Comments on: I Wish There was a Grade Lower Than Zero

by: PoliBlog: A Rough Draft of my Thoughts » Plagiarism and Ben Domenech

Fri, 24 Mar 2025 15:47:46 +0000

[…] 217;s commentary or writing ability, but as is well known to regular readers and students, I can’t abide by plagiarism. If the charges of plagiarism are true (and who plagiarizes movie reivews?) […]

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by: Eirik

Thu, 08 Dec 2025 01:21:23 +0000

In graduate school (optometry) I watched a classmate copy and paste large sections of a large paper directly from a CD-Rom medical encyclopedia. I remember giving him crap about it, but didn’t turn him in because I’m almost phobic about confrontation. It burned me at the time because, IIRC, it was a long paper, difficult to write, and I had used about half a dozen sources to get mine done. He used a frickin medical text and used that authors sources. I doubt that he was caught, either. The prof had so many papers to grade that its likely he didn’t realize what he was reading was stolen.

As for catching modern plagerists, I’ve heard of teachers and profs typing odd phrases into Google and seeing what pops up. I’ve also heard a story, most likely urban legand, about a young man getting into an argument about his paper on the Russian Revolution. The prof insists that the paper is plagerized and the student demands that he proves it. The prof points to the end of the paper, where the student had copy/pasted “See also, Lenin, Vladimir.”

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by: Jody

Thu, 08 Dec 2025 00:24:41 +0000

At Virginia Tech, plagiarism is an honor code violation. If convicted, one of the weakest punishments available is a double-weighted zero.

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by: lisa

Wed, 07 Dec 2025 23:09:51 +0000

Anyone who has ever set in one of your classes on the first day should know that you take plagerizing. But what would an end of the semster be without at least one. And since it is the fall semster maybe they will give you a special Christmas present.

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by: Jan

Wed, 07 Dec 2025 21:31:30 +0000

Just to be on the safe side, you could always put a clause in your syllabus saying that a plagerized paper will get one an automatic “F” for the course. It would at least save you the trouble of grading the person’s final exam.

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by: Dr. Steven Taylor

Wed, 07 Dec 2025 18:05:13 +0000

To be honest, giving a zero rally does the trick–I am just venting. Since we are talking about students who usually aren’t doing all that well in the first place, a zero on a major project pretty much guarantee’s failure in the course.

There’s a great Peanuts cartoon in which Peppermint Patty gets a “Z-” and says “That’s not a grade, that’s sarcasm”–at this point, I’m hungry for some sarcasm.

To answer your question–mostly it is just a case of having read a ton of papers and knowing what I should be seeing. Certainly if a paper goes from gibberish to Harvard-quality prose, that’s a tip-off.

There are a variety of indicators. Plus I am naturally suspicious

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by: B. Minich, PI

Wed, 07 Dec 2025 17:57:16 +0000

Well, if you’re the prof, why not say, “If I catch you plagerizing, I’ll take points away from you.”? That’d do the trick for giving them the grade you want.

I’ve always wondered . . . how does a professor spot a plagerized paper? How do you know if someone has copied something? What tips you off? As a good student, I wasn’t about to figure this out by actually trying plagerism, but I’ve always wondered how you spot it.

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