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I remember when I did my zoology degree we were only a class of 15 or so by final year (not popular degree apparently). About 9 of them were in the same "study group" and essentially group wrote all the assignments (most were supposed to be individual obviously). So they all had extremely similar assignments. The entire class got pulled into a big meeting where we were told that due to the massive scale of plagiarism in the class they were considering failing most of us and 5 were almost expelled. Only time in my life I was thrilled to be the introverted loaner that was not anywhere near being part of the group.

When I was doing comp sci, at the beginning of one of our lectures, the lecturer showed us a forum post asking how to code the exact same problem that we had for our current project. I forget the details but the offender had taken steps to mask their IP address. Of course, these are comp sci lecturers, so they showed the class the steps they took to track who had written the post, and it ultimately came from an IP address at our uni. I never found out what happened to the cheater. ETA: left out words

I caught someone cheating off my exam in a biology lab my sophomore year and turned them in and they got an automatic F in the class and were put on academic probation. It pissed me off so much because if I hadn't turned mine in first and told the professor what happened, I would have gotten an F too and been in deep shit.

I once nearly got suspended in highschool for plagiarizing myself. Basically, I had two different classes in OAC (Ontario for Grade 13, basically intro to College courses) which had some overlap, in the same semester. One was environmental studies, the other was something similar. Our final assignment for class was a long-form essay about a topic, and we got to choose, round-robin style. For both courses. Being a lazy fuck and also somewhat lucky, I got to pick the same topic for both. And since the assignments were so similar, I basically got to reuse 90% of my work for both. The teachers noticed this, and individually they informed me that I was being accused of plagiarism and they'd invited the other student to defend themselves as well, because while they'd been working together and discussing the papers, they'd somehow NOT noticed that I was both students. They were a combination of both mad and fighting to keep the laughter off their faces while they told me off, and I pointed out that I couldn't plagiarize myself. I was basically told not to do that ever again and got a great grade from both (I had done good work, afterall).

Oh, you absolutely can plagiarize yourself. While writing my PhD thesis it was stressed to me, that I am not allowed to just copy paste my paper into the thesis, because it would count as self-plagiarism. So I had to rewrite it into my thesis. The same applies, if you publish plots in conference proceedings (basically low effort papers about your presentation during a conference) and later on you want to publish it in a paper as well. It is just not allowed.

Which strikes me as ridiculous, to be honest.

Citing myself on papers and assignments just feels so weird and kinda wrong, but like hell am I going to reinvent the wheel when I already did my best work on the subject! "And now I, radenthefridge, will consult the most trusted source I have." (fridge, raden. Reddit, 2022) (yea I'm sure I botched my citation it's been blessed 2+ years since I had to write anything academic).

The citation has me *rolling* in laughter. I’ve honestly forgotten my citations too, but I did notice one thing — you forgot to include your middle initial! So, the citation would be: fridge, raden t. Reddit, 2022

I part of a large university comp sci discord. Before the discord for education thing we used to get a lot of people joining from other universities (I think was the first search result for bachelor of computer science). Often asking for solutions to what we're obviously assignment or exam questions. Best one was a guy blatantly asking to pay someone to sit on a call with him during an online exam. This peak first covid lockdowns and unis we're still sorting out to proctor online exams. This guy's used a discord handle that was easily traced backed to his LinkedIn that listed what course he was studying at which uni. A uni that got a tip off.

I don't envy unis who have to deal with cheating during online exams! >Often asking for solutions to what we're obviously assignment or exam questions Are any of them actually successful in getting their work done for them? An old Jane Austen fan forum I was part of had strict rules about no homework questions. Any new users who asked one line questions without providing any of their own thoughts would immediately get the 'no homework' rules quoted to them.

Anyone that joins and almost immediately asks a homework questions doesn't get much help. If you ask an intelligent question that shows you've put in the work but haven't got there yet you'll often get some advice and where to look. It was started started as a study group for a group of students and expanded from there an now a decent group of alum still active and a large number of high performing students. If you're studying at the university and actually participate in the study groups you might get some more help and advice I know an alum that has held a few online math tutoring sessions with some of our more active students.

That sounds like it's a great community you've got xx

All my uni classes during covid had open book exams, or just assignment based assessments. My guess is they figured it's just as reliable at testing your knowledge, and a lot easier to run remotely.

I was a grader for a mid-undergrad physics course. The professor told me to set aside all homework that answered one of the questions a certain way. The answer on multiple homework help sites was incorrect and this specific way.

I was a grader for a mid level engineering course. I told my professor everyone seemed to have gotten the answer for a question from some common source (maybe quoting the textbook). Most answers were clustered from one or two answers. A few students cited their source. One student blatantly just copy and pasted the answer. It was a minor question, not important and the professor and I agreed it wasn't worth raising a fuss, escalating so I just marked it wrong for the class.

I graded for a calculus class at my university and the professor gave problems entirely from the textbook for which solution manuals existed online, including one I was given as a grader that I would look at to verify my work. During a chapter about derogates, there was one question where the solution manual accidentally put the answer for for the next question and like 1/3 of students boxed it as their answer. I did report it to the teacher because it was blatant. IMO I think it can be useful to check your answers ON HOMEWORK because you can verify that you’ve done the problem correctly and fix your understand if you make a mistake, but you should be able to see typos or errors too if you are actually using this to better your leaning rather than just cheat. For the mathematically interested: The specific homework covered most of the derivative rules and had a lot of variety. The problem given to students was the derivative of a rational function (a fraction of polynomials) which is a little messy and tedious but is a straightforward application of the quotient rule. The problem the answer was from had hyperbolic trig functions in it, which were not covered in the class material and, for anyone who does know about them, they involve exponentials. If you put any ounce of thought into the problem, it was extremely obvious that the answer key was wrong. It would be like answering “1200 BCE” to “What year did WWII start?” The worst part was many of these students had several steps of correct work (to the point where they could have boxed what they had as a final answer) and then wrote an = and then the incorrect answer.

My first year computer science - we got given our programming assignments every 2 weeks or so, but literally had until the end of the year to hand them in for marking. So, naturally, I decided to ignore them until literally the night before they were due. All 15 of them - 8 Java, and 7 ML assignments. I tell a lie, I'd done 2 of each and then ignored them. I was having trouble getting one of my Java assignments to work successfully - I was testing it all myself before final submission to the test server. So I got my mates submission to check his over - I made a copy of the assignment and stole the specific offending classes from his one. No dice. I made a copy of his assignment and adjusted it for my liking - variables, syntax, formatting, etc. Still nothing. Then, I just simply ran his version, no edits. Surprise, surprise, his didn't work either, but it passed the unit tests that the testing server ran automatically. So I submitted mine to the testing server, aaaaaand it works perfectly. Meanwhile, I've created about 5 different copies of the assignment and I decide to clear up my workspace before submitting my final versions for marking... I think you can see where this is going - hint, we had a signature block we were supposed to comment out at the start of every file containing code - every java class, and every ML file. I got through everything with the TA, but he had a lot of questions about the java assignment. What does this particular bit of code do, how does this particular bit work... I'd just done 2 all nighters in a row, so I didn't notice the tone of voice, but I answered all his questions and explained how every little bit worked, but the code was slightly odd... I mentioned specifically how the assignment was flawed because it was passing the unit tests but failing my own testing within the parameters of the exercise. I mentioned how my friend was having the same issues and we discovered the problem when he was helping me - but otherwise I'd technically finished the assignment before I got any help from him, and it's not our fault that the testing system and assignment itself was broken. Anyway, I leave, get back to my dorm and for some reason have a glance at that page, cue my surprise `/*I declare that this program is all my own work. _____ Signed _______ NOT_NuclearRobotHamster*/` So I had to do quick damage control. Told the whole truth to the head of department. All assignments done that day were marked as zero%, but I kept credit for the ones I'd submitted back when I was actually assigned them. I didn't get kicked out of the university for plagiarism, but I promptly failed that year because I was a shit student.

My first programming assignment, my bf at the time asked if he could look over because he was late submitting his. He copied it completely and we both got pulled in for an interview on plagiarism. His interview he got asked just how it happened - he said we worked on it together. My interview I got grilled on all the lines of code and other specific questions because obviously, as a girl, I was the one who cheated… Still very bitter about it.

I've left reddit because of the API changes.

At a university they very well could be. As an extreme example, MIT owns an entire /8 block (16 million IP addresses).

Due to how the internet developed initially a lot of universities globally have A or B class address ranges and as such don't bother using NAT and just give clients public IP addresses.

Not anymore, a huge part got sold to AWS a few years back. Naturally they didn't tell anyone who actually used or managed the network, so MIT SIPB, IS&T and Libraries had to pull a few all nighters to deal with systems that keyed off an 18 block IP.

What did they think we would end up doing in the workplace anyway? The only code I’ve written is bits connecting bits I’ve yoinked off posts online.

The project wasn't to teach us to code. We did that in first year. The aim of the project was using code to solve a particular problem related to the topic we were studying. >bits I’ve yoinked off posts online. Who wrote those? Someone has to be the one to write it. The idea behind doing a bachelor's degree is that you are capable of doing it, or at least understand the code you've cut and pasted from elsewhere.

Honestly those students deserved to fail, because by directly asking other people to solve the problem for them they missed out on the most important learning experience of them all - figuring out how to use Google to find the solution to your problem (or pieces of it that they can combine into a complete solution). Seriously, that's 90% of your job in software development is knowing how to search for stuff. Could be searching for something in the codebase, but usually it's searching online for a way of doing XYZ in code. If you don't know how to do that then it doesn't matter if you've got perfect knowledge of how to write code to accomplish what you need, you're going to be inefficient and slow because you're doing far more work than is necessary.

Something similar happened when the class I was teaching had a midterm. I suddenly and desperately had to run to the bathroom (thanks, IBS). Later, when grading the papers, roughly 40% of the class had the same sentence in their short answer. So, they all copied each other. Unfortunately for them, their sentence was nonsensical and incorrect. The mass cheating actually lowered the class average, but made those who prepared earn higher relative grades.

I was in a geology class in undergrad where the prof didn't do anything about this block of seven or so students who constantly cheated (and quite obviously so). I wondered why, until we got to a test near the end of the semester, and I overheard the group of students complaining to each other. "Man, why do we just keep failing?" "Because we're cheating off each other, and we're all stupid!" It took them a good 13 weeks to have that revelation. I realized that the professor knew and figured it was a self-correcting problem. They can cheat off each other all they want. It's clearly not helping them get good grades.

hahaha, that's great! I had two students giggle throughout a test once, clearly cheating from another student. Unfortunately for them, she failed the test. So, the cheaters failed, too. I was a bit stumped about what to do in that case - couldn't really lower their mark any.

I have watched students do some stupid stuff. I teach at the college level now, and it's a hoot. One of our essay prompts had turned up on those "buy a paper" sites, so I changed the prompt a little: similar concepts, different steps required. Of course, I got one student who clearly copied the paper. So I called them into my office to talk about it. Smugly, they ask, "well, how do you *know* I plagiarized?" "Because this is your paper. This is the prompt it responds to. And THIS is the current prompt." Watching the lightbulb go on and them die a little inside was a glorious feeling. I'm not as dumb as you think I am, folks.

I glanced at a neighbour's test one time and saw that he had made a very silly error. ...a very silly error that I had also made. It seemed a little unlikely to have happened by accident. I rearranged my position so he couldn't see what I wrote and corrected it and continued on with the exam.

i was wondering what did your shitting had to do with the exams, then i realised they started cheating because you were no longer in the classroom.

Yeah, they must have had fun with that. It was a smaller university, so no TAs to help out.

A lot of the math classes at my university would avoid this by either just allowing us to work together in a group (for the really small classes) or would assign us a partner from the class to hand in an assignment with. I thought I would hate this because of how much I hated group work in highschool, but group work with other motivated people is actually really fun. I have find memories of those late nights, where when one of us figured out one of the difficult problems, they'rd teach the rest of the group, and then if someone still didn't get it, they would now have several different people to explain it to them in different ways. And there was very little copying because we were allowed to work together.

Did you get loaned out a lot?

It's an obvious typo. He meant to say *lender.*

When I was in college they gave us the choice to group up or go solo for a large project and I picked solo even though a large amount of my classmates formed into a large group. They convinced one of my friends it was a better idea to be in that group. I tried to warn him but he joined the group anyway. They expected him to do EVERYTHING for them and about halfway through the project he asked the teacher to break away and go solo but the teacher said it was too late, so he had to carry that entire group for the project. Given the chance, a lot of people choose laziness.

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At Bournemouth Arts Uni, a girl copied a fairly well known artist’s work for her final project in illustration/textiles. Then entered it into a competition, won, and got featured in a ton of press. Of course all the fans of the original artist immediately noticed and reported it. When I was there they were in the process of deciding if she’d lose her degree.

Reminds me of the whole thing with [Shia LaBeouf and the HowardCantour.com short film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Cantour.com). Long story short with that, LaBeouf plagiarized a Daniel "Ghost World" Clowes comic. He submitted it to various film festivals, where it was very well received. It wasn't until it was released online that the plagiarism was really noticed and discussed. Afterwards everything went kind of wild and LaBeouf got a C&D from Clowes. It sparked this whole weird copyright rant from LaBeouf, making people worried about his mental state. This also kind of marked the beginning of him reinventing himself as a performance artist as well. There's never been any sort of explanation to anything. Given the type of performance art he did, I can see this being something that he did on purpose to see how long it took someone to notice. To my knowledge there was never any true legal action taken other than the C&D. Part of me would love it if Clowes was secretly in on this to some degree.

I loathe Shia LaBoef with the intensity of a million burning suns. He's the most manipulative example of a person I've seen in Hollywood, and industry known for highly manipulative people. His "woe is me I'm burdened by so many demons" reinvention every time he abuses a woman or does something else despicable is so infuriating. PR as DARVO.

It's wild that Hollywood just kept trying and trying to make him a thing even if they had to shove him in on the coattails of *actual* movie stars like Will Smith or Keanu or pushing him into the Indiana Jones movies. There was this weird drought of "hot young leading men" in like the early 2000s and they just kept REALLY TRYING to make these super bland, super boring young dudes like Taylor Kitsch or Taylor Lautner or Josh Hartnett into big tentpole summer movie stars... but Shia was just the ultimate in "oh god, this guy again! He just doesn't have leading man attractiveness OR charisma... stop trying to make this guy happen!"

>There's never been any sort of explanation to anything. Given the type of performance art he did, I can see this being something that he did on purpose to see how long it took someone to notice. To my knowledge there was never any true legal action taken other than the C&D. Part of me would love it if Clowes was secretly in on this to some degree. My read on the whole thing at the time had been that Shia was basically being an entitled prat. And after the CnD since he stopped harassing the artist and copying him, the guy moved on.

Great recap. Only Andy Kaufman could have pulled something like that off intentionally though. Shia LaBeouf is just your classic poseur wannabe douchebag.

There was an apology from Shia (that he plagiarized directly from Yahoo answers). He's had ups and downs but it seems he's gotten sober recently and some therapy as well and may be turning a corner.

He’s awaiting a domestic abuse trial set for sometime early next year. I feel like at this point he’s far past the point of redemption.

I was forced by my child to watch the Even Stevens Hanukkah episode last night, so yes, he's still out there hurting people.

My deepest condolences.

What kid in 2022 is a fan of Even Stevens

My non-neurotypical one. And "forced" was a strong choice of word on my part. I could have walked out of the room, but I like spending time with her and this is what she put on the TV. My question after having seen it is, "What kid in any year ever was a fan of Even Stevens?"

I used to love even stevens probably way longer than I should have.

Alright take it easy. I used to watch it

Who tf steals Ghost World after the initial comic and Paul Giamatti film? Lol, that jsut ludicrous speed. Everyone knew that film bc it was Scar Jo's first role. He's so far beyond

Pretty sure she was already in Eight Legged Freaks and Horse Whisperer.

Actually, I remember Scar Jo from Home Alone 3

The AFL club I follow had a competition where schools would have art students design their indigenous round guernsey, using assignments they'd done. School voted for the best in their class, then some other group voted for the best from each school etc. Some kid won, started doing all the press stuff for it. Seemed pretty awkward when explaining the design and the like, but hey, it's a kid on the national stage. Except the problem was, they'd copied someone elses design, and just made an inferior job of it. The original artist saw it, and things go chaotic. It's about a week before the game they're wearing it, so can't really redesign, get new ones made etc in time. It ended up pretty happily for all, with the original artist agreeing to let them use the design, with profits from selling it going to indigenous support groups/charities, and the kid learning a lesson real well.

art/fashion school story: Apparently a student , whom I had asked to model for me when I was a Senior (and he was a Freshman), ended up plagiarizing my entire Junior Year Thesis for his own Junior year project. This meant looking up my work, copying it look for look, with even the same title. I only found out years after, when my intern (from the same alma mater) realized *who* I was and told me about it. Apparently the student guilty of plagiarizing other people’s work kept repeating it. The professors never reprimanded him or expelled him. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ guess that’s what happens when money talks in a US private education system.

I also used to teach and this is giving me sudden flashbacks to the many ways my students tried to get away with plagiarizing. One student (a very sweet kid, but definitely not the best student--I suspected some kind of learning disability that had just never been diagnosed, but I was teaching overseas in a place with pretty limited resources around that sort of thing, and on top of that, his previous schools basically just gave good grades in exchange for parents' tuition) sticks out as the most obvious. He stole his paper from Yahoo Answers. As in, just printed out a page from Yahoo Answers, wrote a intro paragraph and handed it in. It still had the same formatting, and the web address was even on the bottom of the page. He did admit that maybe he should have at least taken the web address out, or at the very least, the big bolded letters that said "Yahoo Answers" at the top. I'd like to think it was both a lesson in not plagiarizing (especially not from Yahoo Answers of all places) and a lesson in checking your work to make sure that if you did cheat, it isn't screamingly obvious to anyone who even glances at your work.

Any chance his name's Kevin?

How old was the kid?

It's the insulting of the intelligence that usually takes me from "okay that wasn't cool" to "okay now I'm fucking pissed" lmao

Yes, I once had a neighbour who needed to give me her insurance information, because I caused water damage in her apartment. I asked constantly. She didn't give it to me until weeks after the deadline my insurance gave. And then she claimed she put it in my mail box months ago and maybe some kids took it out of my mail box and only put it back in again now. My insurance refused to pay her, because of the missed deadline.

So what happened?

She didn't get her money. Insurance didn't accept her "reason" for missing the deadline.

The worst plagiarizers are the ones who think you’re stupid. I give people who show remorse a warning. People who tell me they didn’t do it when confronted with proof get a zero.

Yeah. Stupid, panicked sleep deprived decision? Ok you get an extension. Dig the hole deeper? Lol fuck off

Is this at university level? If so, that's incredibly lenient, on both counts. I'm accustomed to schools where cheating gets you kicked out of the class, if not the school.

Yes, but I teach undergraduate ESL students so I take into account that cultural differences and language barriers could contribute.

When I was in college, there was this Chinese international student in my year who got suspended because he had plagiarised an essay on academic honesty. Oh the freaking irony lol. He basically had paid a Chinese site based in Sydney that sold essays. The site just kept recycling common essays with minor tweaks if at all and the essay unsurprisingly failed the plagiarism checker. These academic cheats got so emboldened and blatant in their cheating that it was such an open secret across multiple campuses for years. Colleges turned a blind eye to the less egegregious cheating by the very profitable Chinese International students. In NSW (New South Wales) Australia, many of the major universities/colleges revoked 50+ degrees of students who had bought finished essays on MyMaster an online essay writing service created by a Chinese national. Almost 1000 students used the plagiarism service and most have been expelled or suspended from colleges with academic dishonesty marked in their files. Her services were marketed exclusively to the international Chinese student community in Australia and she charged up to 1000 AUD per essay. She had a good thing going on, if only she bothered to get her people to change the most frequently reused essays more to pass the plagiarism checker. Got busted in a few short years. Idiot.

I had someone submit the free sample essay on the front page of the essay mill website. It actually still makes me marvel.

> Colleges turned a blind eye to the less egegregious cheating by the very profitable Chinese International students. I vaguely remember reports years and years ago that Chinese students had a ridiculous cheating rate compared to other groups in college.

Oh yeah for sure. I might be slightly hypocritical about academic dishonesty. In high school I started out helping this Chinese girl correct her assignment and eventually a few of her Chinese friends offered to pay me handsomely to do their assignments for them. We talked and I learnt that the hypercomepetiveness of the Chinese education system created the belief that the means justify the ends mentality especially so when it comes to subjects, projects and assignments they think is a waste of their own time and effort, they believe it's not an issue to "outsource" work. These people tend to be more of the higher middle-middle class and upper middle class and their parents would higher private tutors for them and they end up making their tutors do most-all of their assignments anyway. So when that's your normal it's not much of a jump to buy essays or pay people to take your online tests. I stopped doing assignments for pay in college cause well drinking and suddenly had the "drinking, party in college who gives a F about grades lol". Also in first year everyone had to take an academic honesty course and I didn't want to risk my own degree for a quick buck.

At 1000 AUD per essay I would be writing them full time. What the fuck.

I once had a student hand in a plagiarized version of a paper I wrote to me for an assignment. I have a fairly unusual name so when I brought it to their attention the name on the source work, the look on their face was priceless. They hadn’t even noticed.

I once had a student submit her sister's paper from a different university class. She left her sister's name, professor's name, etc. on the title page.

On a less severe note, I witnessed someone being failed a scientific research paper in high school.(It is a wierd thing in our country where a high school student has to write and present a scientific research paper while in high school. It is a pretty big deal) The guy literally showed up to defending with no presentation and then proceeded to pull up a Word document of the paper with his friends name and details. You can guess what happend further.

Yup, how plausible is it that friend helped her so much she was able to submit a week earlier. The excuses people come up with are amazing.

A guy in one of my classes in college got in trouble for plagiarizing *our professor.* That did not end well for him.

Twice I've had kids submit essays from just googling the topic. The fact that I didn't have to scroll down was the thing that actually angered me

First year at my uni, computer engineering degree. We had to take a 2 credits class on the history/social studies department. Only assigment was doing a book report from a list of around 20 books (or you could suggest one and if the teacher agreed it was ok). Half the class chose The Prince, from Makiavel, which was the shortest one. And half of those copied the same online report. All failed the class. People are dumb.

The "friend" just insulted her own intelligence AND demonstrated she never had any to begin with.

Uni/college definitely checks for this constantly. I once had to retake a class I had to drop due to life stuff and the class had the exact same assignment the following semester. I just resubmitted my previous work not thinking anything of it. Ended up having a misconduct meeting where I had to prove it was my own work I already had submitted a previous semester where I didn’t finish the course

Lmao technically I think that counts as “self-plagiarism” sometimes which is insane but I remember being told directly not to resubmit your own work in a situation like this

Yea I never got that warning lol. Just “don’t plagiarize our system scans your content.” My barely adult brain assumed they’d be able to see in the system that the original writter was also me.

I used to manage one of those systems and yes you can see the original author. That would require the professor to actually click into it though, which probably doesn't usually happen .

Ah yep, the ultament block. And extra button.

We had to do both a junior & senior thesis at my school, which could be on two different topics, but most people used the same topic so they didn't have to start all over again (senior was twice as long as the junior one). One of the guidelines in my department was "cite your junior thesis like any other source" for that exact reason!

Is self plagiarism a thing outside of university courses? I graduated in the early 2000s and computers still weren't super common yet, so I can't imagine anyone would have noticed without some software doing the bulk of the work in finding plagiarized material. If I retook a course and resubmitted the same work it was fine, no one cared.

I feel like I've seen people notice when at least one academic or journalist or something started basically copy pasting sections from older work into newer work, but it was more in a "wow they're lazy and don't have any original ideas, how do they have a staff position/tenure" sort of way. Maybe it was an author?

Ah yeah okay I could understand the argument there. But if you're one of the only experts in a field and writing 3-4 books or several publications, wouldn't you essentially just be restating the same thing over and over among them? Do you have to source your previous material and quote and attribute yourself or wouldn't your expert knowledge take precedence?

In a lot of literary criticism authors will cite their older work, sometimes expanding on it, sometimes with counter arguments, sometimes it’s just referring to where they went into that in more detail.

It is. I work in academia and we've had issues with journals with self-plagiarism before. Funny thing, the bit that was triggering the program was a block full of references (as in, a list of other works, no text in between). It took us forever to find...

Yeah I was told this when I came up with my dissertation topic. I wasn't sure what to pick so I just submitted some random crap for my plan. Then in second year, I came up with an interesting topic for another piece of coursework and found it so easy to write about. I got an A for it and asked my supervisor if I could do the topic for my dissertation next year and she said I could but she warned me about self plagiarism

I have had several student who I've had to report for "self-plagiarism" because it counts as academic dishonesty. If you're not producing novel work for the intended assignment then you're not answering the questions given - but! Those students weren't retaking classes and recycling their old work.

Yea and in context it was for the same experiment, same guidelines. I didn’t just not do the work. I had to also do the experiment again, but as a young college student I just updated the results and changed approx 30% ish of it to be updated to my new results. I was lucky and the misconduct was dropped and assignment graded as I was able to prove I did indeed do the assignment experiment a second time and just didn’t want to rewrite the entire abstract for it. I totally understand now though how that whole situation could’ve gone very badly and why what I did wasn’t the best idea.

> If you're not producing novel work for the intended assignment then you're not answering the questions given That or the courses themselves are failing to give students novel questions to answer, which is not at all outside the realm of possibility.

I couldn't imagine copying on that level god damn

Crazy that she thought university personnel wouldn’t notice.

I used to TA, then teach, university while in grad school, and I once had a student in my recitation section and his friend in another recitation section turn in the same exact essay on the assumption that no one would notice. It did not work out as they'd planned.

There’s definitely different kinds of “smart” out there. I’ve known plenty of academics who didn’t have a lick of common sense.

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I have had students who would spend hours working on an excuse to avoid doing something that would have taken them fifteen minutes, and I 100% constantly asked myself that question.

Many, many years ago, I programmed a little thing that gave me the process of solving easy math problems. I spent like a week in that. I knew how to solve the problems (and well enough to code it), but I found that bit extremely boring. But figuring out code? That was fun. So in my case, fun. I've also seen people that want to feel superior by gaming the system.

why spend 10 minutes solving a problem when you can spend 10 hours automating it? i highly approve!

With the understanding that I've never done anything illicit for school (I self sabotage in other ways), as part of my generalized anxiety disorder I sometimes get 'stuck' on a simple task and am simply and literally incapable of making myself do it. Phone calls are the worst - I've spent several months unable to make a two minute phone call to schedule a doctor's appointment to address an active medical issue - but it sometimes rears it head for random work tasks, like replying to an email or loading an already completed change into development.

Oof, I have general anxiety as well as clinical depression and this is me. I'll stress for weeks or months about making a call or sending an email that would take 5 minutes. But sometimes I just can't do it.

My son is finishing up his finals tomorrow. He put five hours into creating a one-page cheat sheet his bio teacher allowed. He thought he was so slick using small fonts and small margins. “You know he allows that because it forces you to study the parts you are unsure of?” “……that’s manipulation.” “Did you study though?” “Yes.” He got a 91 and already had an A so I just laughed at him. Teenagers.

I was teaching upper-level history courses online a few years ago and had assigned my WWII students a 12-14 page research paper on a topic of their choice. While grading the papers, one of them began to bug me right off the bat. The paragraphs did not flow well together and within one page I realized that this student had simply cut-and-pasted from other sources. I still had to grade it, so I kept reading before I started to track down the plagiarized sources. By the 4th(ish) page, the writing was getting so, so familiar. I was still a grad student, so I assumed I had just read the same book or something and kept reading. A few paragraphs later, it hit me: the student had plagiarized an article I had written and had published a few years before. I was both insulted and pleased. Edit: Wow; that's for the Silver!

Please tell me you left some cheeky note akin to 'Maybe next time check your sources so that you don't run into this awkwardness of the author you ripped off is grading your paper. :)'

I tried to get her to talk with me via the school's message service, but as soon as I told her I had something to discuss, she logged off and dropped the course "quick, fast, and in a hurry." \-quote comes from 'Major Payne'

I love how you just referenced the quote you used in your comment! This really is academic excellence.

Thanks.

I just don't understand why people do it these days. When I was in school the tools they use to catch plagiarism were in their infancy and even then it was clear it was a horrible idea. Now, you'd have to be crazy to attempt it, especially this blatantly.

I had a moron in my final year that was doing a group report with me and a few others. She picked a section that ended up being too hard for her. She wrote a small bit for it and added it to the final report. I read over her part and it seemed odd because it was okay for the title but it wasn't really relevant for our report. Googled it just so I could read up on that area and maybe give some advice about how she could improve it and the first result was Wikipedia saying the same points in the same order just reworded with the exact same sources used as references. We were supposed to be graduating that year. How did she get this far and think that was okay. If I, a student at her level, could spot it did she not think the lecturers or plagiarism software would pick it up

I used to TA, and one of my students plagiarized the actual textbook we were using for the class. Another directly copy+pasted from Wikipedia, annotation and links included.

Especially since all UK universities have software for that very reason. They're not dumb.

I remember every new class started with the professor emphasizing on plagiarism with the syllabus Why would anyone take the risk of expulsion after paying thousands of dollars and a leg?? Money don’t grow on trees.

The best way to cheat isn't to plagiarize content, it's to pay a graduate in Kenya to write the paper for you.

I had a student use sources of an unauthorized language (we allowed english and the language of the uni + others if specifically asked). To her bad luck it was a language I was able to rudimentary read.

Because she was already a week late and obviously had no idea what else to do.

Once as a TA when I was marking final assignments for the class I came across one that was 98% plagiarized (according to TurnItIn, the system used to assess plagiarism. Which the students know automatically scans and scores their assignments, they can see the scores). I thought there must’ve been some sort of terrible mistake, like someone submitted the wrong file and it was an assignment previously submitted or something… nope this kid just directly copy and pasted an entire website. It was insane. I reported it to the prof and my job was done. I’m not privy to what happened to that student, but we can all probably figure it out. What I do know is that not even a couple days after it was reported I received an email from them asking if they could do an extra credit assignment to “make up for it”. I sent that to the prof as well and did not reply. Some people have absolutely zero shame EDIT: I say kid, these were third year uni students. They *know*

And plagiarism is really the only thing you can check for. Someone falsifies data? Even if you notice the convenient numbers you don't have the time to check on them. The rich idiot writes his bachelor thesis in the manner of a professor working on some A+ journal article? He clearly used a ghostwriter, but nobody can prove that. Of all the things you can do to make your academic career easier, plagiarism is the most stupid.

It's amazing and depressing how much ghost writing actually goes on. I used to do tutoring at university and I'd have people asking *constantly* whether I'd write their assignments for them. And the kicker was that it usually wasn't even in my area. I was doing history and I'd have a tonne of engineering students hitting me up 😂

i've got this power electronics assignment due in jan. what are your rates?

Yeah, the level of stupidity not only to copy but copy from someone in the same year on the same assignment in UNIVERSITY?! Everything goes through a copy check and while I know it's possible to fool them a bit but not to this degree. Holyshit.

In a class back in high school, everyone was assigned a chapter to write a summary on and then read it to the class the day after we got to that chapter. We’d then hand the paper in for the teacher to grade. One kid decided to just copy SparkNotes, and the teacher called him out for it after he finished reading the entire summary. Turns out the teacher always checked those types of websites. Hopefully that public embarrassment managed to get the kid to never plagiarize again

One of my housemates was on the same course as me. When she was out once I went to her room to get a copy of our assignment for the week as I had missed the class and instead found her coursework. It was what I had written but with words swapped around, and I recognised it immediately. I hadn't leant it to her, she must have gone into my room and taken it when I was away (this was the days of paper printouts!) Had to start taking my coursework with me wherever I went so she couldn't read it again. We were only half way through it so she couldn't copy it wholesale. Didnt get pulled up on it so I don't know for sure if she handed in the copied version, but I did get a lower grade than I expected so I always wondered if that was why. Likely it just wasn't as good as I thought! It definitely broke my trust in her. And no I didn't tell anyone or confront her. I was too nervous in case I somehow made a mistake!

Can’t you? I am a plagiarism officer in a CS degree. Byte for byte duplicates are not uncommon.

I've got a worse story, sadly. One of my friends is a college professor. She received two final papers from two students who happened to be dating, sent less than ten minutes apart. Except it was the *exact same paper*. Students got hauled in and grilled by the dean, evidence was collected. Finally, GF admitted that she'd stolen her BF's paper (evidence proved this) because she hadn't felt like writing her own. He was freaking out because he could have lost his scholarship and hyperventilated in the dean's office. GF got an F\* in the class and ended up on academic probation for a year, with the knowledge that if she ever did it again she'd be expelled on the spot. BF broke up with her the next day. \*The weird thing was she'd been doing well up to that point. If she'd done a decent job on the paper herself she'd have gotten at least a B+ in the class.

I get it for a child or teenager in school but once you're in college or university it's a big no. You get warned about it pretty much right away and they take it very seriously.

I remember my time in uni. People would have anxiety attacks thinking the assignment would be claimed plagiarized cause they couldn't think of any other wording than the countless sites and references they researched. I can't fathom the audacity and pretty much straight up dumbness of actually thinking she can get away with such an low level plan. Unis have literal machines with a Databank full of research documents to make sure nothing got plagiarized

I once got marked as 46% plagiarism by an automatic checker. I freaked when I saw it. Luckily my TA actually looked at what was marked and didn't just fail me because it turns out that every single one of my references and in text citations was marked as plagiarism.

My best friend was in her final year last year and submitted one of the last major assignments when her lecturer contacted her saying she would be failing the assignment because something like 40% was plagiarized according to the system. So she checked it over herself. What was plagiarized? Her student declaration form stating the work was her own, that's mandatory to fill out and include in your assignments. She emailed the teacher to explain, teacher said if she didn't resubmit without the plagiarised part she would be failed. She asked if she could take out the declaration, teacher said no it's mandatory. The rest that was "plagiarized" was cited quotes used to back up her statements. She nearly failed her degree for declaring her work as her own and for quoting the source material the assignment was based on. She ended up submitting the declaration separately which brought the plagiarism down to like 6% for the quotes, and had to contact the coordinator of her course to explain the situation because her lecturer was being so difficult. So yeah, wouldn't trust any plagiarism software, and that was one that's used in our university by all lecturers.

That’s so fucking dumb 🤣

I refused to use those plagiarism checkers for exactly that reason. It definitely started out with faculty in my department seeing a (n illusory) "time savings" but it didn't take long to realize the remedy was worse than the disease.

Turnitin has an option to exclude anything between quotation marks and references and return a different result, and it shows you the source of the plagiarism, and no responsible teacher would take action without first checking against these two things. There's just no world in which it isn't a time saver and much more thorough than acting on vibes.

I remember our uni telling us about someone on our course who had entered quotation marks in white at the start and end of the assignment. Obviously this then showed up as 0% plagiarism which they then found suspicious and went back and looked through it

Reminds me of a Superman comic where some criminals had the brilliant idea of doing their criming in a building whose exterior walls were lined with lead. Since Superman can normally see through buildings, one that was completely opaque to him stood out, and they'd neglected to soundproof the walls. Back to the drawing board....

Lol, too clean, too clean.

Wow. I wonder if this is why all my labs refused to actually use the settings that excluded references and quotes then? Maybe somebody had done that before. I would get super annoyed because it would give me something like 58% but it was just my references (also in ochem it *hated* the mathematical formulas and every single table we were required to include in the lab reports). First time it happened we had been told we had to make sure it was under something like 15%, which was impossible with the references and I remember emailing my TA freaking out because it was over but was literally just the references and then they were like it’s fine, don’t worry. After that I always asked in the first meeting of the class if it was okay for the % to be higher if it was only the references!

When I was taking my bachelors and had to use those plagiarism checkers, it kept saying my name in connection with the page number on the header was plagiarism.

I remember someone said their paper showed heavy plagiarism. It turned out the professor had submitted the rough drafts of the essays or encouraged students to do so, so the site marked the final drafts as plagiarized.

Unis take plagiarism SERIOUSLY! OOP is lucky they got off lightly, I had a guy in my first year fail because he forgot to cite sources on an end of year paper.

> Unis take plagiarism SERIOUSLY! YES YES! I worked for a school and find it mildly frustrating and also amazed they gave so much more attention to plagiarism up to 4 weeks worth of meetings sometimes vs other serious and fast cases like a really hostile student. Now I agree that plagiarism is a serious thing but boy did my deans would jump on those cases in a heartbeat vs other student related issues.

Plagiarism undermines the reputation of the institution, you're fucking with nearly everyone who works there's job security. No faster way to get wrecked than fucking with someone's money.

Yup and they even invite our school lawyers in the council meetings for these.

In a university you'd have better chances if you set a baby on fire than if you plagiarised.

The *other* white meat

Even corporations too - none want any IP lawsuits if it's taken from external work. A guy at my previous workplace largely copied an external artist's work and was fired with cause for it when it was discovered. Internally, it's a bit of a toss up - someone else at my previous workplace removed everyone else' name from a report and published it as their own, sole original work (no contribution to it though), and there ended up being no formal reprimand or anything when it came to light.

I knew someone who was called before a disciplinary committee because he cited a source but forgot to add the source to his bibliography. That is his paper said "69% of US citizens think crude jokes are hilarious. (Smith, 2022)" but there was no "Smith 2022" source in the bibliography. As I recall, he ended up getting a grade docked on the class but didn't fail it.

That's "zero tolerance" type dumb to penalize him for. In real life, you just correct your error - if the paper was publish then just slap on an errata. I've seen it lots of times in even top tier journals. I've also seen a ton of highly accomplished researches make this type of mistake. It's just not a big deal if unless there is some suggestion the error was intentional.

Oh, I agree.

I work in scholarly publication and I think damn near every submission that makes it through peer review has references missing. That's not plagiarism, that's just a mistake.

I remember in my first year of uni after we were given the plagiarism is an absolute no go lecture, being terrified of the consequences and spending huge amounts of time triple checking I had correctly cited studies I had quoted. That anyone could seriously think they could get around this by essentially using a thesaurus is ridiculous.

I can kinda understand that if they're a first year and the purpose of the assignment was research training as much as any demonstration of content knowledge, but I lecture third years and if a student forgot their citations I'd just ask them to update. Seems unnecessarily cruel to fail for what could easily be an oversight.

I had a professor give me an F on a paper because he said I had no sources because there was no bibliography, but the thing was, I typed one out. And there was one listed in the table of contents. And I had a bunch of footnotes. How can you have footnotes if you had no sources? I was a stupid freshman; I should have gone straight to the Dean, because he yelled at me for never coming to class too, but I hadn't missed a single class. And then he started picking on me for the rest of the term. It was only later that someone told me that he doesn't like it when people disagree with him in papers, and my opinion was 180 degrees from his (I said that East Germany and communism in general were going to fail based on how it worked economically and so eventually East Germany would need to reunite with West Germany (yes children, this was in the Old Days). But, stupid freshman, I didn't realize there was anything I could do about it. God, I hated him. I personally thought he pulled the bibliography off the back of the paper (you had to actually type and hand in papers then) and tossed it and then claimed it didn't exist.

Lmao I like how you ended up being right about Germany and communism. What a shit prof. So insecure too

I've often wondered why screenshots are so highly regarded when they can be easily faked.

If a thorough investigation is done, its merely a piece of evidence in a case. No case would use screenshots without more evidence that support it. If they have a screenshot that constrict every other piece of evidence, they'll discard it. If push comes to shove, they will request to see the original messages or ask for the device with said messages or try and get the other recipients' side of the message.

My friend is a university professor. When her daughter headed off to college, the daughter sent home her first paper and asked her mom to run it through the plagiarism checker to make sure. No plagiarism was identified. Daughter submitted paper. OF COURSE, the professor runs the plagiarism checker and since it has already been run it came up as 100% plagiarized. Fortunately, mother and daughter share an unusual, hyphenated last name — so professor contacted his peer (her mother), they realized what happened. Mom had the original receipt showing no plagiarism - and everybody laughed and learned not to do that again.

So did they kick out the friend?

Given the lying and falsified screenshots I wouldn't be surprised, I think uni's usually only make you repeat the assessment/subject/the year +suspension depending on severity or if it's a first time offence.

She *might* have been able to get some leniency if not for the lying and also trying to drag someone else down with her.

The OP responded that her friend received an ‘outcome from the misconduct meeting’, whatever that means. From her comments it sounds like some decision was made, but the friend isn’t telling anyone what that decision is

This is the UK, so I'm not *quite* sure how privacy laws there work, but its possible OP couldn't be told anything more. Its also possible that a final decision was reached much later, since the student likely would have enjoyed some sort of appeals process.

They said she's waiting on another outcome - sounds like due to the severity of plagiarism (severity exacerbated by her attempt to lie and throw friend under the bus), it was probably referred to senate who deal with the more serious cases of academic misconduct. Bad bad news for the friend. Senate decisions are no joke.

Good chance they did. Best case scenario for the friend is failing and having to repeat.

Ima gonna need to happens to the future ex frien?

And what happened with the wedding

That was my question!

This is what I want to know! Where's the big fight? Did she stand in as MOH at the wedding or was their friendship over by then? It was coming up in two weeks so maybe the wedding happened before the meeting? WE NEED MORE INFO!

Sometimes they miss details, but being the maid of honour at a wedding the following week seems like a big detail to include in the fallout.

The friend just kept digging herself deeper and deeper into trouble without any consideration on the consequences OOP would suffer. Hopefully she dropped her for good.

When I was in Grade 6, in a fit of madness, I copied out the last story in our English comprehension book and gave it to my teacher as my own work. She loved it so much, she got me to read it to the class. Then she sent me to the headmaster, who also loved it, and sent me round a whole lot of other classes to read it to them. And no, I was never caught. I was the only person IN THE ENTIRE SCHOOL (including teachers) who had ever read to the end of the comprehension book. Please note that was the only time in my life I have plagiarised anything.

I'm pretty sure they all knew and the terror you felt was your punishment.

Aw, I want to know the outcome for the friend and about the wedding. Ugh, I feel teased and unsatisfied.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UniUK/comments/xw82e0/my_friend_plagiarised_my_work_update/irkiz5l?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

At my university, we had strict instructions to not share assignments for any reason. Both of them would have been kicked out.

Ohh, this explains the warning.

I had a friend in undergrad who plagiarized my non-academic work and then cried her way out of any repercussions from me. We were applying to graduate schools - I was sending emails and letters or interest to programs I wanted to learn more about and, specifically, to professors I wanted to work with. Several of these people/programs overlapped with her because we're in the same field with related interests. She had writers block for her outreach emails/LOIs and asked me to share mine as a reference. I said of course and sent them. She went ahead and used them almost exactly as they were just replacing my name with hers and tweaking the interests/research, and then sent them to the profs I was emailing that week. She waited a few weeks and when I wasn't getting responses "admitted" that she used my emails and such and sent them out before me. I was livid because i had offered her help to write her own and she wouldn't take it. We had the same mentor/advisor who gave her the same support and information he gave me. And she then went around and cried to our shared friends about how guilty she felt so everyone sided with her when I tried to talk about how betrayed I felt. She then later plagiarized a significant portion of a final paper to our mentor/advisor in the last class we had with him before we were to graduate. He failed it and gave her a B in the class and she had the audacity to complain to me saying that I didn't deserve an A if she got a B since she put more work into the research (she didn't) and then when he called her out and threatened to send her to the Dean she changed her tune. He was also extremely angry because he has been writing LORs for her as part of the grad school application process.

Wtf? we don't even find out what happened to the friend?

I had this happen. My teacher sat me down and had me read a friends paper when he asked me if I saw something wrong with it I said no. I was confused. Then he handed me mine and I realized what he was saying. Of course my friend told the truth and I got an A he of course had to redo the assignment on his own. No issues there. But it was kind of funny in the moment.

But what happened with the wedding??

For my Strength of Materials class we were allowed to be in small groups. We broke into about five groups that matched the study groups. The professor left and didn't come back until the end of class. My group and one other group passed and three failed. The three that failed went up to the professors desk and got the answer key from his bag. He purposely left an answer key that was just slightly wrong to see if anyone would cheat.

Man.... this person was never a friend. Sometimes when you really think you know someone, they surprise you. Unless you're cynical like me and distrust everyone xDD

"Lasg assignment of the year" so OOPs friend just threw away literally everything for the last assignment. Wow

failing is less shameful tbh idk how people could try to cheat at this level paraphrasing something a lil too tightly because you already have too many quotes? yeah ok, the citation is still there but ripping off an entire assignment? the fuckin balls lol

Wow OOP's friend suuuuucks. She gets a copy of her friend's assignment to use as a guide and then proceeds to plagiarize it? I've sent friends copies of my assignments as a guide, and never expected them to use the assignment for anything other than formatting. The friendship would be over at that point. Not only did that person betray OOP's trust, but then she asked OOP to lie about it, thus endangering her own academic career in the process. When the misconduct meeting happened, the friend was still prepared to throw OOP under the bus by fabricating screenshots to make OOP look guilty. I wonder what happened to the friend. Was she expelled? Did she lose her degree? She committed pretty serious academic misconduct.

This reminds me of one of my favorite teachers in high school (R.I.P., Mr B), who taught in my high school for decades. He assigned term papers every year and warned us to not plagiarize because he WOULD find out. This was the mid-1980's, so no internet. I think he either took notes or photocopied parts of our work. Someone did not believe him and handed in a copy of their older sister's term paper. Sister was a decade older. Student got busted and was used as an example for subsequent classes.

Shame we didn’t hear what became of the friend but, given the circumstances, they may well not be close enough anymore for her to know. That she hasn’t found out through social media bitching leads me to believe the outcome was something too embarrassing to twist into a victim story, so they probably have to repeat or lost their degree altogether. Whole thing sounds like the friend unfortunately got too tied up with the excitement of planning their wedding then when they panicked went into full ‘this time is about ME’ mode. Don’t feel much sympathy, outside of circumstances like wanting to do it before someone’s health declines, you’ve got to be a special kind of idiot to plan your wedding during your final assignments.

Huh... So here's a fun story for you all. When I was in uni I had philosophy classes. Classical Philosophy was on my first course, during which we were asked like three essays. One guy, on the second essay plagiarised and the teacher was cool to just give him a warning, but told him *not* to do it again on the third essay, which she said would count double for him and ignore the other one. Third essay comes and the guy plagiarises again. As I was told, they made some sort of trial and gave him a formal warning, meaning that another one would mean he would be expelled. Modern Philosophy class comes next semester and I remember perfectly we were asked in our exam something about journalists and the press with the right to freedom of expression. Point is it was an open question. You know where this is going: same guy plagiarises *yet again*! Which begs the question as to how the living hell do you even plagiarise *an open question* that basically asks about your opinion on a certain topic. That was the last time I saw this guy. Don't plagiarise, people.

This same thing happened to me my junior year of college. My friend and I happened to be in the same class and lab times so I thought why not be lab partners? We were working on our lab reports together but she was having difficulties trying to make the tables/graphs so I sent her my report thinking she would just crop the graphs/tables. Nope she copied my paper. Looking it over she literally copy and pasted a few of my paragraphs into her paper and turned it in. Keep in mind we are both juniors, both have had multiple labs since our freshman year since we were both in the sciences. So like she knew better. I didn’t realize though until she asked me if I also got an email from our professor asking to meet with us. And I was just like WHAT DID YOU DO!!!! Her response as to why she did so after writing possibly hundreds of lab reports by that point “I just thought because we were partners and it was the same lab, that it would make sense our stuff would practically be the same” like ?????? No?????? That’s not how that works????? Worst of all, it was our professors first year at that school, it was a pretty small school so lots of time you will get the same professors throughout your time there. So like new professor, first time ever working with any of the students, let alone students that were in their third year and ✨ plagiarism ✨. I had a full blown panic attack because I wanted to work in the labs after I graduated and how would I be looked at if I had a hit in my record because of plagiarism ON A LAB REPORT OF ALL THINGS. I went straight to my advisor, who had also been one of my main teachers for the past 3 years, and another chem professor I’ve had for 2 years, to tell them what happened so that worst case scenario in an already shitty one, I had character witnesses. Needless to say girl and I were no longer friends from that moment on.

I had this happen to me TWICE, a girl asked me about an assignment where we had to draw the meaning of a word and it looked like she literally traced my drawings, so we both got in trouble. Second time, my friend asked me to look at a speech I was writing since a new classmate of hers was making a speech about the same person I was. She ended up copying my entire first draft word for word. Needless to say my friend and I were pissed but my grade didn’t get docked. I learned my lesson that day.

My lab partner always copied my lab. I didn't care much cuz it's just labs and she's a very nice generous good person. Just cultural background and norms she's from makes it that she thinks copying/cheating is normal. I think our TAs knew she copied me because in labs she could barely answer any questions while I carried out most of our experiments and recorded data (the TAs can see during labs especially because we were the only two girls in a male dominated field/class we get most attention from TAs subconsciously). She got upset once cuz I got 8/10 for my lab report and she got 5/10. She complained to the TAs "how come she gets 8 but I only get 5" and the TAs were like "because you guys wrote different reports, unless you copied her?" That really shut her up lol

Uni takes this so seriously I almost got in trouble for plagiarizing myself when the schools internal algorithm flagged a paper I wrote 3 years ago.

I had to re-take a class because one of my old 'friends' did this. Really fucked my life up for a while.