Plagiarism seems to be turning into quite a big thing with the rise of the internet (or maybe it's just that we're more aware of it?). At any rate, the internet is making it much harder to police.

One student at the University of Kent was set to sue the university in May after they failed his work for plagiarism and as a result he was on track to fail his degree. His argument was that he'd always plagiarised by cutting and pasting from the internet and the university should have picked up on it sooner. Maybe they should have picked it up sooner, but surely an 18 - 21 year old should have the experience and wherewithall to know that copying without sourcing is not on?

Beck.

That's just ridiculous - he admitted he'd been cheating and then said it was the uni's fault for not catching him earlier? Students these days!

Kinda reminds me of a guy at St Andrews who screwed up his exams, knew he was going to do so and asked the examiner for a glass of port during the exam. He was of course refused and when he failed he appealed on the grounds that the examiner had broken university law during the exam by refusing to give him the glass of port.

He passed the exam by default.

But, it gets better. The examiner understandibly was miffed at this and kept a close eye on this chancer. The chancer was expelled from the uni the following year for "not wearing a sword in St Salvator's Quad on New Year's Day".

Gotta love those archane university laws....

anyway, that's got nothing to do with the plagiarism thing but it's a fun story. *grin*

That is simply bizarre.

I mean most Universities make their rules about plagiarism utterly clear right from the start, so it's quite clearly the student's responsibility to know what the rules are.

It's like a motorist being fined for drunk driving and then suing the police because they've often driven home with that much alchohol in their blood and the police should have picked up on it sooner. I mean how far do you take this? "Look, you got me bang to rights, I murdered my wife, but I also murdered my grandmother years ago, so you should have picked up on it sooner." I certainly hope he loses this case. Otherwise it means plagiarism becomes unpunishable provided you don't get caught the first time. In fact, it could potentially mean that anything becomes unpunishable provided you don't get caught first time.

There certainly seems to be a lot of plagiarism here at UWE, and I suspect we only pick up on a fraction of it - when a turn of phrase looks unusually sophisticated compared to the rest of the essay or the student's work, we'll do a Google. If they've purchased their essay from one of these cheat websites (that always disclaim, like butter wouldn't melt in their mouth, that their essays are not to be used for plagiarism, and that to do so is a violation of the terms and conditions of purchase), then Google only accesses the essay in scrambled form, so you have to go through carefully piecing together bits of sentence. But we get them in the end. Oh, yes.

And I'm going off on a rant here, aren't I? *g*

I can remember reading about that, and thought How stupid is this guy? Not only does he plagiarise, but when he's caught he says he's plagiarised in most, if not all, of his other projects and because they didn't say anything about those he should be let off with that one.

I think that's the definition of stupidity.

Andy