Grimly funny indeed. My most recent story I heard a couple of days ago: a
friend of mine, not an English professor, was reading a student paper and
marking, he says "Thank God," in pencil, putting an occasional "really?"
or "maybe you need more evidence here" in the margin and slowly sensed
that what he was reading was strangely familiar. The feeling got stronger
and stronger and he suddenly realized that he had a) to deal with an
obvious case of plagiarism and b) to erase those pencilled comments.
That's right--the paper looked familair because he himself was the
original author and the perhaps not quite convincing arguments were his
own. Anne P.

> I understand the CHE "article" sent by Prof. Herman to be
> satire.  The word plagiarism has a Latin root that can
> also be rendered as "plundering," and since furtiveness
> (as in "stealing away") and theft rather than robbery w/
> confrontation is involved, and since "credit" and
> "currency" are also a part of our subject, I think the
> proper analogy is embezzlement by transfer of funds.
>  Copyright is of course a modern concept, involved with
> the emergence of the person-as-independent-individual, and
> the present dissolution of that entity into a cell within
> the undivided collective electronic consciousness probably
> spells the end of much of the conventional distinction
> between mine and thine with regard to intellectual
> property.  The hard-wiring is not only incomplete in
> youth, it is also probably a-changing.  Though plagiarists
> tend to omit the "myne author" of traditional transfers of
> the presently offending kind (or to retire him or her to
> their bibliography), the childhood of letters is like the
> childhood of the lettered, it begins with quantities of
> copying; the plagiarist persists in a habit education
> necessarily gave him/her in the first place.  Nobody is
> looking for departures from authority in the writing of
> wills either; legal boilerplate is such a safeguard as our
> students may be seeking when the reproduce articles full
> of professional jargon.  Everyone will have a favorite
> story to illustrate his or her point of view on the
> matter.  Mine is from Herbert Lindenberger, who confronted
> a student with his knowledge that she had plagiarized her
> paper on Wordsworth.  She stedfastly denied having done
> any such thing.  He pointed out that the offending
> sections of her paper were from his own book.  "Holy -- "
> she exclaimed, "you're not THAT Lindenberger!"    -- Jim
> N.
>
>
>       On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 09:08:08 -0700
>   "Peter C. Herman" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>I thought the list might enjoy this "article"
>>from today's
>>Inside Higher Education.
>>Peter C. Herman
>>
>>June 10
>>Report from the Academic Committee on PlagiarismBy
>>David Galef
>>To the Dean of Academic Affairs:
>>Our special committee on plagiarism has concluded its
>>research.* Below
>>are the highlights of our findings.
>>­­­
>>Students are growing lazier about the whole process of
>>copying, not even
>>bothering to change fonts in a cut-and-paste excerpt or
>>otherwise
>>disguise their tracks. When asked why he inserted an
>>entire page printed
>>in Black Forest Gothic in a paper written in Courier, a
>>student in
>>freshman composition expressed surprise: ?If you start
>>changing things,
>>that?s cheating, right??
>>The path of least resistance continues, often
>>refreshingly low-tech. A
>>Psychology 200 instructor reported a student handing in a
>>Xerox of an
>>article with the author?s name whited out and her own
>>inserted. ?I did
>>the best I could,? confessed the student. ?I didn?t have
>>my laptop with
>>me, and I was in a hurry.?
>>A student in an Art 303 seminar handed in a paper that
>>had been
>>plagiarized from another plagiarized paper, which was
>>plagiarized from an
>>earlier paper, which in turn seemed to be derived from
>>another source.
>>The instructor finally traced the work back to a papyrus
>>scroll residing
>>in the Cairo Museum.
>>In another recent case, a student handed in a paper that
>>had been copied
>>from the Lycée Populaire, all in French, though the
>>student himself knew
>>no French, and the course was an American literature
>>survey.
>>Some of the faculty feel particularly betrayed, no longer
>>sure of their
>>ground. One instructor bemoaned ?the lack of standards
>>these days, when
>>students are willing to plagiarize even mediocre texts.?
>>He referred to a
>>paper he?d recently received that duplicated a D+ paper
>>he?d graded and
>>returned the previous semester.
>>After one comp-lit lecturer told his students that
>>plagiarism
>>derives from the Latin plagium or ?kidnapping,? he
>>received a
>>ransom note: ?Unless you leave $500 in small bills by the
>>rostrum in 101
>>Henry Hall, you will see your darling lecture next in a
>>paper for a world
>>lit survey class at U Neau.? Luckily, proctors were able
>>to apprehend the
>>perpetrator playing a tape to the voice-recognition
>>software at the
>>Information Technology Center.
>>­­­-
>>Spotted: a new trend called plagio-riffing, where
>>students get together
>>and mix and match five or more papers into one by
>>sampling and lifting
>>choice paragraphs to the beat of George Harrison?s ?My
>>Sweet Lord?
>>(plagiarized from ?He?s So Fine?).
>>­­­-
>>How to tell if a student work has been plagiarized, Old
>>and
>>New:
>>Old: It looked suspiciously well typed.
>>New: It has a Web address printed on the bottom.
>>Old: It read like a) Thomas Jefferson, b) the student?s
>>girlfriend, or c) Abigail the Academic for Hire, from the
>>tutoring agency
>>down the street.
>>New: It reads like document #1209583 on
>>Cop-an-Essay.com.
>>Old: It had key phrases that didn?t fit with the rest of
>>the
>>student?s diction. Example: ?The height of the Roman
>>empire represented
>>the pagan apotheosis of imperial grandeur, but the seeds
>>of its decline
>>were inherent in its decadence, and to me that sucks.?
>>New: Since all the writing looks like a pastiche of
>>web-based
>>gibble-gabble, we?re still studying this problem.
>>­­­-
>>Making the punishment fit the crime for those caught
>>plagiarizing: Have
>>the student copy the same sentence over and over again.
>>Note: reproducing
>>without permission has an additional meaning in China, as
>>our resident
>>Sinologist has pointed out.
>>­­­-
>>According to a report from another university?s home
>>page, over 70
>>percent of all students admit having used sources without
>>acknowledgment,
>>and plagiarism is ?growing by leaps and bounds.? Any
>>resemblance between
>>that report and ours is purely coincidental.
>>_________________________________
>>* Note: The committee would have released its findings
>>last year but for
>>the unfortunate incident of committee member Professor
>>Renquist?s
>>?borrowings? for his latest book. The case has been
>>settled out of
>>court.
>>
>>
>
> [log in to unmask]
> James Nohrnberg
> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
> Univ. of Virginia
> P.O Box 400121
> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
>