At the end of class on Monday, we divided into small groups and exchanged our plagiarized papers. In class today, we had a contest to see who did the best job in our group of concealing plagiarism in their paper. I had fun searching different sites trying to find passages that were plagiarized. It was much harder than I thought it would be to locate plagiarism, which made me realize the valiant effort teachers have to make, in some cases, to discover plagiarism. Of course, instances where students do not even bother to change the font or copy an entire paper word for word does not take much patience to find.
My group members did a great job of concealing plagiarism in their papers by changing words in passages, citing some sources in the paper to throw off the reader, and using unique sources. Jenny won the contest in our group because no one was able to find the creative source she used. She used one source for her paper, which was a video tutorial that was linked to a website. This was a really good idea because I actually had looked on the site and did not even think to click on the numerous links that were listed.
One factor that I think made it difficult to locate plagiarism in the papers I read is that I was not familiar with the style of writing of my group members. This made it hard to determine what did and did not sound like them. I also think that it was hard to find plagiarism because I was not very knowledgeable on the topics I read. I think that if I had more base information on the topic it may have been easier to spot plagiarized passages. Overall, I found the plagiarism experience to be challenging, but also interesting to see the amount of effort it takes to locate plagiarism.
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3 comments:
i think even though the plagiarism was just for this English class, i still felt uneasy as i was writing and performing the act. i think it was due to the fact that we were always told it was wrong. it's like getting an assignment to become a thief if i could compare it.
I found the same difficulties while searching for plagiarism...I was not familiar with my group members' writing style, or their topics. And wow, a video source?? thats amazing and probably way more work than anyone who was really trying to plagiarize would do.
Yeah, I also found it hard because I didn't have a good sense for what my group members' writing was really like. It would have been easier if we had more "formal" work to compare it to, like a teacher would normally have. I think that would really help identify the parts that did not sound quite right.
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