<p>"Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image."</p>
<p>Still, some attempts to cut down on plagiarism are just ridiculous. My friend’s school has a program to pair you with a mentor and do scientific research during the school year. At the end of the year you have to write up a research report to get credit for the program. My friend worked with the same mentor for two years in a row. For the research report his second year, he used the same intro he did the previous year. The school failed him for “self plagiarism”. What…</p>
<p>When in doubt, ask. It has prevented trouble numerous times.</p>
<p>I can honestly admit that I so-called “self-plagiarized” for two different anthropology courses. Wikipedia referenced a person who describes it as not “intellectual theft” but “academic dishonesty.” But how is it still dishonesty when it’s my work? Have these people ever thought maybe my ideas and opinions for the former class were identical to the new class?</p>
<p>I have definitely used some stuff over again. With turnitin.com however, that will not happen anymore</p>
<p>I wonder what would happen if we ran professors’ work through the Turnitin.com process.</p>
<p>^^Haha stuff like this ends up happening</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/education/21prof.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/education/21prof.html</a></p>
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<p>You don’t think it’s dishonest to try to get credit for the same work multiple times?</p>
<p>I don’t really. I have shown that I can find the information and I have shown I know the info. just because I didn’t find it a second time…</p>
<p>notasophistamore, thank you! No need for further comments.</p>
<p>I was so slow when I started C25K that I just laughed at the thought of running two miles in 20 minutes! The hardest part of the program for me, though, was in week five, when I was supposed to run 8 minutes, walk 5 minutes, run 8 minutes one time, and the next run 20 minutes straight! Ha! I just modified it so that I ran a couple of minutes longer each time.</p>
<p>The biggest problem I have with Turnitin is that it’s obviously going to catch original work that is simply similar to work already in its ludicrously large database and it’s going to catch work that quotes and responds to others, even when those other works are cited. Just to clarify, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with considering and analyzing passages and arguments and ideas from others, so long as you cite their sources, and comment upon them. That’s what scholarship is based on. If everyone just gave their interpretation without considering anyone else’s, we’d have a bunch of personal reflections, not academic papers. Turnitin just looks for repeated passages, so it can’t tell whether or not they’re cited, which worries me. Obviously, the professor using the program should check to see, but they might not.</p>
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<p>It’s up to the professor/teacher to use turnitin appropriately. Turnitin helps teachers find cheaters; it’s not supposed to actually identify the cheaters.</p>
<p>It’s interesting that turnitin has evaded copyright violation issues…They’re using copyright material (i.e. students’ papers) for profit. </p>
<p>I think it’s perfectly fine that colleges/high schools use turnitin.com to verify originality–it’s clearly a fair use exception. How turnitin.com has managed to bypass the law and make a profit off the whole process is beyond me.</p>
<p>I tend to frequently ask questions whenever I am not 100% sure about whether to cite something or how to cite it correctly. In the end, I usually go overboard with citations, but I think that that is the better alternative for getting in trouble for plagiarizing.</p>
<p>It seems like most people here are missing the issue that this article is dealing with. It isn’t talking about problems with detecting plagiarism, it’s talking about the idea that kids are honestly incapable of grasping the idea of plagiarism because of the influence of file-sharing and open-source stuff. Here’s a good thesis point of what this journalist is saying:</p>
<p>“But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.”</p>
<p>…which is ridiculous lol. The idea that kids do not understand what plagiarism truly means is crazy. It reeks of psychologists who really need to be focusing on other things, rather than describing phenomena amongst teens that in truth don’t exist. These kids are no different than those who went to school in the 90’s without Wikipedia, P2P, open-source software, and torrents… these kids are just lazy.</p>
<p>I turned in virtually the same paper three times, and a heavily modified version of it another time. I never got ‘caught’ because I wasn’t doing anything wrong; I still had all rights to my papers and nowhere in the professor’s syllabus or anything did it say we couldn’t reuse previous work. Some professors put that in there but somme don’t.</p>
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<p>This is fine. I expect that you fully disclosed that this was a reused paper? </p>
<p>You’re allowed to redistribute your copyrighted works. You are not allowed to pawn copies as original manuscripts.</p>
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<p>How can you not think that’s dishonest? It’s not an issue of plagiarism so much as it’s trying to get credit without doing the work (which is also what you’re doing when you plagiarize). I can’t imagine the professors knew about this, since it defeats the entire point of assigning a paper to let students turn in work they’ve already submitted in other classes. </p>
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<p>You really need to be told not to turn in the same paper three times? If the syllabus doesn’t explicitly say that you can’t copy exam answers from another student, is that OK, too?</p>
<p>Turnitin.com is a freaking joke. it checks your paper through everything thats ever been written at your school and gives you a list of people you “plagiarized” from. but the thing is that it goes through everything and checks every single word and gives you a list of words, papers, and people which teachers automatically go on. In my experience, minor plagiarism = major plagiarism in that a paper that has the same exact sentence as a different person on another report gets the same treatment as someone who copied the entire thing. its ridiculous.</p>
<p>but anyway, colleges imo are so paranoid about this plagiarism thing that its taking so many unnecessary precautions to eliminate it and trying to scare students for no good reason. true enough people need to learn to give credit where its needed and learn how to cite things, but its ridiculous when a college just utterly punishes so hard on something for a class that people most probably dont care about.</p>
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<p>Plagiarism is trying to get credit for work you didn’t do. This is trying to get credit for work you did do. Don’t conflate the two.</p>
<p>Perhaps there’s a good argument for the claim that reusing one’s own work is ethically questionable, but saying it’s just like copying someone else’s work isn’t going to convince anybody.</p>