HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE HO2028 4/24/02 "TESS PLAGEARISM" ==================================================== Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 08:05:11 -0400 From: Shannon Rogers Subject: Tess plagiarism---please help!!!! Hi all, It has reached that frantic time of year again when desperate students turn to the ugly demon of plagiarism to make a deal to get them out of their final assignments quickly and painlessly. I have received three papers on Tess with the same topic and same exact (with some word changes) opening paragraph. None of the papers are good--Tess is literally the jumping off point for a discussion of different roles in today's society. There's no discussion of the book beyond the first paragraph, which you can see contains an extremely garbled chronology of events (the thing you learn about the novel's hidden subtext!). Two of them go on to discuss gays and lesbians in today's society, and one talks about rape victims generally, with no reference back to Tess. Here is the opening paragraph: "Our society has its way of establishing roles for its members. Whether we like it or not we must play therole according to our part. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Tess is faced with a part she had difficulty playing. It was her role given to her by society and eventually was her tragic flaw that ended her life. Tess was a woman in early 19th century who was raped by a man, Alec D'Urberville. She became pregnant but unfortunately the child she was bearing was a miscarraiage. She then flew the estate where Alec had impregnated her and fell in love with a man neamed Angel. He too had fallen but could never be true as a result of the rape by Alec D'urberville. Tess, although infuriated, confused, and insecure went back to Alec and convfessed her "love" for him. She blamed herself for the rape and accepted her role as a woman with a label. By the end of the novel, Tess had murdered the love of her life, Angel, and was sentenced to death by the state." Obviously, they wouldn't do well on the paper, but since they all three have the same paper, I really wanted to find out where and what it is in order to show them that this kind of dishonesty will get them nowhere--they aren't so clever that we won't root them out and, in the end, a couple of pages of even weak original thinking sure beats an F and an academic dishonesty report in the file. I've run this through Turn it in.com, but to no avail. Does this look familiar to anyone? Thanks so much, Shannon ========== Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 09:01:10 -0400 From: jgould@andover.edu (John Gould) Subject: Re: Tess plagiarism---please help!!!! Shannon, The paragraph is so awful that it may not have come from the internet. In any case, Google doesn't recognize it. Possibly one of the kids wrote it and the others lifted it with or without the author's knowledge. (I've had that happen, especially since material written on a computer sometimes gets left in the computer center or on a machine that someone else gets access to.) Or it may exist in old files stored in a dorm or residence house? I fear the only way you can find the source is to grill the "authors." Good luck, John ========== Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 12:39:39 -0300 From: "rnemesva@stfx.ca" Organization: St. Francis Xavier University Subject: Re: Tess plagiarism---please help!!!! Shannon, I'd agree with John Gould on this one. The paragraph is so awful that it's unlikely to have ever appeared in print, or even in some "essay mill," since I'm guessing there is very little market demand for F grades. Either these three students "collaborated" on their opening, or the thing was pilfered in some way by one or both of them. We had a case like this in my department, and the plagiarism committee was able to construct a bibliographic "stemma" to determine which was the original document and which the stolen one. Things get considerably more complicated when there are three texts involved, so you're probably going to end up hauling all three into your office and confronting them with the smoking gun. That's no fun at all, but good luck. Richard Nemesvari Department of English St. Francis Xavier University rnemesva@stfx.ca ========== Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 09:57:14 -0400 From: Shannon Rogers Subject: Re: Tess plagiarism---please help!!!! Dear John and Richard, I think that you're both right. Obviously there's no market for bad papers, and there is probably just a file of papers in someone's frat house. But the "roles in life" theme was what had me curious--I thought perhaps there was a Monarch notes mention of this or a general paper site that discussed Tess in this fashion and just maybe someone had run across it before. Also, I know there are a lot of sites out there where some half- informed person spews some opinion about a book or historical event, and students, typing in a phrase or title to search on, will simply copy what that person had to say, with little attempt to discover whether they are a reliable source or not. Most things are easily trackable, but this one had me stumped. Now the fun begins. Shannon ========== From: "Alan Shelston" Subject: Re: Tess plagiarism---please help!!!! Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 10:32:46 +0100 This is really one for the teachers and academics, but Shannon's pleas touched a chord, since I am in the middle of some one hundred student papers. May I take a little time to air a general teaching problem. My experience is that not many students plagiarise in the absolute sense of the term, but the lines are becoming so blurred that the assessed essay has become very doubtful coinage. The crimes that Shannon described are easy to detect, and as others have suggested you have to face it out in situations like that. But much more difficult is the malfeasance of the sophisticated student, who doesn't simply plagiarise, but takes over critical terminology - i.e. phrases, sometimes whole sentences, from several sources and reworks them into a tapestry of their own, along with a kind of running commentary that provides the backcloth, as it were. I had this recently with a group of essays where the sources were in fact American graduate student essays on the net. (Incidentally can any of our US members tells us why they put them there in the first place?). In no meaningful sense is the end product the student's own work, and it is not difficult to detect. It is, however hopelessly time consuming to track down, and then to defineas a transgression of the rules. I'm afraid I have a very simple solution, which is to abandon the use of essays for degree assessment altogether. It was meant to bring about greater fairness and accuracy, but the fact is that grades mean so much now to the student that they are led into practices which, if not always downright dishonest, are pedagogically worthless. They are also increasingly reduced to states of panic in which they will do anything as the deadline draws near, and are then useless for anything else. The essay used to be an instrument of teaching and learning - now that it has become a means of measurement its traditional (and to my mind more important) function has gone. Believe me, this is not the triumphalism of an old-fashioned exams obsessive who says 'I told you so' - there are other ways. But the assessed essay - at least in my experience - is becoming so flawed an instrument that we really have to look at what is happening with it. To pretend - as I fear many do - that it is not happening is trahison des clercs surely. Sorry to bore Hardy lovers with this one - but many of you are teachers so I thought I would test the water. I'm teaching Tess this week - much more fun. I doubt she would have got her essay in on time - Jude surely would have had endless last-minute computer crises. Alan Shelston ==========