] what a good day to kill someone". In my own paper I wrote"the flowers were blossoming profusely" and my professor held me after class and asked why I wrote that because it didn't fit with what I had written. It was basically a small detail that stood out like a sore thumb. And she went on to tell me that those words sound very familiar and that I should take a moment to think about copying from another student. I trashed my paper and started again. I read the book once more and made a brain storm tree and went from there. I passed the class and went on to learn a valuable lesson...College is for dumb dumbs.
Holy shit what a coincidence, I'm literally working on an assignment about "the lottery" by Shirley Jackson as I read this. I can definitely relate to you though, I've been paired up with what I can only describe as aspiring novelists, and even though I consider myself somewhat of a competent writer, it falls completely flat when compared to these people. It's super tempting to write in a similar fashion to what you just read, especially if that writing left an impression on you, you'll just start to copy their style unconsciously.
@@moistcrusader2026 yeah I know what you mean. I enjoy writing especially when I want to describe a time/place. I start to feel like I can take 10 pages to describe a tree...sound familiar? :)
@@Zanarkendjp Unfortunately I don't know what you mean, sorry. I do enjoy very descriptive writing though, I find people who can describe something with minute detail while still making it engaging very impressive
I never plagiarized past the 4th gade. I got C's straight through all my writing classes. I'm a successful engineer now. Don't plagiarize, just get shitty grades. You'd be shocked at how irrelevant grades are.
@@advikdeshmukh805 You don't need to get an internship to get hired. I never did. I'd argue it's better to not do an internship. Spend your young 20s having fun, not working.
I teach computer science at a university and have seen tons of plagiarised assignments. Getting caught and being forced to repeat is a nice "threat" but it's not the main reason why you should be deterred from it. All university rules aside, here's what I have noticed happens to a huge amount of students who plagiarise: - You're not learning. The assignments are there for you to learn the important aspects of the course. Not doing well in them is a more valuable learning experience than plagiarising them - You might get a few extra marks from the assignments, but in actual exams it becomes very easy to see who was plagiarising throughout the year. Those students fail exams... hard - If you somehow manage to make it to the next year, you're going to struggle a lot more and you will be overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge you're missing from the previous year. It's so much unnecessary stress and many students quickly realize and regret that they took the easy path previously. "This was a future me problem and now I'm future me and it sucks" - You learn to cut corners, what happens when you actually get your degree and start looking for a job. Let's say you have just graduated this year and are fully qualified for the industry. So what? So are the other thousands of students. How can you convince the the interviewers to give YOU the job over anyone else. How are you standing out from the crowd? Do you think they're going to give the job to someone who was faking their knowledge throughout their time or maybe someone who did well in the university AND joined competitions, joined extracurriculars, has their own projects they've been working out by applying the knowledge they learned in the university?
"give the job to someone who was faking their knowledge throughout their time or maybe someone who did well in the university AND joined competitions, joined extracurriculars, has their own projects they've been working out by applying the knowledge they learned in the university?" yeah and sacrifice 80 hours a week just to have the most minute edge against other students that still wont land you a job that will support the cost of living, college is a slimy disgusting scam
. "You're not learning" I went to college for 6 years. Everything I learned, I learned in spite of the work I was assigned. . "Those students fail exams." If a class has written assignments that lend themselves to plagiarism, what sorts of exams does that class have, that constitutes a high percentage of your grade? I had written exams where I was expected to write code on paper and hand it in. There's only one way to do that - 1) ask the teacher what is going to be on the test 2) write, compile, and test a code listing for each item that might be on the test. 3) memorize all the code listings. At least, that's the only way I can imagine doing it if you don't already know Java, or C++, or whatever language the class supposedly teaches. Since I already knew the languages (again, in spite of, not because of assigned work), I sailed right through. . "You will be overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge you're missing from the previous year." Same problem. When I ran up against the limits of my knowledge, it was knowledge that I obtained in spite of, and not because of, anything I did in college. Lower level classes ABSOLUTELY DO NOT prepare students for higher level classes. Most professors have the expectation that they do - because of students like me, who "sail right through," the professors assume there is nothing wrong with the way they are doing things, ie, they are utterly disconnected from reality. . "You learn to cut corners, what happens when you actually get your degree and start looking for a job." Unfortunately, college taught me NOT to cut corners, something that took me years and years of professional experience to unlearn, hampering my career. In the business world, the focus is on delivering value to a market, not elegant theories. People who can't produce results because they are caught up in the "science" part, are quickly left in the dust.
I agree with the sentiment that you learn most from failures. Unfortunately, the educational system disagrees. When you are given homework, you are actively encouraged to not fail as through the entirety of our lives our homework assignments are graded on how correct they are, not on how much effort we put in to understand the concepts. This also hurts students confidence in exploring concepts. The fact is, students are encouraged to cheat by the system and until the system changes to encourage learning the concepts rather than correctness, cheating will always be a problem.
I always thought most essays were stupid. It's usually just 1 idea or concept that can be explained in a paragraph and the rest is just a test of your ability to regurgitate information. There really should be a better way to develop critical thinking skills.
In 10th/11th grades we had a teacher that literally used powerpoints from ex-students. Sometimes she changed the names, other times she didn't bother. She always said something bad about the presentations with the student's name's on it and we know it was all stollen because she only read what was there
I agree with the importance of addressing plagiarism, not just in the classroom, but in real life too. It's all about respecting others' work and ideas. Growing up, my teachers always emphasized this as a crucial ethical principle. Inspired by others? Absolutely. Quoting and similarity? Sure thing. But copying? No. Dont steal.
Even the guy who cited all the sources for each sentence got dinged for plagiarizing simply because he didn't use quotations and it "didn't sound good" when he put it together. What a waste of time.
I remember covering this topic pretty well in some of my college writing classes. I don't recall if we were shown examples like this (we might have been), but I remember discussing the three main ways to get information across: summarizing, paraphrasing, and direct quotations, with a lot of practice in each strategy. I found it to be very helpful.
I had one half of a class use the same two paragraphs in an assigned essay topic. I found after a google search they had used two paragraphs of a book description found in a publisher's catalog.
As an open AI model, I don't have personal opinions or feelings, but I can provide you with information on plagiarism. Plagiarism is widely considered unethical and unacceptable in academic and creative fields. It involves using someone else's work, ideas, or words without proper attribution. It undermines the original creator's efforts and can have serious consequences, such as damage to one's reputation or academic penalties. It's essential to always give credit to the original source when using someone else's work to maintain integrity and uphold ethical standards.
The student could have said "According to the book BOOKNAME, 'STEAL ALL THE SHIT' which sets the context for this paper" ... and then repeat this over and over for 12+ pages, ending each quote with some minor explanation of why that quote was important. To save space though, it's better to just paraphrase so you can shorten entire paragraphs into 1~2 sentences followed by a short explain then move onto the next point. After a while, having an untangled paper is more important than sounding cool.
Just read a paper that listed his dead friend as a coauthor because he appeared to him in his dream and supposedly gave him some sort of insight that lead to the findings of the paper.
To be honest, with the amount of essay/thesis/any published work online right now, I will not be suprised if one day, a professor will mark a student fail just for plagiarism, while writing it in front of him.
The first time I unknowingly plagiarized was when I used a previous paragraph in one paper I did, on another paper with a very similar prompt and subject. At the time, I didn’t know plagiarizing yourself was bad.
I once did work that was so good the teacher was absolutely sure I had plagiarized it. He then went on to take points away for bogus reasons while making snide comments. But because he didn't actually accuse me, he didn't care when I gave him undeniable proof that the work was mine. I then had another teacher accuse me of self-plagiarism for not citing my own photos, which I had taken specifically for that assignment and were not published anywhere else. At that point I started to actually plagiarize work out of spite. I would read source material in one language then translate it. Not because I needed to do it, but because I would rather feel caught than falsely accused by these cretins.
I'll never forget the time I was accused of plagiarism for using my own words from a tech conf I lead a session for. Apparently, some professors believe that if you quote yourself, you must attribute yourself....which is beyond stupid, but whatever. Two years later, that PhD was working for me as a contractor and had a personal "eureka" moment about this.
Well, if you are quoting yourself you should attribute yourself for a number of reasons 1. if its for a class, then if that other work was not from the same class, it essentially means you're just resubmitting old work and not taking the time to come up with fresh ideas; if you site it then you are telling the teacher "look, this was really good and fits in well here, but i am aware that it is a source and I am not trying to just resubmit I must agree that this reason is a bit weak though 2. (and this is an important one): if you are quoting yourself from a paper you wrote, by citing yourself, you are allowing the reader to then go check that other source to see if that quote is substantiated: that's part of the reason citing is so important, it allows readers to double check facts more easily than other situations. If you are quoting from a paper with multiple authors that is more than just you, then you need to make sure they give credit
This isn't a "belief" of "some professors", this is the universal rule throughout all of academia. If it seems strange or confusing to you, you have absolutely no clue what plagiarism is or what the actual problem with plagiarism is. If you have published some piece of thought previously within the literature or in other sources that are quotable, you need to cite and reference those sources if you are going to reproduce those ideas in some later publication. Plagiarism isn't primarily about 'stealing someone else's' ideas or anything like that, it's about presenting as *original work* something which is derived from prior work. If an idea you are presenting is predated by prior work, including your own work, you must cite it. If you do not, it makes it difficult trace the origin and development of ideas within the academic literature.
I was hoping to see sneaky dinguses getting blown the heck out for trying to cheat. I wasn't expecting somebody providing helpful writing tips to their students to avoid common pitfalls. I hope she chums the waters next time if she ever hopes to revisit this topic.
Is anyone else paranoid that they'll write a sentence that is exactly what someone else wrote and get accused of plagiarism? I have no clue how I could defend myself if this ever happened.
I feel like single sentences being the same can be passed off as reasonable chance, but there's probably a point at which it is statistically improbable for you to have written the exact same thing, word for word; hence why most of the examples were of paragraph length, with a specific enough niche that the probability of you writing the exact same thing word for word would be next to none.
If you do accidentally reproduce a passage someone already wrote but which you've never read before, and it's long enough to trigger a plagiarism accusation , make sure you go play poker right afterward, because with your luck you'll probably get a few royal flushes in a row.
Difficult to avoid I'd imagine. However, it's nice to see that the Doctor/Professor was willing to have an open door for students to inquire if they felt if they were plagiarizing indirectly. I never went to college but awesome to see.
I had a senior design project in which two of my teammates tried to throw everyone else under the bus by submitting plagiarized code as their own. I feel the professor should've failed them, but he kept them on our team, which just made things tense and awkward.
@@FightFantasy I'm not talking about copied lines or functions. I'm talking about an entire program consisting of more than 300 lines, and claiming they did all of it, and saying the other teammates did nothing and should be failed by the professor. It was the most egregious throwing under the bus I've experienced in academia.
The fun being when you hand your partner the sunmitted essay while you read from the "plagiarised" text highlight spelling and grammatical errors preserved in the submitted essay. I, honestly, found it sad that students thought we wouldn’t notice or find out. As I was teaching in IT and we, occasionally, would be contacted by jobbing programmers for clarification on the "assignment".
When ChatGPT was hardly known by anyone in our school, I've been grinding all my essays and assignments to write me the texts from it. Good times even though I am decent at writing.
The algorithm has fed me this video. I'm a STEM major but have taken several writing courses and will probably take a few more before I'm out. I'm one of those people who can read a sentence and remember it years later if it's impactful to me. It definitely pays to be careful and I caught myself in one of those moments prior to submission.
This is why I’m an engineering major. Never again will I have to write a stylistic essay on something I don’t care about. I can’t blame these students for taking the easy way out; that is a practice that is encouraged in engineering. Get to the correct answer as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.
These professors need to understand that failing someone over plagiarism is not going to stop them from plagiarizing. Instead, they just learn how to hide it better.
I was thinking the same thing. Throughout the whole 3 minutes that I watched I could only think "damn this whole thing seems completely stupid". I don't mean to offend, but I can't be bothered to give a damn about that
The one thing I learnt from the two examples is if you are going to introduce something, the easiest way is to use quotes of someone/quotation marks. Especially for the first one, where the first sentence sounded a bit opinionated
All my life I plagiarized Pitagora and Archimede. This teacher looks so happy, laughing about the first student ("I got you"). That student gave the reference, to make the teacher's job easier. The obsession with plagiarism is damaging more than helping students who try to learn.
My English teacher saved me from being accused of plagiarism in my science research project. Last year in her classroom when I asked her to read it and give me pointers she noticed I forgot to put “” around a quote I used to help me describe the topic at hand. I’m thank to this day for her doing that and pointing it out or I would not have passed that project. (I was a junior in high school at that time and I’m a senior now).
Are they really that strict? I don’t think you gonna failed in high school for something minor as that, I would hate to be in any high school who failed students whole academic for such minor mistakes
I actually caught my teacher plagiarizing once. It was for an online class, and I was given a research topic (something about wildfires, it was a geology class with a politicized teacher). While looking up articles, I found a paragraph on a fire department website that looked familiar. Turns out, it was word-for-word the same as the introductory paragraph the teacher gave on the topic. I happily reported it to the supervisor (I HATED this teacher) and he promised that the matter would be taken seriously. It was the highlight of my school year.
I have an Idetic and a photographic memory. I remember entire book I've read. When writing, it can be dangerously close to plagerism. I copy sentences from many books and stitch them together. I try my best no to do it, but sometimes I do it.
@@najeebhaddad7028 It can be really useful, like for exams. But sometimes it can be tromatic, for exemple, when I was a child (like 7 or 8) I walked into my living room and my parents were waching human centipede. I never got these images out of my head. I also can't rediscover a book, series or movie I've already watched/read.
@@roideschiffres6760 Wow... That's really interesting. Yeah I always wished I had photographic memory for exams and stuff but never thought about side effects. Thanks for sharing a bit of your story with me though.
A friend of mine uploaded a paper to a popular place where some students went to plagiarize/ download completed papers. One of the students in class apparently used it because my friend overheard exactly the thing that he inserted into the paper: an inappropriate phrase involving the reader’s mother and her ch🐱t. Needless to say, the student didn’t bother reading the paper after downloading it and the professor wasn’t pleased.
A thought occured to me that a child will lie and no moral judgement would be placed against them. The child doesn't intend to lie when they break something accidentally or forget to do their chores. The lie comes instinctively because they don't know any better. Just because the child didn't mean to lie doesn't mean it's not a lie.
Her point isn't that you can't use someone else's paper or words, but you have to give credit to the original author if you are citing them word for word. And there are situations where it can just happen during the note taking/research stage, just by accident. Happens to musicians too where they may have used a beat in a new song but it wasn't an original melody or chord, but came from a song they heard years ago. I would agree grade school/high school may have the same generic prompts but in undergrad/grad school you have much more freedom (at least in my experience) in your paper or research paper. What I saw from my college is more so "work on a new product launch...make sure your paper contains the below 5 topics". And then you can write a paper about literally any new product you can think of as long as you cover the framework. This teacher/professor takes a healthy approach because using someone else's words isn't the problem. It's how you handle using someone else's words and do you ensure credit is given? I can't think of a single industry where the ramifications of plagerism isn't at least a minimum of reputation ruining and worst case is career ending. Nothing feels worse than your manager asking where you got something and you answer I don't know. It's impossible to rebuild that trust and it's embarassinf
Oh such innocence, colleges and universities are no different in approach, only in the expectation that those 12+ years of semirigorous conditioning take effect, so the illusion of academic freedom can be better proped-up. And plagerism is rife in those institutions, you're just not seeing in because you have been conditioned not to notice it.
Do you know how many songs there are about love that manage not to be identical? And those are only three minutes long. There is infinite variation in language.
This is excellent. I wished I had seen this when it first came out. A couple of years later I did a post graduate degree. I was always worried I was plagiarising when I read something and reworded it when citing it.
In 5th grade, my work was plagiarised by a student (for an ART related piece of work), He put a lot more effort into the assignment then me, and he got an award for it, I reported it and nothing got done about it, it wasn't much in the grand scheme of thing, but I will never forget the way it made me feel, ever since, I truly understood the importance of not plagiarizing work, and the fact that it is simply not okay to take credit for the work of others.
Eh when you’re in 5th grade it’s still mostly a “we’re all in this together” attitude. Me and my family have zero artsy instinct, so whenever an artistic project was assigned my mom would call other parents to see what they were doing, and asking their permission for us to try the same idea. We would then take some of their ideas and go 110% at it, but not out any sense of of competition with the other kid and their parents, we were always grateful for some of the creative ideas they had (like using dried clear hand soap to create “water” in a diorama, tricks like that which we never would have come up with on our own) so I never really paid attention if my grade was better than the other kid; in any case I still had to do the messy work of putting it together so I always felt whatever grade I got was my own.
Something about this video stuck to me, a kind of adversarial feeling I had but couldn't square with the groundedness and tough-love attitude of the teacher. I cheated a lot in college, not because it was hard but because I was lazy and bored, and I think the examples get to the heart of why: there's a considerable amount of shame heaped upon these students not for repeating the words of others, but for repeating them them in the "wrong" way. There's an examination of why they plagiarized, but not on why they felt the need. Word count is the too-easy answer, the perfunctory style of college writing is another. In any case, nothing new is being said, the stolen writing merely used to add an element of interest so one's eyes don't glaze over as quickly, but it's not like the definition ripped from the dictionary is seeding a political argument, or a student masking another's discovery as their own. Citation could be taught with a worksheet and a reference page but instead millions of human hours are spent re-writing the same descriptions of global warming or disease until one develops a muscle memory for rephrasing the obvious. So much more I could say that would be worthless to, fittingly. I could've been taught something in college. Instead I graduated summa cum laude. The next time you're watching some video essay on here and you're suddenly hit with realization that the presenter hasn't actually SAID anything, merely referenced and summarized, take a moment to thank college writing.
Submitting an essay always scares me, even if I have cited everything to the best of my knowledge. That's why I lost my passion for academic writing and gave up the chance of a PhD. Especially when people use AI detection systems with that relatively high false positive rate.
if your essay reads like a string of quotes you have quoted too much. the majority of your essay should be your writing and the quotes should just illustrate your point/be your evidence for your your argument. your tutor will probably read most of the sources you have consulted and won't want to read an essay that is just parroting them. an essay is meant to demonstrate your grasp of a subject and how you use evidence to support your argument. if your essay is just a string of quotes then it isn't possible to gauge your knowledge at all. quotes should be used sparingly and only when necessary. it is hard to put a ratio on quotes/essay. i always preferred to see what my students argued than a copy of someone else's work. always remember to reference correctly in the manner asked for by your university. not referencing can also lead to accusations of plagiarism or even making things up. tutors can sense what is or isn't a student's own voice but always check you work thoroughly or ask for help. this video is excellent advice.
I had a lecture for my data structures and algorithms class who gave us an assignment question relating to chat gpt. The question were about identifying the issues with the chat gpt answer to a question. He was basically showing us how unreliable using chat gpt to answer assignment question was.
I see students get together and share lab reports. There are three archived and the students swap paragraphs and change the words around. But they dont think to change turns of phrase. In any event they spend way more effort cheating than if they bothered to learn to write and then just wrote stream of consciousness.
Copying work is plagiarism, citing it is scholarship.
When citing papers, you’re typically doing so in order to acknowledge results from previous findings / arguments and then steer a paper in a different direction taking into consideration those previous findings.
Plagiarism would be taking their work and then using it as if it is your own
@@yourname1869 My comment was intended to demonstrate that essential difference in an amusing way.
@@frogandspannerthose who have the capacity for independent thought got your message immediately. Then there are the others…
@petercrane2691 please don't be the exact reason why everyone has an issue with academics. You are not better than everyone else. Maybe a lot of people don't understand because..... I don't know.... it's in fucking text and not spoken.
You know what, you're right. People should be ashamed of themselves for not reading a joke from 8 words of a UA-cam comment.
even then, it needs to be used to support a new point, not just out on its own
This is a really good professor. Doesn't excuse the behaviour, gives her students consequences, but isn't overly contemptuous and calmly explains what not to do with examples.
And gives students chances to get help for potential plagiarism issues before they have to turn in assignments
Isn't overly contemptuous? She is awful. She Failed an A student for copying a single paragraph in an undergrad class. She is a viscous snake is what she is.
Soo agree. Wish my professors in college offered this.
this is why I like Engineering. You don't have to put up with this essay plagiarism bs. In fact, they don't even care about grammar and sources in my Engineering labs. lol. I am glad I am pretty well done with all my gen ed's.
this is why I like Engineering. You don't have to put up with this essay plagiarism bs. In fact, they don't even care about grammar and sources in my Engineering labs. lol. I am glad I am pretty well done with all my gen ed's.@@anonymous-cq7wj
Software Engineers: _laughing nervously_
We basically plagiarize each other for a living
Truer words have never been spoken
"Engineer" is fucking hilarious to me
@@rome7702 why?
@@rome7702 I too am curious why that is "hilarious"
@@lbaxel9122I assume it's because it's kinda of an oxymoron. Normal engineering is a hardware thing.
Professor: "This was 17 years ago."
And this video was posted 9 years ago, meaning the student wrote that paper 26 years ago in 1997.
I was one year old
@@1370802 i was -10 years old lol
I wasn’t alive yet
i was - 7 years old
i was -13…
One time in college I plagiarized off of myself accidentally. I was writing a paper when I found I could reuse a couple paragraphs from another paper that I'd written and submitted to the university. I was given a zero on the paper because once you submit a work to the university, you no longer have ownership over it as your rightful intellectual property. I had to go to the professor and explain that I used my own words from a previous paper. She allowed me to redo the paper, but she told me I was not allowed to cite myself as a source. its a very weird and annoying rule -- kind of a funny story though.
> you no longer have ownership over it as your rightful intellectual property
thats dumb
thats bs idk where are you from or what kind of contract or agreements you had to sign to enroll in your university but normally the ownership of your thesis as intellectual property will always be yours as long as you are indeed the sole creator.
I know self-plagiarism is a thing, but in general is one of the weirdest and dumbest ideas ever
Omfg I sorta did this in college once. I wrote a long ass essay for a communications class. About a year later I had a different communications class and procrastinated on a shorter, less formal/important assignment and luckily the 2 assignments were similar enough where I could copy the same points from my other paper. I just summarized my previous paper to avoid having it be the exact same and submitted that with no issues
I agree that self-plagiarism is stupid (especially since you aren't allowed to cite yourself in this case), but it isn't necessarily a result of you losing ownership of your words. Using the exact same words in a different work still counts as copying, even if you wrote the original work that is being copied. It would be like if Shakespeare used an exact same paragraph in Hamlet that had been used in Romeo and Juliet. He still owns Romeo and Juliet, but it would be clear copying of his own previous work, thus having no value in the new work. Getting around this simply requires rephrasing the ideas or indicating he is quoting it to support something new (such as drawing a parallel).
I like how we’re all voluntarily watching a college lecture that a bunch of kids had to go to
The college students are also there voluntarily. That’s the difference between college and high school.
@@1370802Some classes are required for certain majors and others are required for all majors. I assure you, there are some classes where the students don’t really want to be there. Just because you want a degree doesn’t mean that you can’t feel forced to take a class.
@@jaydenpatterson2490you always have the choice to not show up. Ur paying to be there.
@@karmicobsession1636 doesn’t mean everyone likes every class that they have to take
The students are "forced" to attend as their grade depends on it, while,alternatively , we are voluntarily watching this lecture as there are no incentives or consequences to watching this in our free time
I never got nailed for plagiarism in my college writing classes, but I appreciate how the professor here allows the students to consult with her before turning in the paper to avoid plagiarism.
What do you mean - all profs have consultation hours for students?
@@nicbentulan I mean, all profs have office hours for that or whatever else
@@nicbentulan Unless they don't. Or they technically do, but are never available.
@@patches4170 Yeah I feel like none of these other posters ever met my college advisor or the graduate chair of my department... Office hours? Good fucking luck.
@@nicbentulanyeah but they don’t usually mention that students can ask about plagiarism, most students wouldn’t go to their prof if they’re scared that they’re plagiarizing, but explicitly stating that she will help can make a big difference in the amount of students that will reach out
We had a professor once who did this but rather than plagiarism, did it to highlight the importance of proof reading.
My favorite example was "Christopher Columbus circumcised the earth with a 100ft clipper."
Wot
read it again@@nosidenoside2458
Wait, as in the student wanted to say Columbus circled the world with his ship?
@@HostileAtHeart I imagine they meant to write "circumnavigated".
There is so much wrong with that sentence lmao. Columbus most certainly did not circumnavigate the earth
Plagiarism gets weird sometimes - everybody's constantly trying to say the same things in slightly different ways. Eventually we'll run out of ways to say things, and accidental plagiarism will become increasingly common
This is the problem. You get a word count of 2000 words. It's not a new field, say a first year undergraduate history paper on the Reformation, or the Civil War, you’re given a couple of text books and a list of websites to research. You’ve got a couple of weeks to turn it in. You're not going to go and do original research, so you, and the tens of thousands of other students over the decades, not to mention the tens of thousands of other academics, are ALL using the same sources.
You do your due diligence, you’re a good student, you get the subject and you have an idea, you enjoy learning. The problem is that even though you've done the reading done your research, you've had some ideas, it's almost guaranteed that hundreds of others have had the same thoughts, and they've written about them.
So you play it safe, you cite, and then you cite some more, and you play it really, really, safe; you don't want to be accused of plagiarism. So at the end of your essay you've got 2000 words, with almost every sentence, point, paragraph, with a citation after it. And it’s horrible. You've just got common use connectives and paraphrases inbetween endless citations. Because the subject has been wringed out of all its originality. You feel your playing a word game, a type of scrabble, not writing a paper to show you understand it. I know there's wriggle room for ‘common knowledge’, but after a few months it just feels like your a human AI, you're desperate to actually get out of writing endless essays playing the citation word game, it gets boring real quick.
That's why you can just quote something
it's most definitely not an accident when two full paragraphs coincide word for word
@@itellyouforfree7238 indeed. I never claimed it was, though
@itellyouforfree7238 but when every thing that can be said has been said, anything that will be said will be plagerism, accidental or not
I never made a big effort to spot plagiarism but when my student left a link in their paper it was hard not to notice!
😭
At that point, they should get zero as a matter of principle! I mean..COME ON!!
@@fahadalghamdi9316 They did, plus a reduction of one letter grade for the semester. Probably shouldn’t be surprised, but now they work in D.C.!
in their defense, they "cited" their sources ;)
I wonder why this is getting recommended randomly 9 years later, in any case, great video and great professor
It’s the start of the academic year. At least in the UK. Just had a flood of freshers to my city. This is probably being shown in class.
It got recommended to me as well, I'm 32 lmao
One time in college I got cited for plagiarism because I accidentally didn’t put quotes around something that was taken from an article we are all given and told to make a summary of, and even though that it was clearly accidental and I put an in-text citation and reference next to it, the professor gave me a zero, took it to the student disciplinary council, and thus forced me to both complete a stupid plagiarism training I didn’t need and thus left a stain on my permanent record. The original quote was half a sentence on a total absolutely minor and meaningless assignment for a class I was doing well in…
Absolutely ridiculous that he not only had to make a big condescending stink over it when I eventually had to meet him over it, but couldn’t even keep it in house and waste everyone’s time over it.
Not only that, but the fact that most universities and teachers don’t have different punishments for accidental minor plagiarism versus intentional wide-reaching plagiarism is just dumb
And people think teachers deserve a raise. I’ve only ever seen one teacher in my life that didn't deserve to be paying me to sit through their incompetent ego trip.
Yeah, the emphasis should be on writing good papers, not punishing small careless errors. This is the common sense that a lot of teachers seem to lack. One is much easier to grade though, and the teachers aren't being paid very much for this.
@@coatofarms4439 They fucking do. I do not care how many shitty teachers you have, I know many more who are outstanding at what they do. If you're saying that someone who sits with children (yes even high schoolers count as children) for 8 hours a day, do work BEFORE and AFTER school is over (whether it be prep, grading, etc...), and a bunch of other stuff only deserves $20k (less than a PROGRAMMER), then you're crazy. As a programmer, I see what my mother has to go through as a teacher, and the fact that I get paid way more than her still astounds me (I work as a programmer and the amount of work I do barely amounts to anything compared to what teachers have to do)
maybe you should have paid more attention. don't blame others for your careless mistake.
You see, there is no way for the professor to verify whether this was or was not intentional, and it also doesn't matter. Teaching you the hard way was 100% the correct and pedagogically justified approach.
I once got yelled at for plagiarism and was given a 50% on the assignment and you may be wondering why not a 0... well I don't know, probably because she couldn't find the source I was plagiarizing from and just expected me to feel guilty and accept the 50% but I wrote the paper to begin with and didn't plagiarize anything. I confronted the teacher and she was the unable to admit she's wrong to a student type of teacher so she held her ground and said it was too well written, and I must've used something to fix it for me. I said I wrote it in a word document and she said, "SEE That is not allowed! It was supposed to be written in the text box with no other resources to help." Keep in mind this was a 'research paper'. We were allowed to use the internet. I went to my counselor and she laughed because she knew me and said that this would only happen to me then contacted the teacher and said to overwrite the grade.
Wow ur teacher was somethin else
Glad the grade got overrided
its hard to believe awful teachers exist
@@shadowpicaro yeah. It was for a course that wasn't directly connected with my school (German 2) so the teacher never met me in person and I found it amusing to be honest. I knew it wouldn't matter in the end and it was such a memorable story. *It wasn't the only time it's happened though*
I did once receive a 75% on a paper that was 2.5 pages when the length requirement said "must be a full 2 pages" I complained and she said it was too long. I took it up with the University because this teacher was a TA or something and worked the summer classes
Wait you had a counselor? Back in my day(jk, literally 2 years ago, piece of shit system still vigent) we just had to sit there and eat their whole sermon even when they were wrong
That happened to me in 6th grade. She gave me a 50% for plagiarism because I used an em dash. A lot of teachers are just scum
Theres something about introductory college lectures that gives a unique sense of optimism and opportunities.
And it all comes crushing down when you take advanced level courses with a lecturer that essentially just reads the textbook in class
My experiance is the exact opposite but i digress
Throughout my undergraduate I wrote largely expansive, technical papers on different engineering projects or topics, to disease solution frameworks and market analysis, to infectious disease. The way I avoided plagiarism, as there is endless volumes of information about such subjects, is to identify the key sources for a topic, aggregate them and sort them by topic. Then, you can create sections in whatever you take notes on for each topic (as it is relevant to your paper of course), and go through each paper and copy and paste the portions that have relevancy to your work. Paste the URL by each quote. Highlight in red the key information discovered in each copied section, and rinse and repeat. Underneath the quote, summarize in as few words as possible the general idea of each quote.
As you write your paper, you can reference these notes, and syncretize from your own knowledge or multiple different copied sections the relevant material, and be able to accurately, on the spot, cite multiple sources for your argument and directly compare whether or not you are "copying" what the authors are saying or using their discoveries as evidence for your work.
Word salad
illiterate@@obi-wankenobi1750
I always run my final paper through multiple plagrism checkers to ensure that I don't miss anything I unintentionally copied.
This is fantastic advice from a seasoned academic :) !!
Amazing advice, going to save this in notes.
I had a case where a source I was using was written in a voice and wording exactly identical to the way I write. I _almost_ used the exact same sentence as was in the source, purely through coincidence. Thankfully I caught it and was able to reword my own sentence since this was an assignment where we were not supposed to use direct quotes, but it was a nerve-wracking experience to think that I might get called for plagiarism when I just write in an academic voice by default when I'm doing school papers.
@@stancastan try using less adverbs like very. Other than just being bad my teacher said it looks like ai writing when it’s done too much.
@@stancastan Same, I wrote a psychology page the other day and I put it in an AI detector. It said 99% AI generated content, even though the entire paper was written by me with no AI assistance. I think it's just as foolish for educators to rely on currently faulty AI detectors as it is to use AI to write your papers as a student.
@@abcdqwerty3562 Well that's good. I haven't come across any teachers or professors using them but my opinion stands, if any are using them, they're very much ignoring the reality.
According to those detectors, the Bible was written by AI. The detectors are wrong more often than they’re right. @@stancastan
@@stancastan Wow, a group of people notorious for being technologically incompetent… turn out to be technologically incompetent time and time again! Who would’ve known?
even if i do write in my own words, for some reason i still get worried about plagiarimn and getting a zero on a project that i worked so hard for
That's because handing out zeros for plagiarism is bad policy.
It's like shooting a patient in the head because they have a small tumor on their pinky toe.
When doing research, it becomes hard to avoid plagiarism. Especially if you end up reading a lot of someone in particular, you may catch his style and ending up writing almost word for word what he wrote. So there is a dumb strategy: read different people, summarize then let it out of your memory and work from your summaries. But that's some dedication ^^
The other unintentional trick is to do your research in another language. English is not my official first language, but I have a good command of it. So, I end up reading in English and writing in French. Also, I do summaries over multiple authors, so the conclusions and hereabouts are not one of one author, but of the group.
@The Philosophy Guy Like she said, if you use a big quote from another author and cite it correctly, it might be considered overquoting, you might get docked for it, but it's not illegal, and you're not going to get expelled for it.
im reading a ray bradbury book right now and I am not gonna stop myself from using his stlye of writing lol, especially his use of imagery, its really strong and effective
Yep. Sometimes I would remember something someone wrote, and accidently write it up word for word.
It isn't difficult at all: if you are summarizing, as you say, a point made by another author, you simply source it. Problem solved. I will concede that in many undergraduate classes the idea of providing sources may not be taught as well as it should be. And, having been to law school, sourcing points (or authority, as we'd call it) is second nature to me, so I do speak with a little more education on this subject. But the idea that avoiding plagiarism is difficult is nonsense. Where things get dicey are historical "facts." By that I mean, what constitutes a fact? If a historian writes a book that shows that Abe Lincoln did XYZ on a certain date, something unknown to us beforehand, is that a historical fact now, like his Gettysburg Address or assassination? Or is it something that needs to be sourced since it is little known? That is something I don't have the answer to, but you're always better off sourcing material. For undergraduate work, providing a source should never be an issue with any paper you turn in.
@@scott1564 happens that sometimes, you've a great ides to develop a thesis, because 10 years ago, you read something. The thing is that you've no awareness of that. So, you write it and then get told that it's plagiarism, because you're having the same devlopment than X.
So, you need to read others to know that you're too close to be different. Hence, it's not original work.
Normally, you've to read different people, summarize their ideas (with sourcing), position yourself then add your own ideas, unless you can show with no uncertainty that you align with each of them. In that case, you use internal references. It's still heavy work.
I really do think we're at a stage in history where it is far harder to reinvent the wheel. You can only use or rearrange words in such a unique way to not "plagiarize", especially for definitions.
I honestly think the idea of plagiarism is skewed, in the sense that plagiarism shouldn't be that big of a deal. I can understand why it does is terrible, but I also think the teaching system takes it too seriously. I've heard of cases of people failing their entire education, of not life, because they took an easy way or forgot to quote an author and some people decided it was bad enough to condemn them to a heavy punishment. Kinda feels like school making their own justice, which should be illegal. It's also becoming increasingly difficult not to copy what someone did, as even of it wasn't necessarily published *someone* must have already formulated it that way. The best example of that is music, as almost every song is documented, and people are starting to buy the rights to string of notes rather than songs because it's used so often.
If the material you “plagerized” is factual then who gives a damn. The goal of information should be to spread knowledge not try to please the ego of arrogant writers who just so happened to write it first. College professors should be fired so they can learn how the real world works.
True. One time in high school i got cited for plagiarism on an essay i had written. The thing is that i had never read any of the texts that i had supposedly plagiarized. My essay just happened to have a few sentences that were similar by coincidence.
@@xavierrecipon6053 Exactly. Back in my schools and university there were rules like, don't cite X%, and I believe it was capped at 20% or 15% relatively... regardless of the subject. And for code I believe it was slightly higher, BUT THATS CODE! They're like, expecting me to create new logics out of thin air sometimes LMAO. Or write up my own syntax, like bro...
And now they have something like TurnItIn, or whatever it's called; I putted in a paper I wrote, it cited stuff from sources I never even looked up, let alone read about... it's crazy. And the sources I did cite, rarely picked up on it, maybe a few but generally no. And the teacher was like, "I'll let it slide this time" Like bro. This case was for a biology course, a widely "researched" field with many writings on pretty foundational topics. Rewritten about over and over again... and it's not like the founders of new frontiers in biology decided to come up with alternative terms to prevent plagiarism, like seriously...
I do wonder how plagiarism works in other languages far less binary than English. I guess those symbolic languages being Japanese, Chinese, or Korean.
@@Iog In general less spoken languages are easier because you will have less scientific paper in that language.
But yeah plagiarism is stupid in a lot of cases, you think about more of avoiding plagiarism than to actually create new things based on already existing stuff.
As a software developer plagiarism is my life, i will take bits of code that I can use in my own way. Even though those bits are not mine but the things I build from them is and that what is truly matters.
I'm a musician and basically the art of composing is basically stealing from eachother and making other's stuff yours, as Stravinskij said: "Real artists don't borrow, they steal". Sure, that definitely does not mean you can take a Mozart sonata and "make it yours" but you can base the composition off the style and play around with it or quote passages from composers. I see people saying "it's hard to be original, I can't quote because I'm afraid of copyright". My advice is it doesn't matter. You can take the subject from a Bach fugue and write a new one, you can take any theme from any composer and write variations, the most you can do is specify whose the theme is
@@amandak.4246it was quite regular from classical artists to borrow from each other at the time though.
Something I tried is stealing the bass from songs. Basically I reduced it down and added figures above the bass, basically turning it into a partimenti exercise. It worked particularly well with Corelli. Definitely suited to Baroque era stuff more though.
Hmmmm
@@amandak.4246 Yes, but that also goes the other way around. Copyright of contemporary music is getting way, WAY too strict and starts having the same problem of prohibiting every tiny bit of plagiarism - it misses the point of protecting intellectual property and dissolves into over-pedanticism and killing creativity (resp. obscuring the important information if we are talking about the sciences).
Yeah, chords and basslines are pinched all the time. I'd encourage it there. 😁
I once had a professor get on my ass for plagiarism. Because they 'had a student say that same exact phrase on last paper.' Turns out that same exact student was me, I basically re-used a point word for word on a past paper for this paper. The assignment was to research a topic that was mainstream, and then come back to it three months later to see what changed. My topic didn't really change at all that much. He was like 'you need to quote yourself, or I'll have to flunk you for plagiarizing yourself.' I was like 'dude, you can but we'll be taking this to someone higherup. It's ridiculous you're being so stingy about it.' He decided that it wasn't worth arguing with me over it, nor was it worth his time to talk to like my parents/his boss. He ended up knocking my grade from an A to a B because that was 'fair.'
Still hate that guy, and I made a left him a well worded review on that professors website.
Your supposed to cite yourself in that circumstance
He was literally right though lmao
@@King-ox1ef I never said he was wrong, but I wasn't gonna change that shit.
@@notleviathan855 then why get mad when he takes grades off for doing something incorrectly when you won’t fix it
@@jameson1239 Because it's incredibly stupid that an A paper gets dropped to a B over not quoting myself. He also, was a shit professor overall. His lectures covered nothing in the books we were assigned, he gave us homework material that frankly wasn't even remotely close to what we were studying. He also, was just an asshole.
There was another student, who generally got C,D grades on most everything. During an important test this student actually got a 94% The professor was so sure this kid cheated, that not only did he write a letter to the dean, but also the counselor, and the students parents. Turns out, that the kid didn't cheat, he just understood the material. The professor didn't offer any sort of apology, and refused to put the students original 94%, instead marking the assignment late, and giving the kid an 80% as a result.
My university uses a plagiarism checker that checks against ALL sources the uni has access to, and one time it said that I had plagiarized something. After checking the source it said I plagiarized I discovered that I had plagiarized from...
myself.
The plagiarism checker also checked your paper against all assignments anyone had ever turned in, and it said I plagiarized, off of my own previous assignment, from the same class.
Edit for clarity: It was a mundane background sentence akin to, "The sky is blue," and I ain't citing or rewording that, nor am I citing my coment that preceded this edit.
Unironically you're still supposed to cite yourself if you just quote your own work.
@@freshrockpapa-e7799”As I said in my rough draft...”
This is true. On my current syllabi for all my college courses, they cite plagiarism against yourself as being no different than plagiarism from somewhere else. Packs the same punishment (borderline expulsion) too
Copying your own work is still plagiarism. You either have to cite it or rework it.
@@DueySR I wasn't even copying, and it was a mundane background sentance akin to "The sky is blue," and I ain't citing or rewording that, nor am I citing the edit that preceded this comment.
I could smell the note copying from a mile away. It happens at graduate and professional level. The first sentence, the definition, is now a common expression. If used without the rest of Blumberg, I don't think it would be plagiarism. In that case, I think it is a matter of context whether or not an introductory phrase like "The CDC defines..."
The story/example involving the AIDS paper just shows how ridiculous the obsession with plagiarism is. If a student just turns in work that us simply copying someone else’s work then they rightly deserve a poor grade, but if they show legitimate thought and effort, failing them over quotation marks or a missed citation is asinine.
This. I'm really, really concerned about the upcoming year when I'm going to be writing my diploma thesis and if some program is going to accuse me of even *subconciously* copying something, it's insane.
But what would you do if your work was published and the person you unintentionally plagiarized from caught that? You’d be sued and rightly so. College is a preparation for real world professionals.
I agree. In Sweden, if a teacher has remarks on your paper, if it's slight plagiarism for example, they will tell you to edit it and resubmit it. And then it'll be approved.
@@1370802 Over a single definition from a source you did actually cite, when it's almost certainly an honest mistake? I think the vast majority of scientists have better things to do.
@@1370802 There are 8 billion people on earth. How many words in the english language alone, do you think are spoken every day?
The sentence that you just said, almost certainly, has been said, in multiple languages. multiple times before.
This paragraph i type right now, has most likely, been typed, at least ONCE before, even if it went undocumented.
She's amazing for offering help for students that are doubting themselves.
This is why I used to run my group member's work through plagiarism checkers. I actually caught them a few times and told them to redo it.
I had a senior level, semester long presentation for Virology. It was the terminal class in the entire department of Microbiology, and I was not a Microbiology major. My classmate, who genuinely seemed to have literacy problems, copied and pasted incorrect information from over a dozen of sources for each of his slides, did not modify the references, the diction, the formatting errors from pasting onto powerpoint, nothing. Just straight up copied and pasted. Did not cite anything either, despite there being in-text citation in some of the paragraphs
I told him to redo it, and he did not touch the document at all until we presented
The thing is, all of the precursor classes to that are -extremely- writing intensive. I don't know how he wasn't caught
tip: write jot notes, not in paragraphs. that way, it's less likely that you'll plagiarize.
stoneface
Why? Isn’t plagiarism supposed to be intentional?
@@aw4417 @A W it depends... often yes, intent is part of the 'charge' of plagiarism, but there are different considerations for different circumstances so in some instances intent will be taken into consideration and in others it won't matter
I hope the second student didn't get in trouble because it was clearly unintentional. After, this I would drop her class immediately
I don't think the professor has a choice. They are rules set by the university/college.
She said it was an accident, so clearly it was. Couldn't be that she was lying to shirk responsibility. People never do that. Clearly.
@rookievideos8865 Why would a sane person write text word for word on purpose knowing how easily it can be detected
@@erinys2 You have more faith in people than you should. People do really dumb shit knowing full well what will happen when they do. They continue to do it time after time. Someone with tens of DUIs, multiple arrest of robbery, or etc. Common sense shouldn't be taken for granted. It doesn't help that plagiarism is by far easier than all of those. You can just control C and V it on a word document or have the source right next to you as you type. People of all academic levels and social ones all make the same dumb decisions because they always think they can get away with it. That they're smarter than the individuals that are being "fooled".
@notaurenotsure2732
Plagiarism exists. I will refer you to the first example in the video for one possible reason as to why someone would do it. Also, insane people exist. What are you trying to say?
in my opinion, unintentional plagiarism isn't plagiarism. In my view, plagiarism is intentional stealing of someones work
But, whether intentional or unintentional, they both result in the same thing: the student either gets away with it, or the student gets caught.
@@fillername236 It happened with me back in 2016. Mine was unintetional and i almost got kicked out of college for it. But they left me off the hook and told me not to do it again.
@@DedricSilva yeah like if it was unintentional, how are you going to prevent it? you didn't cause it in the first place
I used to work as a TA when I was in grad school, responsible for reading papers for the professor in a freshman course. Unintentional plagiarism is easy to spot, I.e student meaning to paraphrase but it is too close to the source material student quoting the author and giving the appropriate in-text citation but forgot to put quotes. Just some examples. I’ve come across intentional plagiarism. I’ve always had the student’s back that I felt, unintentionally plagiarized in my notes due to oversight or lack of writing experience in paraphrasing. However, for the students that intentionally plagiarized, no.
Morally speaking, you might have a point, but in practicality you're going to face the same consequences either way, so it would be doing students no favors to hold them to a lesser standard than they are going to face later in life.
Thankfully didn't have to take a single gen ed prerequisite for college. In high school we had a plagiarism detector that you could simply use as a tool to ensure what you submitted wasn't plagiarised, so it was physically impossible to submit blatantly plagiarized work, but more importantly the way it was presented as a tool rather than "oh you plagiarized, kys, have a zero on the assignment." The things that would set off this plagiarism detector was ridiculous as well. You might think you're writing an original sentence only to to be told that you most definitely are not.
well is it even considered plagiarism at that point?
I had a student plagiarize in a paper on the topic of plagiarism!
That takes balls!
Edit: BTW, she’s an excellent professor.
now that's meta writing
XD 'Ironic' plagiarism
Like that recent debacle with a psychologist faking data in a study about honesty 🙃
@@awaredeshmukh3202
Irony, a cruel mistress…
The first example with the parks system paper is a great case in point: all the student had to do was present that excerpt as a lengthy quotation. Had he done that the paper would not just have avoided plagiarism, it would have also have simply been a much better paper.
Which is stupid and shouldn't even be a thing
that doesn't make sense at all. the paper would not be a new article, just a collage of already written stuff
it would have been intellectually honest but no it would not have materially improved the paper. plagiarism identifies a kind of academic dishonesty, it has nothing to do with quality per se
it wouldn't have been better like the student was right to think that was a quick and easy way to make an A grade introduction, it was j morally wrong and he should have spent some time coming up w something on his own of an equal quality... but not j inserting a quotation
I wonder if this professor ever had a student that plagiarized their own work. I've sometimes heard it referred to as "self-plagiarism".
Yeah I saw that in the syllabus of one of my courses this semester. I don't see how it makes sense though, my work is my work and it's mine. Period.
@@andrew2377 Wrong! Your work is your is yours only in the context that you originally wrote it in. When you re-use your words, you need to cite yourself if you are even allowed to do this practice in the first place!
@@theconnotationofmemedealer3795 I need to cite myself? But it's me.. that's just silly. Do I not own the rights to my own words? Explain this in a legal sense.
@@theconnotationofmemedealer3795 What I'm saying is, the idea of "plagiarizing yourself" is just professors trying to make it harder on the students..... My words are my words.. they are mine. I am my own conscious. I am me. My mind shouldn't have to magically change because I need to make sure not to "copy myself". What a complete joke.
@@andrew2377 in academia, uncited postulations/analyses are taken to be new contributions to the field - if you just start copy and pasting your 10 year old ideas into new papers without citation you're just muddying the waters and creating more work for other people who have to track down its origin. it also reflects poorly on your ability to be rigorous, and could even cause others to view your historical and future work with suspicion ("if they copy+pasted their own work, what's to say they didn't plagiarise others?"). in school, if you have perfectly phrased (unlikely) something previously then it should be cited such that it's clear to the reader that you've already done legwork, that you're confident in your conclusion, and that you're about to go on to reiterate it. if imperfectly phrased, this is an opportunity to reassess your original idea and strengthen it and word it more clearly. in any and all cases, simply re-using your work silently is lazy and you only deprive yourself of the chance to improve your analytical skills
I never plagiarized academically, but I do remember an instance where things made me nervous. I was debunking a book and in the process I was looking up a lot of other work on the topic, I wrote my own debunking from scratch and posted it on a forum. I put a lot of effort into it and it was a hit with the crowd there.
Someone wanted to put it into a PDF for use and I declined permission. The issue is that I didn't know (and still don't) how much of what I wrote would have been too close too the source. My memory isn't photographic but it is good enough that I wouldn't want to have that work scrutinized.
If it had been the night before it was due at an academic setting, I would have had to submit it and hoped for the best. After all I did write the whole thing myself with no copy and pasting. I can totally see that being a trap where nothing was intended but there is no time to go back and vet everything and after all the reading I had done it had sort of blurred together.
I didn't have a due date and I had the instinct at least to be worried and so nothing happened, but I still think about it from time to time. The unanswered question.
Despite my anxiety, its better to leave some questions unanswered than have to deal with the truth, be it positive or not. There is a paper I had to write for college that I still get chills thinking about it, had read so many books and despite how I wrote it, it always kept striking on the back of my head how close it is to some of the work I studied for it.
I ended giving up and just accepting a certain note reduction by a lot of quoting and adding sources but I still think someday someone will come up in my dreams and put me in dream jail for possible plagirizing
The algorithm liked that video so much, he dug up that video again after 9 years, only to tell this generation of students not to plagiarize.
In 9th grade I plagiarized 4 paragraphs for my essay off wikipedia then I erased them off wiki... It did not work 💀💀
menace
Oh no bro😂
Only once I got close to plagiarizing a paper. I wanted to get better at writing and in my English class I asked my professor to group me up with the best student in the class. She did and we did our next assignment. I read her paper and I was blown away!
I only had trouble coming up with a thesis statement, and that was the issue I wanted to work on the most. Our assignment was on "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. We had to write about the symbolic black box.
This student described the scene in her opening paragraph something to the tune of, "the flowers were blossoming profusely [. . .] what a good day to kill someone". In my own paper I wrote"the flowers were blossoming profusely" and my professor held me after class and asked why I wrote that because it didn't fit with what I had written. It was basically a small detail that stood out like a sore thumb. And she went on to tell me that those words sound very familiar and that I should take a moment to think about copying from another student.
I trashed my paper and started again. I read the book once more and made a brain storm tree and went from there. I passed the class and went on to learn a valuable lesson...College is for dumb dumbs.
Holy shit what a coincidence, I'm literally working on an assignment about "the lottery" by Shirley Jackson as I read this. I can definitely relate to you though, I've been paired up with what I can only describe as aspiring novelists, and even though I consider myself somewhat of a competent writer, it falls completely flat when compared to these people.
It's super tempting to write in a similar fashion to what you just read, especially if that writing left an impression on you, you'll just start to copy their style unconsciously.
Glad you avoided it! Did this happen years ago?
@@astridjrgensen6755 yup! 2007/2008 I still have the paper, I just checked my old flash drive!
@@moistcrusader2026 yeah I know what you mean. I enjoy writing especially when I want to describe a time/place. I start to feel like I can take 10 pages to describe a tree...sound familiar? :)
@@Zanarkendjp Unfortunately I don't know what you mean, sorry. I do enjoy very descriptive writing though, I find people who can describe something with minute detail while still making it engaging very impressive
I never plagiarized past the 4th gade. I got C's straight through all my writing classes. I'm a successful engineer now. Don't plagiarize, just get shitty grades. You'd be shocked at how irrelevant grades are.
reassuring based on just how much i don't care about the english language
That’s because engineering is hard asf and employers know that. For competitive business internships, you need a good GPA or they won’t hire you
@@advikdeshmukh805 You don't need to get an internship to get hired. I never did. I'd argue it's better to not do an internship. Spend your young 20s having fun, not working.
the first guy probably plagirsized everything from the first papers too and fooled you into thinking he was a good writter.
I teach computer science at a university and have seen tons of plagiarised assignments. Getting caught and being forced to repeat is a nice "threat" but it's not the main reason why you should be deterred from it. All university rules aside, here's what I have noticed happens to a huge amount of students who plagiarise:
- You're not learning. The assignments are there for you to learn the important aspects of the course. Not doing well in them is a more valuable learning experience than plagiarising them
- You might get a few extra marks from the assignments, but in actual exams it becomes very easy to see who was plagiarising throughout the year. Those students fail exams... hard
- If you somehow manage to make it to the next year, you're going to struggle a lot more and you will be overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge you're missing from the previous year. It's so much unnecessary stress and many students quickly realize and regret that they took the easy path previously. "This was a future me problem and now I'm future me and it sucks"
- You learn to cut corners, what happens when you actually get your degree and start looking for a job. Let's say you have just graduated this year and are fully qualified for the industry. So what? So are the other thousands of students. How can you convince the the interviewers to give YOU the job over anyone else. How are you standing out from the crowd? Do you think they're going to give the job to someone who was faking their knowledge throughout their time or maybe someone who did well in the university AND joined competitions, joined extracurriculars, has their own projects they've been working out by applying the knowledge they learned in the university?
"give the job to someone who was faking their knowledge throughout their time or maybe someone who did well in the university AND joined competitions, joined extracurriculars, has their own projects they've been working out by applying the knowledge they learned in the university?" yeah and sacrifice 80 hours a week just to have the most minute edge against other students that still wont land you a job that will support the cost of living, college is a slimy disgusting scam
. "You're not learning" I went to college for 6 years. Everything I learned, I learned in spite of the work I was assigned.
. "Those students fail exams." If a class has written assignments that lend themselves to plagiarism, what sorts of exams does that class have, that constitutes a high percentage of your grade? I had written exams where I was expected to write code on paper and hand it in. There's only one way to do that - 1) ask the teacher what is going to be on the test 2) write, compile, and test a code listing for each item that might be on the test. 3) memorize all the code listings. At least, that's the only way I can imagine doing it if you don't already know Java, or C++, or whatever language the class supposedly teaches. Since I already knew the languages (again, in spite of, not because of assigned work), I sailed right through.
. "You will be overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge you're missing from the previous year." Same problem. When I ran up against the limits of my knowledge, it was knowledge that I obtained in spite of, and not because of, anything I did in college. Lower level classes ABSOLUTELY DO NOT prepare students for higher level classes. Most professors have the expectation that they do - because of students like me, who "sail right through," the professors assume there is nothing wrong with the way they are doing things, ie, they are utterly disconnected from reality.
. "You learn to cut corners, what happens when you actually get your degree and start looking for a job." Unfortunately, college taught me NOT to cut corners, something that took me years and years of professional experience to unlearn, hampering my career. In the business world, the focus is on delivering value to a market, not elegant theories. People who can't produce results because they are caught up in the "science" part, are quickly left in the dust.
I didn't plagiarize, but your argument against it is so poor that I wish I did.
you the kind to have mandatory attendance for your classes?
I agree with the sentiment that you learn most from failures. Unfortunately, the educational system disagrees. When you are given homework, you are actively encouraged to not fail as through the entirety of our lives our homework assignments are graded on how correct they are, not on how much effort we put in to understand the concepts. This also hurts students confidence in exploring concepts.
The fact is, students are encouraged to cheat by the system and until the system changes to encourage learning the concepts rather than correctness, cheating will always be a problem.
Such an inspiring professor, an example for all educators out there.
I always thought most essays were stupid. It's usually just 1 idea or concept that can be explained in a paragraph and the rest is just a test of your ability to regurgitate information. There really should be a better way to develop critical thinking skills.
In 10th/11th grades we had a teacher that literally used powerpoints from ex-students. Sometimes she changed the names, other times she didn't bother. She always said something bad about the presentations with the student's name's on it and we know it was all stollen because she only read what was there
That's different. It's not her school assignment to make assignments. Though it seems like she's not great anyway.
I agree with the importance of addressing plagiarism, not just in the classroom, but in real life too. It's all about respecting others' work and ideas. Growing up, my teachers always emphasized this as a crucial ethical principle. Inspired by others? Absolutely. Quoting and similarity? Sure thing. But copying? No. Dont steal.
Steve Jobs said good artists copy, great artists steal. A mantra that seemed to get him very far in life, even if he was an asshole.
It went from this to a cat and mouse chase between generative AIs and detective AIs.
Even the guy who cited all the sources for each sentence got dinged for plagiarizing simply because he didn't use quotations and it "didn't sound good" when he put it together. What a waste of time.
I once detected plagiarism by typing in one suspicious sentence into google. The source popped up in two seconds.
Some people need to use a thesaurus more.
i can't believe that obscure breadtuber plagiarized this video
I remember covering this topic pretty well in some of my college writing classes. I don't recall if we were shown examples like this (we might have been), but I remember discussing the three main ways to get information across: summarizing, paraphrasing, and direct quotations, with a lot of practice in each strategy. I found it to be very helpful.
I had one half of a class use the same two paragraphs in an assigned essay topic. I found after a google search they had used two paragraphs of a book description found in a publisher's catalog.
2021 and this is still a great lecture! Thank you!
It's a lecture about copy pasta... What did you expect? Copy with pasta was a thing 1000's years ago aswell...
why would the current year effect the quality of video ? its the same thing
As an open AI model, I don't have personal opinions or feelings, but I can provide you with information on plagiarism. Plagiarism is widely considered unethical and unacceptable in academic and creative fields. It involves using someone else's work, ideas, or words without proper attribution. It undermines the original creator's efforts and can have serious consequences, such as damage to one's reputation or academic penalties. It's essential to always give credit to the original source when using someone else's work to maintain integrity and uphold ethical standards.
Saddened that you have only two likes
Shut up bot not you top comment
I don;t know why i was just recommened this (after 9 years) but truly informative and helpful. Thank you so much.
I can see accidentally plagerizing a sentence or two. But when you have a paragraph that's WORD FOR WORD...no accident there.
The one with the notes is so common, just make sure to never write down stuff 1 to 1 in your notes unless you explicitely plan to use it as a quote
The student could have said "According to the book BOOKNAME, 'STEAL ALL THE SHIT' which sets the context for this paper" ... and then repeat this over and over for 12+ pages, ending each quote with some minor explanation of why that quote was important.
To save space though, it's better to just paraphrase so you can shorten entire paragraphs into 1~2 sentences followed by a short explain then move onto the next point. After a while, having an untangled paper is more important than sounding cool.
"Cite your source."
"It came to me in a dream."
Just read a paper that listed his dead friend as a coauthor because he appeared to him in his dream and supposedly gave him some sort of insight that lead to the findings of the paper.
To be honest, with the amount of essay/thesis/any published work online right now, I will not be suprised if one day, a professor will mark a student fail just for plagiarism, while writing it in front of him.
The first time I unknowingly plagiarized was when I used a previous paragraph in one paper I did, on another paper with a very similar prompt and subject. At the time, I didn’t know plagiarizing yourself was bad.
I once did work that was so good the teacher was absolutely sure I had plagiarized it. He then went on to take points away for bogus reasons while making snide comments. But because he didn't actually accuse me, he didn't care when I gave him undeniable proof that the work was mine.
I then had another teacher accuse me of self-plagiarism for not citing my own photos, which I had taken specifically for that assignment and were not published anywhere else. At that point I started to actually plagiarize work out of spite. I would read source material in one language then translate it. Not because I needed to do it, but because I would rather feel caught than falsely accused by these cretins.
I'll never forget the time I was accused of plagiarism for using my own words from a tech conf I lead a session for. Apparently, some professors believe that if you quote yourself, you must attribute yourself....which is beyond stupid, but whatever. Two years later, that PhD was working for me as a contractor and had a personal "eureka" moment about this.
Well, if you are quoting yourself you should attribute yourself for a number of reasons
1. if its for a class, then if that other work was not from the same class, it essentially means you're just resubmitting old work and not taking the time to come up with fresh ideas; if you site it then you are telling the teacher "look, this was really good and fits in well here, but i am aware that it is a source and I am not trying to just resubmit
I must agree that this reason is a bit weak though
2. (and this is an important one): if you are quoting yourself from a paper you wrote, by citing yourself, you are allowing the reader to then go check that other source to see if that quote is substantiated: that's part of the reason citing is so important, it allows readers to double check facts more easily than other situations. If you are quoting from a paper with multiple authors that is more than just you, then you need to make sure they give credit
They taught about self plagiarism at my college. Seemed like a way to avoid copying old work and coming up with new ones
“Some professors believe”
Yeah, if by some you mean the majority of academia in general.
This isn't a "belief" of "some professors", this is the universal rule throughout all of academia. If it seems strange or confusing to you, you have absolutely no clue what plagiarism is or what the actual problem with plagiarism is.
If you have published some piece of thought previously within the literature or in other sources that are quotable, you need to cite and reference those sources if you are going to reproduce those ideas in some later publication.
Plagiarism isn't primarily about 'stealing someone else's' ideas or anything like that, it's about presenting as *original work* something which is derived from prior work. If an idea you are presenting is predated by prior work, including your own work, you must cite it. If you do not, it makes it difficult trace the origin and development of ideas within the academic literature.
Self plagiarism is literally taught in high school as well so definitely not "some professors".
It's really easy, just rearrange the sentence, use a different word, and done. Shoot I copied a whole article re-arranged the paragraphs, words, etc.
Paraphrase dude 🤦🏽♂️
Imagine all the students that got away with plagiarism because of teacher who were too lazy or too busy to check the references.
I'm sure they're all working normal successful jobs because none of this crap matters in the real world.
I often wonder how many college students got away with plagiarism before the internet. My guess would be "most."
I was hoping to see sneaky dinguses getting blown the heck out for trying to cheat. I wasn't expecting somebody providing helpful writing tips to their students to avoid common pitfalls. I hope she chums the waters next time if she ever hopes to revisit this topic.
Same here, but I'm glad she did. There are some points that she brought up that I'm going to bring up in my lectures in the future.
Is anyone else paranoid that they'll write a sentence that is exactly what someone else wrote and get accused of plagiarism? I have no clue how I could defend myself if this ever happened.
I feel like single sentences being the same can be passed off as reasonable chance, but there's probably a point at which it is statistically improbable for you to have written the exact same thing, word for word; hence why most of the examples were of paragraph length, with a specific enough niche that the probability of you writing the exact same thing word for word would be next to none.
Oh ok that makes me feel a little better I guess lol@@fireplace8583
If you do accidentally reproduce a passage someone already wrote but which you've never read before, and it's long enough to trigger a plagiarism accusation , make sure you go play poker right afterward, because with your luck you'll probably get a few royal flushes in a row.
How can you plagiarize a definition, a definition is a definition - not really
*sweats mathematically*
mathematicians never define things in their papers unless they invented in
what about graduate school? @@Untoldanimations
I never thought I would voluntarily attend an optional class but here I am
After being recommended this video in excess of a dozen times, I suppose the algorithm has defeated me…
Difficult to avoid I'd imagine. However, it's nice to see that the Doctor/Professor was willing to have an open door for students to inquire if they felt if they were plagiarizing indirectly. I never went to college but awesome to see.
I had a senior design project in which two of my teammates tried to throw everyone else under the bus by submitting plagiarized code as their own. I feel the professor should've failed them, but he kept them on our team, which just made things tense and awkward.
Plagerized code? Literally every professional software contains code that was copied and pasted from stack overflow
@@FightFantasy I'm not talking about copied lines or functions. I'm talking about an entire program consisting of more than 300 lines, and claiming they did all of it, and saying the other teammates did nothing and should be failed by the professor. It was the most egregious throwing under the bus I've experienced in academia.
@@FightFantasyacademia is different from the real world.
The fun being when you hand your partner the sunmitted essay while you read from the "plagiarised" text highlight spelling and grammatical errors preserved in the submitted essay. I, honestly, found it sad that students thought we wouldn’t notice or find out.
As I was teaching in IT and we, occasionally, would be contacted by jobbing programmers for clarification on the "assignment".
When ChatGPT was hardly known by anyone in our school, I've been grinding all my essays and assignments to write me the texts from it. Good times even though I am decent at writing.
these days you cant even submit a paper until it has less than 15% on a plagiarism checker
3:36 i can feel the regretness that he was experiencing... "If only I'd just not cheat on JUST THAT INTRODUCTION"
Hbomberguy angel version
The algorithm has fed me this video. I'm a STEM major but have taken several writing courses and will probably take a few more before I'm out. I'm one of those people who can read a sentence and remember it years later if it's impactful to me. It definitely pays to be careful and I caught myself in one of those moments prior to submission.
This is why I’m an engineering major. Never again will I have to write a stylistic essay on something I don’t care about. I can’t blame these students for taking the easy way out; that is a practice that is encouraged in engineering. Get to the correct answer as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.
These professors need to understand that failing someone over plagiarism is not going to stop them from plagiarizing. Instead, they just learn how to hide it better.
at least they will learn something @@zgra74
still have to worry about patents tho
Hell yeah I'm a software engineer and I like to joke it's professional plagiarism
I was thinking the same thing. Throughout the whole 3 minutes that I watched I could only think "damn this whole thing seems completely stupid". I don't mean to offend, but I can't be bothered to give a damn about that
The one thing I learnt from the two examples is if you are going to introduce something, the easiest way is to use quotes of someone/quotation marks.
Especially for the first one, where the first sentence sounded a bit opinionated
All my life I plagiarized Pitagora and Archimede.
This teacher looks so happy, laughing about the first student ("I got you"). That student gave the reference, to make the teacher's job easier.
The obsession with plagiarism is damaging more than helping students who try to learn.
My English teacher saved me from being accused of plagiarism in my science research project. Last year in her classroom when I asked her to read it and give me pointers she noticed I forgot to put “” around a quote I used to help me describe the topic at hand.
I’m thank to this day for her doing that and pointing it out or I would not have passed that project.
(I was a junior in high school at that time and I’m a senior now).
Are they really that strict? I don’t think you gonna failed in high school for something minor as that, I would hate to be in any high school who failed students whole academic for such minor mistakes
I actually caught my teacher plagiarizing once. It was for an online class, and I was given a research topic (something about wildfires, it was a geology class with a politicized teacher). While looking up articles, I found a paragraph on a fire department website that looked familiar.
Turns out, it was word-for-word the same as the introductory paragraph the teacher gave on the topic. I happily reported it to the supervisor (I HATED this teacher) and he promised that the matter would be taken seriously. It was the highlight of my school year.
I have an Idetic and a photographic memory. I remember entire book I've read. When writing, it can be dangerously close to plagerism. I copy sentences from many books and stitch them together. I try my best no to do it, but sometimes I do it.
Wow thats extremely fascinating. whats its like having photographic memory?
@@najeebhaddad7028 It can be really useful, like for exams. But sometimes it can be tromatic, for exemple, when I was a child (like 7 or 8) I walked into my living room and my parents were waching human centipede. I never got these images out of my head. I also can't rediscover a book, series or movie I've already watched/read.
@@roideschiffres6760 Wow... That's really interesting. Yeah I always wished I had photographic memory for exams and stuff but never thought about side effects. Thanks for sharing a bit of your story with me though.
@@najeebhaddad7028 No problem, If you have more questions don't hesitate to ask.
A friend of mine uploaded a paper to a popular place where some students went to plagiarize/ download completed papers. One of the students in class apparently used it because my friend overheard exactly the thing that he inserted into the paper: an inappropriate phrase involving the reader’s mother and her ch🐱t. Needless to say, the student didn’t bother reading the paper after downloading it and the professor wasn’t pleased.
As they say, “Good scholars plagiarize, great scholars cite.”
A thought occured to me that a child will lie and no moral judgement would be placed against them. The child doesn't intend to lie when they break something accidentally or forget to do their chores. The lie comes instinctively because they don't know any better. Just because the child didn't mean to lie doesn't mean it's not a lie.
The real question is how can one out of many millions of essays about the same limited set of boring curricular topics ever hope to be original?
Her point isn't that you can't use someone else's paper or words, but you have to give credit to the original author if you are citing them word for word.
And there are situations where it can just happen during the note taking/research stage, just by accident. Happens to musicians too where they may have used a beat in a new song but it wasn't an original melody or chord, but came from a song they heard years ago.
I would agree grade school/high school may have the same generic prompts but in undergrad/grad school you have much more freedom (at least in my experience) in your paper or research paper. What I saw from my college is more so "work on a new product launch...make sure your paper contains the below 5 topics". And then you can write a paper about literally any new product you can think of as long as you cover the framework.
This teacher/professor takes a healthy approach because using someone else's words isn't the problem. It's how you handle using someone else's words and do you ensure credit is given? I can't think of a single industry where the ramifications of plagerism isn't at least a minimum of reputation ruining and worst case is career ending. Nothing feels worse than your manager asking where you got something and you answer I don't know. It's impossible to rebuild that trust and it's embarassinf
Oh such innocence, colleges and universities are no different in approach, only in the expectation that those 12+ years of semirigorous conditioning take effect, so the illusion of academic freedom can be better proped-up. And plagerism is rife in those institutions, you're just not seeing in because you have been conditioned not to notice it.
Do you know how many songs there are about love that manage not to be identical? And those are only three minutes long. There is infinite variation in language.
This is excellent. I wished I had seen this when it first came out. A couple of years later I did a post graduate degree. I was always worried I was plagiarising when I read something and reworded it when citing it.
I will continue to plagiarize, steal valor, and commit fraud; and no one can stop me.
In 5th grade, my work was plagiarised by a student (for an ART related piece of work), He put a lot more effort into the assignment then me, and he got an award for it, I reported it and nothing got done about it, it wasn't much in the grand scheme of thing, but I will never forget the way it made me feel, ever since, I truly understood the importance of not plagiarizing work, and the fact that it is simply not okay to take credit for the work of others.
Sounds like Yayoi Kusuma plagiarized by Andy Warhol.
Eh when you’re in 5th grade it’s still mostly a “we’re all in this together” attitude. Me and my family have zero artsy instinct, so whenever an artistic project was assigned my mom would call other parents to see what they were doing, and asking their permission for us to try the same idea. We would then take some of their ideas and go 110% at it, but not out any sense of of competition with the other kid and their parents, we were always grateful for some of the creative ideas they had (like using dried clear hand soap to create “water” in a diorama, tricks like that which we never would have come up with on our own) so I never really paid attention if my grade was better than the other kid; in any case I still had to do the messy work of putting it together so I always felt whatever grade I got was my own.
Something about this video stuck to me, a kind of adversarial feeling I had but couldn't square with the groundedness and tough-love attitude of the teacher. I cheated a lot in college, not because it was hard but because I was lazy and bored, and I think the examples get to the heart of why: there's a considerable amount of shame heaped upon these students not for repeating the words of others, but for repeating them them in the "wrong" way. There's an examination of why they plagiarized, but not on why they felt the need. Word count is the too-easy answer, the perfunctory style of college writing is another. In any case, nothing new is being said, the stolen writing merely used to add an element of interest so one's eyes don't glaze over as quickly, but it's not like the definition ripped from the dictionary is seeding a political argument, or a student masking another's discovery as their own. Citation could be taught with a worksheet and a reference page but instead millions of human hours are spent re-writing the same descriptions of global warming or disease until one develops a muscle memory for rephrasing the obvious.
So much more I could say that would be worthless to, fittingly. I could've been taught something in college. Instead I graduated summa cum laude. The next time you're watching some video essay on here and you're suddenly hit with realization that the presenter hasn't actually SAID anything, merely referenced and summarized, take a moment to thank college writing.
Well said.
Submitting an essay always scares me, even if I have cited everything to the best of my knowledge. That's why I lost my passion for academic writing and gave up the chance of a PhD. Especially when people use AI detection systems with that relatively high false positive rate.
today it's harder than ever to get away from copying other's words
I never plagiarized. Always asked for help. Cited sources. Followed simple instruction.
I always fear of accidentally plagiarising
Same here. It's not difficult to understand.
What is considered too much quotation for a paper?
if your essay reads like a string of quotes you have quoted too much. the majority of your essay should be your writing and the quotes should just illustrate your point/be your evidence for your your argument. your tutor will probably read most of the sources you have consulted and won't want to read an essay that is just parroting them. an essay is meant to demonstrate your grasp of a subject and how you use evidence to support your argument. if your essay is just a string of quotes then it isn't possible to gauge your knowledge at all. quotes should be used sparingly and only when necessary. it is hard to put a ratio on quotes/essay. i always preferred to see what my students argued than a copy of someone else's work. always remember to reference correctly in the manner asked for by your university. not referencing can also lead to accusations of plagiarism or even making things up. tutors can sense what is or isn't a student's own voice but always check you work thoroughly or ask for help. this video is excellent advice.
The things the UA-cam algorithm picks up will always confuse me.... but as a (hopefully) future educator, this is an excellent resource and example!
I had a lecture for my data structures and algorithms class who gave us an assignment question relating to chat gpt. The question were about identifying the issues with the chat gpt answer to a question. He was basically showing us how unreliable using chat gpt to answer assignment question was.
I see students get together and share lab reports. There are three archived and the students swap paragraphs and change the words around. But they dont think to change turns of phrase. In any event they spend way more effort cheating than if they bothered to learn to write and then just wrote stream of consciousness.