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[Scelly9]

Found 11 plagiarizers today in the class I mark for.

Out of how many?  Please say several hundred.  PLEASE!

About 60

...please say that this is a low level class that some middle schoolers are taking?

1st year physics for engineers

aka: university level stuff

WAI.

[Lightningfalcon]

Found 11 plagiarizers today in the class I mark for.

Out of how many?  Please say several hundred.  PLEASE!

About 60

...please say that this is a low level class that some middle schoolers are taking?

1st year physics for engineers

aka: university level stuff

Damn.  Were they plagirizing entire papers or just forgetting to cite sources? 

[Logical2u]

Found 11 plagiarizers today in the class I mark for.

Out of how many?  Please say several hundred.  PLEASE!

About 60

...please say that this is a low level class that some middle schoolers are taking?

1st year physics for engineers

aka: university level stuff

Damn.  Were they plagirizing entire papers or just forgetting to cite sources?

Entire labs except for 1 group who I suspect copied half their lab from a group that plagiarized their entire lab.

As for why, don't ask me. I'll probably never know. I just get to read through all their stuff and play "spot the identical numbers, words, and phrasing" game for a few hours.

[Loud Whispers]

Entire labs except for 1 group who I suspect copied half their lab from a group that plagiarized their entire lab.

As for why, don't ask me. I'll probably never know. I just get to read through all their stuff and play "spot the identical numbers, words, and phrasing" game for a few hours.

Word for word? Sheesh, you just don't get cheaters like they used to be.

[Yoink]

Oh gods.
I remember this one time in band camp in primary school, 5th grade I believe, it was "annoying homework assignment time", where we, despite being poor, innocent little childrens, were cruelly forced to spend our leisure time researching primitive tribes around the world. (Pretty sure the nifty, laminated booklet I made is still floating about somewhere.)

Anyway, one guy got up for his turn, carried a sheet of card with a few paragraphs of info on it to the front of the room. He very haltingly recited a bunch of facts, basically just reading them from the sheet. The teacher wasn't too impressed, naturally.

Next up was my friend, who carried his own sheet of card up to the front of the class, looking rather unhappy. As soon as I started to speak I realised why: word for word, his project was exactly the same as the guy before him.
Apparently they had both pulled their work from the very same webpage. Whoops. (Not like I didn't do the same, but at least I re-worded everything, hehehe.)
These were the days before you had to cite every single freakin' source you gathered information from, but it was still pretty damning.


E: Also, notably, that was pretty much the last time in my school years that I actually gave a fuck about homework/assignments.
I was looking back through my memory thinking, "Wait, hold on, I actually put effort into something? What the hell?! That can't be right. What. I want my money back." But then I realised that at that point I had only just begun to cultivate my hatred of homework and the teachers who would expect me to deal with their crap whilst not at school.

[Lightningfalcon]

Entire labs except for 1 group who I suspect copied half their lab from a group that plagiarized their entire lab.

As for why, don't ask me. I'll probably never know. I just get to read through all their stuff and play "spot the identical numbers, words, and phrasing" game for a few hours.

Word for word? Sheesh, you just don't get cheaters like they used to be.

When I cheat I'm at least smart enough to change some of the numbers around and double check my work.  Exchange a word or two there, drop a sentence there.  Really, it's not that hard people. 
Note- Only times I've ever cheated was in middle school when we were doing math homework, and I couldn't be bothered to do all the tedious "Add this number and subtract that number" stuff. 

[Flying Dice]

Just going to put this out there, but if you cheat extensively (especially on papers at a university level), it'll be noticed. People have their own writing styles and individual quirks, so a drastic shift in tone makes it pretty clear what's going on. That, and quite a few universities have automated systems to check for similarities between submitted papers and published work/websites. It's pretty much at the point where it's more work to cheat without being caught than it is to do the damn work. Thank goodness.

[Dutchling]

Heh. I remember one time when a friend asked me for my assignment as he hadn't made his yet. I gave him mine and the next day we were both called to the front of  the class. Teacher had both our papers on his desk next to each other, and I saw they were exactly the same, except that mine had the text split up in two (like in newspapers). I was like: Of shit, I'm dead. Than he asked us which assignment belonged to which person, as we both forgot to add our names.

I still wonder how he could not have noticed that. But then again, it was also the teacher in whose class we watched funny insurance commercials and ate cake.

[Tellemurius]

My schools uses a web application that scans documents of any existence on the internet, its pretty damn precise word to word.

[Dutchling]

My highschool used that as well.

[Bdthemag]

Although there are programs which can take a page of text, and replace various words with similar meaning words. They can be a bit sloppy at times, but that would probably get around it. Not that I did any of that stuff, I wasn't a complete dick in highschool.

[Lightningfalcon]

Although there are programs which can take a page of text, and replace various words with similar meaning words. They can be a bit sloppy at times, but that would probably get around it. Not that I did any of that stuff, I wasn't a complete dick in highschool.

Suuuuuuure you didn't.
I think that most searches also look for synonyms when searching. 

[Dutchling]

That's why you need to find a paper in a different language. Translating a paper is easier than writing one.

[Lagslayer]

I had teachers that said the real difference between plagiarism and citation is the citation itself. You could have virtually the entire paper just be quotes of the respected works, so long as they are noted and cited at the end.

I still preferred to reword and shorten the info for the sake of efficiency, which often made it difficult for me to meet length requirements, but meh.

[Lightningfalcon]

I had teachers that said the real difference between plagiarism and citation is the citation itself. You could have virtually the entire paper just be quotes of the respected works, so long as they are noted and cited at the end.

I still preferred to reword and shorten the info for the sake of efficiency, which often made it difficult for me to meet length requirements, but meh.

If there is one thing I learned from English, other then the seventy five vocab words a week we memorize, it's how to B.S an essay to meet a requried length. 
At our school it's you need citations, and unless it is a direct quote, it needs to be paraphrased.