Plagiarism: Double (and triple and quadruple) standards
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My reaction to the current controversy over Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarisms is to observe again that the relevant policies are a tangled and incoherent mess. I first wrote about this back in 2006 — and as it happens, that post compared the work of a different university president with the treatment of a Harvard undergraduate accused of plagiarism:
We tell kids that plagiarism is wrong, but we tell them that a lot of things are wrong that they see successful and respected people doing every day. […] In fact, anyone who pays attention knows that in some cases, like political speeches and celebrity memoirs, it's normal and expected to pass the work of others off as your own.
Here's an example that cuts close to the academic bone. A couple of decades ago, X was a graduate student at Y University, a school that regularly appears in U.S. News and World Report's listing of the top 50 American universities, and not at the bottom of the list either. The school's president, Dr. Z, had a nationally syndicated column. It ran under his byline, but X helped pay her way through school by writing it. I don't mean that she edited it, or did research for it, or drafted it. She came up with the ideas, did whatever research was required, and wrote it exactly as it ran. Dr. Z approved it for publication, or at least was given the opportunity to do so, but he never changed anything. (Or so X told me, and I believe her.)
I'm sure that Y University had a policy against plagiarism, like all similar institutions. It no doubt defined plagiarism in the usual way, as "the act of using the ideas or work of another person or persons as if they were one's own, without giving proper credit to the source" or something of the sort. This definition obviously applies to hiring someone to research and write your papers for you, just as much as it applies to copying passages from a book or cutting and pasting from an online source. (And writing-for-hire is hard to detect unless the hireling squeals. I've heard of one case that was uncovered because the hireling plagiarized a term paper from online sources, and when the copying was detected by the usual means, the accused student tried to absolve herself on the grounds that the guilty party was really the person that she had hired. "I hope you throw the book at the lousy cheater", she is apocryphally supposed to have exclaimed.) In any event, if Ms. X had been caught hiring someone to write her graduate-school term papers for her, she would surely have been unceremoniously dropped from the program.
See also:
"Plagiarism and restrictions on delegated agency", 10/1/2008, where a clear case of plagiarism resulted in the firing of a political speechwriter, with no impact on the political career of the Canadian Prime Minister who hired him and who delivered the plagiarized speech.
"'The writer I hired was a plagiarist!'", 7/13/2010 — another case of plagiarism-by-speechwriter, leading me to observe
If X publishes a work of political philosophy, and politician Y then pays X for the right to re-issue the same text over Y's name instead, this would be viewed as culpable or at least weird. In contrast, if Y simply pays X to ghostwrite the same text, to be published as Y's work, this would be normal. So there is at least a shallow pretense of originality here, and perhaps therefore an odor of hypocrisy after all.
"John McIntyre on varieties of plagiarism", 3/30/2013, trying to create a taxonomy of kinds of copying.
"Rand Paul's (staffers') plagiarism", 11/7/2013. Needless to say, Rand Paul's political career was not affected.
"'Plagiarism' vs. 'ghostwriting' again", 2/14/2014:
It's long past time for our society to have an honest conversation about honesty, honor, and authorship. We give students a clean, hard, harsh definition of plagiarism, according to which it's obvious that every politician and senior executive in the country is a plagiarist. Students, not being stupid, see this implicit contradiction — and therefore file anti-plagiarism strictures under the category of "irrational adult rules that I need to be careful not to be caught breaking, even though they have no moral or practical basis".
At least in the case of the equally-hypocritical rules about under-age drinking, we no longer pretend that alcohol is forbidden for everyone: it's just forbidden for most college students.
I agree that students should not be allowed to cut-and-paste their essays and research papers. And much more seriously, students should also be forbidden to hire others, or to have their parents hire others, to do their assignments for them. But rules of this kind make no sense in the absence of a discussion about why political speechwriters are nevertheless OK — or where the boundaries should be for columnists, historians, novelists, and so forth.
I guess that technically the rules on copying-without-attribution are more or less the same for everyone — there's just a question of who gets punished for infractions. And a related question of who is allowed (and even expected) to hire others to do their writing for them.
The ghostwriting issue is not strictly relevant to the Claudine Gay scandal, except insofar as it brings up more layers of apparent hypocrisy that need to be unwrapped, since hiring someone to do your writing for you is also a form of copying-without-attribution…
Update — The Harvard Crimson has published an interesting Op Ed on the "double standards" issue.
Update #2 — Jonathan Bailey, "Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns", Plagiarism Today 1/3/2024:
The simple truth is that, when it comes to doling out punishments for plagiarism, there is almost no equity. Two people who commit very similar plagiarisms can and often will face wildly different outcomes. That’s because there’s very little consistency in what is considered plagiarism, when we check for it and how we respond to it.
Ken DeRosa said,
December 27, 2023 @ 5:51 pm
Somewhat related is how we treat ownership of the copyright in such works by another. Typically, if the work is a “work for hire” the copyright accrues to the person/entity paying for the work to be produced, not the author. Contrast this to other IP rights , such as patent rights, where an assignment of the rights is made to the person or entity that’s paying for the inventive work to be produced since the actual inventors have ownership rights absent such an assignment and must be listed on any patents applied for. This is not the case for copyrights.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 27, 2023 @ 6:16 pm
One complicating factor with academic articles (once one gets past the initial doctoral dissertation) is that in some disciplines co-authorship – sometimes with many many co-authors – is the norm but in others, single-author by-lines remain the norm. Yet in some of of those single-author-byline disciplines, the use of undergrad or grad student "research assistants" is quite common, and there may be a rather large degree of fuzziness and/or obfuscation about just how much rewriting of prose drafted by the research assistant the formal author is expected to do as a matter of protocol, ethics, and/or good professional practice — and how common it is for academics to fall short in practice of whatever that nominal norm is supposed to be. That said, for someone in Pres. Gay's current position, blaming any shortcomings of attribution or excesses of "duplicative language" on a research assistant would probably not be a good tactic for soothing critics, even if some of the politicians mentioned in the prior linked posts survived arguably parallel situations unscathed.
Chester Draws said,
December 27, 2023 @ 6:33 pm
Somewhat in defence of the political speech writers, there are two very different types of plagiarism — concepts and words.
Political speech writers sometimes take the words of others because they sound good or appropriate. But they are generally trying to deliver an original concept, or at least an old concept in a new situation. Rand Paul can hardly be accused of just following the crowd politically. When he used phrases from Gattaca, it wasn't to sell a SF story, but to help sell his own concepts. He might not write the words of his speeches, but he sure has to own the concepts that they include, regardless of who wrote them.
We know that Claudine Gay took some unattributed passages. That is bad. But worse is that she is passing off some ideas as her own. That is intellectual fraud, and unforgiveable.
Tom Ace said,
December 27, 2023 @ 7:03 pm
John Derbyshire admitted that he ghostwrote a blurb for the back cover of his own book on the Riemann hypothesis, a blurb attributed to Martin Gardner (with Gardner's permission). That struck me as deeply insincere and I wrote to Mr. Derbyshire to ask him why he thought it was fair to do that. He said, "This is in fact rather common. Another one of my blurbs (not a math book) came the same way. It's a fallen world. We do our best."
Barbara Phillips Long said,
December 27, 2023 @ 7:51 pm
I don’t know enough about the Claudine Gay plagiarism allegations to know if I would consider it plagiarism. Columnist/blogger Kevin Drum does not think there is much substance to the allegations:
“Who cares? Sure, it's a little lazy, but that's about it. In Gay's case it amounts to maybe a dozen phrases or sentences out of hundreds of pages, most of them technical descriptions of survey results. There are no stolen ideas or wholesale ripoffs. And none of the supposed victims seems to care except for Carol Swain, who wrote an aggrieved op-ed mostly about the fact that she felt insufficiently kowtowed to. "When one follows in the footsteps of a more senior scholar, one is expected to acknowledge the latter’s contribution to the field," she says as a warmup, before complaining that Gay is just another mediocre affirmative action hire.
“But Swain is a crazy person who hates the left these days, so what do you expect? The actual plagiarism of Swain's work is minuscule and meaningless, as it almost always is. …”
https://jabberwocking.com/most-plagiarism-is-a-nothingburger/
He asks for a “common-sense” definition of plagiarism. The impression that I am left with is that attribution (or lack thereof) is as much a part of this dispute as plagiarism, but it is not clear to me what the plagiarism was. If it was sentence fragments that were not remarkably distinctive, then I am dubious about calling it out-and-out plagiarism based on my (amateur) standards. If whole paragraphs were lifted, that kind of copying would fit my definition of plagiarism. If it was an attribution error, then I leave judgment to academics.
If plagiarism allegations are made in widespread media reports, I would expect to see full sentences or more copied verbatim. I don’t think sentence fragments, unless they are unusually distinctive or permeate every page of the publication, justify career-ruining headlines claiming plagiarism.
Chips Mackinolty said,
December 27, 2023 @ 8:38 pm
As a sometime and long. term speech writer–for politicians and others–the issue of plagiarism has sometimes amused me. Am I plagiarising when I cut and paste into another speech something I had previously written? Go figure!
Mark Liberman said,
December 27, 2023 @ 8:55 pm
@Barbara Phillips Long: "If plagiarism allegations are made in widespread media reports, I would expect to see full sentences or more copied verbatim."
A clear account of some of the problematic passages in her 1997 dissertation can be found in a Dec. 12 Harvard Crimson article. Here's the first (of several) that they cite:
The copied passages are similar (or perhaps larger?) than those that resulted in Kaavya Viswanathan's novel being withdrawn and destroyed, when she was a first-year student at Harvard. There was disagreement at the time about whether her treatment was fair — I was among those who thought that the reaction was excessive — just as there is disagreement now about Gay's case. But the accusations of a double standard have some substance, it seems to me.
Craig said,
December 27, 2023 @ 9:11 pm
"We tell kids that plagiarism is wrong, but we tell them that a lot of things are wrong that they see successful and respected people doing every day."
The argument that "everybody else is doing it" is at best a pragmatic argument based on the assumption that if everybody does something, you won't get in trouble for doing the same. But this has nothing to do with the question of whether it is right to do it. It's the kind of thing people say when they neither know nor care whether something is right, they only care about whether they will suffer consequences for doing it. But it can be hard to predict the future based on what other people have done in the past. Harvey Weinstein might have said, "Rich and powerful men in Hollywood have been abusing their power to get sexual favors from hot young actresses for decades, so why shouldn't I do the same?" It didn't work out very well for him in the end.
Nathan said,
December 27, 2023 @ 9:26 pm
In 2009 I wrote a pretty good Wikipedia article on a somewhat obscure mathematical topic. In 2015 the definitive monograph on the topic was published. Soon after I found out it existed, I checked out a copy, eager to improve the article. Before I finished the introduction, I had found three distinctive sentences lifted verbatim from the Wikipedia article, without attribution. It was pretty demotivating. I didn't read much of the book, and I haven't gotten back to working on the article, which now cites the book.
I didn't really want credit. LIke most Wikipedia editors, I use a pseudonym and guard my identity. No one committed any crime here, and I'm sure the author's ideas were her own, but not all of the words were. I just wish she hadn't done that.
Lex said,
December 27, 2023 @ 9:56 pm
There is no better example of how weird plagiarism norms are than judicial opinions. For example:
Rachel Clark Hughey, Effective Appellate Advocacy Before the Federal Circuit: A Former Law Clerk's Perspective, 11 J. APP. PRAC. & ProcEss 401, 411 (2010) ("As a clerk, I found the best briefs were the ones that were written almost like judicial opinions; the court could practically cut and paste the accurate, concise, and non-argumentative legal and factual discussions into the opinion.").
Seth said,
December 27, 2023 @ 11:42 pm
@Lex – Exactly. I think the writing world desperately needs some sort of equivalent to the legal world's idea of listing of facts and relevant law. If the case is about "A shot B violating law C", it's not necessary to have court1 write "A discharged a firearm at B which is an offense against C" and court2 write "A fired upon B giving rise to a criminal case about C" and court3 write "The violation of legal code C came about because B was victimized by a bullet from the gun of A". Otherwise – or maybe anyway – everyone complaining about plagiarism. Very few types of writing are academic literary papers.
Peter Grubtal said,
December 28, 2023 @ 4:03 am
In Germany there have been several cases of prominent politicians being accused of plagiarism in obtaining their academic credentials. Usually the charges emanate from left-wing institutions and are directed at conservative politicians. The most famous case was that of zu Guttenberg, which ended his career.
Often the impugned works are from the "social sciences", and are discursive wordy pieces, which surely qualify as soft science. Gay's theses fall into that category.
Years ago there was a cynical saying in the academic world : "Aus einem Buch abschreiben ist Plagiat, aus drei Büchern abschreiben ist Forschung".
Cervantes said,
December 28, 2023 @ 8:56 am
Well, it's public knowledge that politicians' speeches are at the very least have shared authorship. The identity of presidential speechwriters is public knowledge, and for that matter the process of developing speeches — how the president works with the speechwriters — has sometimes been publicly revealed. So there's no deception involved there. The president or other politician is ultimately responsible for the words, but there's no pretense that they didn't have help producing them. So I don't really think that's comparable.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 28, 2023 @ 9:24 am
I don't think the very very different practices and expectations in legal and judicial writing compared to academic publications show that plagiarism norms are "weird"; I think they show instead that they are radically genre-specific, because different genres of writing have different social functions which lead to different baseline expectations about "originality" and attribution. Problems can arise when a particular bit of writing is ambiguous or borderline as to genre, but that's not the situation with Pres. Gay since her challenged works are all self-presented as "pure" scholarly writing, not newspaper op-eds or platitude-filled blather to alumni donors or matriculating students or whatnot where different norms might well apply.
The key question it seems to me is not only that of a possible double standard between how ordinary students are treated versus how powerful establishment insiders are treated, it's how Pres. Gay's alleged shortfalls compare to the comparable work of the most relevant benchmark peer group, which would be the dissertations and subsequent scholarly journal publications of political scientists of her approximate generational cohort who were successful enough to get hired onto the faculties of schools like Harvard and Stanford. Were her failures of explicit attribution and excesses of "duplicative language" such that she is a real outlier compared to those peers, or are such practices, however nominally condemned by the official norms of the field, in fact reasonably common in practice?
So IMHO the best defense that could be mounted for Pres. Gay is an investigation uncovering plausible evidence that a dozen or twenty other scholars with comparable CV's in the same discipline have in fact been getting away with pretty much the same practices. How likely is that to be true? I have no strong ex ante expectation one way or another.
Cervantes said,
December 28, 2023 @ 9:53 am
Well J.W., the fact is that Gay's transgressions were few and pretty minor, and probably attributable to carelessness. I am not aware that I have ever been that careless, but of course if I were I wouldn't know it. I think it very likely that properly cited but too closely paraphrased or even directly lifted snippets of language are common in scholarly publications. Editors and reviewers are very unlikely to read the references, so they will almost always slip by. It's also a bit of a judgment call whether the contributions of students or RAs get authorship credit. I am always generous with that but I know others who are not.
I do think this is a mountain out of a molehill.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 28, 2023 @ 10:39 am
@Cervantes: there seems to me to be a meaningful difference between (a) Gay did things that are in fact not uncommon among her scholarly peers and to the extent they can be characterized as violating "official" professional norms that just shows there's an often-unacknowledged gap between high-sounding theory and actual common practice; and (b) Gay did things that the vast majority of her scholarly peers have avoided doing, but they're probably just the result of carelessness on her part rather than some more culpable bad intent and not really a very big deal in the grand scheme of things. And frankly knowing whether (a) is or isn't the case would be more useful in achieving better public understanding of how the sausage is actually made in Big Academia, separate and apart from the fate of one individual trying to hold on to her current job.
There's a separate complication related to the fact that even though it's pretty clear that the job of a big-institution university president these days is very very different (and requires different and distinct skills) than the job of being a successful faculty member at the same university, there's still an inherited cultural expectation at many institutions that the president should at least appear to be an exemplary or at least better-than-average scholar and faculty member who has graciously condescended to set aside his or her research and teaching for a while to attend to the grubby business of administration so that the rest of the faculty don't have to. So "maybe more sloppy/careless than average in her published scholarly work, but not so culpably so that you would expect her to be stripped of tenure" is not a ringing endorsement of a sitting university president.
Cervantes said,
December 28, 2023 @ 2:23 pm
Actually I don't think she's particularly distinguished as a scholar in the first place. Her CV lists exactly seven peer reviewed publications. That wouldn't ordinarily even get her a contract renewal, or promotion to associate, let alone tenure. How she got to be a tenured full professor is quite mysterious — the whole CV is less than 3 pages. Here it is: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/cgay/files/claudinegay_10-2022_0.pdf
J.W. Brewer said,
December 28, 2023 @ 2:30 pm
@Cervantes: I suppose Harvard is free to try the PR strategy "come on, it's not as if we were actually fooling anyone into thinking she was a notable or accomplished scholar, so if she actually did fall short of conventional expectations for good practice and professional integrity by those perceived as notable or accomplished scholars … it's not really relevant." Good luck to them with that.
Chester Draws said,
December 28, 2023 @ 2:59 pm
How she got to be a tenured full professor is quite mysterious
Nicely played!
Victor Mair said,
December 28, 2023 @ 3:07 pm
"Plagiarism" was a Chinese buzzword of the year in 2019, especially in the entertainment world: "Chinese Buzzwords of the year 2019: plagiarism / stealing a shtick" (1/8/20)
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=45700
Barbara Phillips Long said,
December 28, 2023 @ 6:21 pm
Thanks, Mark —
Seeing how much overlap exists between the two passages bothers me, although I am not conversant with the standards in her field. If Gay had not wanted to do a long, direct quote, then an indirect quote would have been what I would have advised in this case:
In their 1996 paper on “Racial Polarization and Turnout in Louisiana,” Palmquist and Voss say that the average turnout rate seems to…”
The indirect quote would allow changes to the exact wording while keeping chunks of the original verbiage and giving clear attribution. Whether this style is acceptable in a thesis in this field, I don’t know. As a reader, I often prefer this style of attribution to footnotes, although a footnote would still be needed to give the name of the journal and the page or figure referenced.
Jonathan Smith said,
December 29, 2023 @ 12:13 am
That sucks @Nathan :(
But since this is LL — when newly arrived at Penn in Fall 2007, I opined to VHM that "干" was being translated to "fuck" on signage in China due to flawed translation software, not "naughty people" (no stroke of genius.) He invited me to find hard evidence, which I promptly did thanks to my relative familiarity with search engines / message boards / the Internet. Then he posted on LL taking credit for the discovery :(
Lame right? But as @Nathan says, "no one committed any crime here." And the "discovery" at issue was so trivial. One would have to be quite a silly Ph.D. advisee to whine about "credit" in such a circumstance. Such is the fuel that keeps (some of) the lights on around here, and plenty of other places…
Victor Mair said,
December 29, 2023 @ 7:44 am
At the bottom of "The Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation" (12/9/07), I wrote:
=====
I wish to express my gratitude to Jonathan Smith for helping me track down early occurrences of the GAN1/4="f*ck" atrocity on the Web and for the fabulous TUINA sign in Shandong, and to Jiajia Wang for making the screen shots of Jinshan Ciba / Kuaiyi in action, also for scouring Facebook for interesting examples of Chinglish.
[Above is a guest post by Victor Mair]
=====
That was followed by this:
=====
[Update — Joel Martinsen writes:
I dug up a CD of Kingsoft 2002 and tested it on some of Prof. Mair's example sentences. Thought it might be nice to have a screenshot of how the software used to work to compare to the more acceptable translations of recent versions of Kingsoft
=====
Colleagues at Language Log had been writing about the gān / gàn ("f*ck") foul up for quite some time before I did.
The 2007 post was preceded by this one, which Mark Liberman put up as a guest post by me:
"GAN: Whodunnit, and how, and why?" (5/31/06)
Mark prefaced it with this bracketed note:
=====
[Victor Mair sent in further analysis of a common but spectacular mistranslation, discussed in earlier LL posts: "A less grand Chinglish" 5/30/2006, which dealt with a button labelled "dry fry" in Chinese and "fuck to fry" in English; and "Engrish explained", which discussed a menu item reading "Hot and spicy garlic greens stir-fried with shredded dried tofu" in Chinese, but "Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk" in English, 3/11/2006. Victor's note follows. ]
=====
My 2006 guest post was followed by this note from Brendan O'Kane, who had already attained fame as a phenomenal master of Mandarin and later became my PhD advisee at Penn:
=====
Hi – long-time listener, first-time caller.
I've been living in Beijing and working as a free-lance translator for some time now. It's pretty common for clients to take a text, hand it off to a (cheaper) Chinese translation company, and then pass it on to me to 'edit' – a lower-paid gig – and so I've seen quite a lot of this kind of thing. My guess, with the disclaimer that Prof. Mair has forgotten more than I'll ever know about Chinese, is that someone ran the Chinese 干炒 in the example in your blogpost, and the menu posted on rahoi.com, through a machine translation program, perhaps Jinshan Kuai Yi or something of the sort, with the offending results.
=====
Scholarship is a collective enterprise.
ajay said,
December 29, 2023 @ 11:24 am
Part of the problem is the issue of *consent*. If Professor Alice hires Bob, an graduate student, to write a column which will go out under Professor Alice's byline, then Bob knows what's going on and has agreed to it. If Professor Alice just lifts something from Bob's writing and passes it off as her own, Bob has not agreed to that. There's no suggestion that any of the people whose wording Gay used had agreed to it, so all discussions of columnists, speechwriters etc are not really germane.
The other part is the purpose of the writing. What is the actual point of a political speech? It's deliberative rhetoric: support this reform. Vote for this candidate. Vote for me, because I will do these things, which are good for these reasons.
That's different from an academic paper because everyone knows that we judge academics by their published output. An academic paper is not a pure rhetorical act in the same way as a political speech. It's not just an assertion about the world ("enzyme SFE2 is a key growth factor in melanomas in mice" or "Phoenician traders brought olive oil to Britain in pottery amphorae in 220 BC"), it is a performance that is intended to show that you are a good academic because you're able to produce assertions like this, just as a driving test is a performance intended to show that you're safe behind the wheel of a car.
If Gay had got someone else to write an after-dinner speech for her, or indeed a fundraising appeal, no one would call that plagiarism.
D.O. said,
December 30, 2023 @ 8:32 pm
From a suspected plagiarism snippet that Prof. Liberman copied from Crimson, the first sentence changed the direction of change. Palmquist and Voss claim that larger AA participation decreases turnout, while Gay says that it is increased. Do they study different populations? Disagree about the direction of change in the same population? Or what gives?
Peter Grubtal said,
December 31, 2023 @ 2:38 am
@D.O.
That struck me as well. Was it a perhaps a copying/transcription error?
The opposite conclusion should have been explained.
Philip Taylor said,
December 31, 2023 @ 12:12 pm
Twice over the last 72 hours I have either heard what I expected to hear, or read what I expected to read, and in neither case was my assumption justified. I am therefore inclined to think that Professor Gay may have read what she expected to read, and then echoed her thoughts in her re-casting of Palmquist and Voss’s words, rather than reading the original text carefully and then re-casting it in her own words.
Mark Liberman said,
December 31, 2023 @ 6:09 pm
@J.W. Brewer: "I don't think the very very different practices and expectations in legal and judicial writing compared to academic publications show that plagiarism norms are "weird"; I think they show instead that they are radically genre-specific, because different genres of writing have different social functions which lead to different baseline expectations about 'originality' and attribution."
Let's just say that those "different practices and expectations" are radically under-analyzed. In the case of attacking people, or killing people, or taking things that don't belong to you, or behaving dangerously with a vehicle, or etc., there are elaborate taxonomies of types and levels of offenses — in fact there are multiple such systems in different moral and legal domains, with elaborate differences of definition and multiple terminological alternatives.
In the case of plagiarism, it seem that we have just one vague word, with different more-or-less vague definitions in different contexts, and the (unspoken?) assumption that it's all the same. There are good reasons for different things to be judged differently, but for other offenses, we pretend at least that there's some well-defined system of rational analysis.
I find that weird, but YMMV.
Lex said,
December 31, 2023 @ 7:14 pm
“I find that weird, but YMMV.”
Plagiarism norms are ‘weird’ (or not) in the sense that English grammar is ‘weird’ (or not). [Insert dubious analogy to ‘correctness conditions’]
And they are especially weird for students, who are the ones who matter most in this discussion. (If you really wanna cook their noodles, have them compare the plagiarism sections of various universities’ handbooks and websites….)
D.O. said,
December 31, 2023 @ 7:37 pm
IMHO, we shouldn't even use the word "plagiarism" when describing a student passing a homework assignment or a term paper written with someone else's help in part or entirely and without a proper attribution. The core offence in plagiarism is appropriating someone's work or ideas without their consent or not paying your intellectual debt. Deception of the reader is a secondary consideration. The core offense of a misbehaving student is deception of the grading authority. The word "cheating" is fitting. No need to elevate petty larceny to the level of capital crime.
Lex said,
December 31, 2023 @ 10:44 pm
“The core offense of a misbehaving student is deception of the grading authority.”
Isn’t there also potential harm to others in the class? After all, some people plagiarize their Law Review notes, which aren’t graded, but may let you slide into someone else’s spot. For that matter, an ‘A’ on a law school paper is very much a signal of lawyerly ability, so employers are harmed as well.
Those harms seem more like serious fraud than petty theft.
Jonathan Smith said,
January 5, 2024 @ 12:32 pm
VHM 12/09/07: "I wish to express my gratitude to Jonathan Smith for helping me track down early occurrences of the GAN1/4="f*ck" atrocity on the Web"
Because this little case makes a nice LL-specific object lesson: what I did, while of course utterly trivial, was hardly just the above (let us call the above "under-citation," so typical of the genre.) I was rather VHM's direct source for the material discussed in the post at issue. But he chose to claim that "[a]fter trying for more than a year to find proof that the GAN1/4 = 'fuck' mistranslation was indeed the result of relying on poor translation software, I am now able to demonstrate that this really does seem to be the case. Here is the evidence. […]". Zero mention of source.
Doing better in this and similar cases — relating to both ideas and to text extracted e.g. from emails — is obligatory. I say so as others are not in a position to.