Plagiarism

It's been another week of not very much knitting. This week, I have mostly been marking assignments.

And it has been bloody annoying too.

I volunteer on a project delivering public health education and it is assignment week. 13 have been submitted. 2 were bounced straight back to the students because 1/4 to 1/3 of work had been pasted from another report. Five other students have rewritten work from the same website. I am now at the point where I could recite this website for you.

There are plenty of things that infuriate me about plagiarism - it's cheating; it's morally reprehensible; it's lazy; it leaves you to wonder if the student understands anything that they are writing about, but I think the thing that really winds me up is that they seem to think I won't notice.

To say that they don't even attempt to hide it isn't quite true. Sometimes, the only difference is that they substitute the author's name with their own, but the plagiarism I am often presented with takes laziness to new extremes.

Sections of text will be pasted in, in one font, and you may find that a sentence suddenly merges into another format without any reason for this, before switching to another one. This shoddy approach is usually one of the early warning signs of a cheat.

Why students think that this will not be noticed is beyond me, but I don't want to point it out to them as it could be interpreted as a how to plagiarise guide.



And, no, I didn't draw this cartoon, but I'm not pretending that I did.