Plagiarist, Meet Humorist
All OVER the blogs are links to the story which unfolded over the last few days at A Week of Kindness -- Nate Kushner, one of the members of the sketch comedy troupe, took on a plagiarist, and the results weren't pretty, though they were hilarious. If you've missed this, and wish to catch up, you can read the original post, wherein Nate provides the instant message he received asking him to write a paper ("i am a college student and i have to write a paper on Hindu is there anyway u can help me with that"), and his response, which was, basically, to agree to write it and then proceed to provide her with a piece of trash which wouldn't get past any professor (and shouldn't have gotten past the student, either, seeing as how it contained the phrase "I made a doody," but then students who turn in such papers generally don't read them before they turn them in...). More posts followed, as events progressed. And events progressed quicker and further than Nate thought they would, since Boing Boing and other high-hitting sites picked up the story, so then basically the entire internet and its grandmother knew about the story, and people called the dean, and what not -- follow it in the very large comments sections which follow the posts.
The comments are worth reading -- my, my. Tempers were lost, words exchanged.
Last update so far, the girl and her mother called Nate. The girl cried. (They all cry, in my experience.)* She had indeed turned the paper in, as her own. The dean is or isn't involved; things aren't clear here. Nate felt sorry. But all the info's all over the net, sorry, sorry, can't take it back.
Anyway. I'm delighted, myself, with the dreadful paper Nate wrote. I especially appreciate the useless citations.
It reminds me of a paper I was handed once, in the "British Literature Survey I' course (aka "1000 years of British Literature"), which was the sort of paper no professor who was actually breathing would fail to fail. It was exceptional. It purported to be on Gulliver's voyage amongst the Houyhnhnms. It mentioned that the Houyhnhnms' voices "sound like the call of castrati," a detail I hadn't noticed in my previous 5 or 6 readings of the text, and made me pause. It went on to announce that the Houyhnhnms had read the entire works of Charles Darwin.
It was a hoot. It started out fine, and then degenerated into outright insanity. At first I thought maybe that the poor student had gone home and said to his sister, hey, I have to write a paper on this Gulliver stuff and I haven't read the book; what happens? and then she had lied through her teeth.
But the thing was too well written for that. So I went to the internet, and found it in 30 seconds -- oh, look, it's still floating around the plagiarism sites, years later -- and flunked the paper. Then I checked on the OTHER paper this student had handed in -- late -- which I hadn't gotten around to reading yet, and discovered that the other paper had also been taken off the 'net, though in its case it had been written by a member of the SCA.
So he failed the course, and got turned in to the dean, and the chair, and had to have Serious Talks with those personages, and who know where he is now.
But as for me -- I'd been inspired. For whoever wrote that Gulliver paper was brilliant. And I love him or her. And I have taken him or her for my model.
Cause it's amazing, how quickly you can churn this stuff out. And it's amazing, how easily the plagiarism sites snap them up. And there's no way in hell any professor receiving a paper on, oh, let's say, "The Staging of Six Characters in Search of an Author," is going to think that he or she has misread the text, and Pirandello has "used a technique he inherited from the 'Cirque de Soleil,' involving a trapeze hung from the catwalk." So that's my little gift to the profession -- somewhere, someplace, somebody's going to receive that paper, if they haven't already. And they're going to think, what the hell. And they're going to google it. And it's going to show up lots of places. Here, for example.
Or, for another example, somebody's getting a paper on "Gender Issues in Antigone," which mentions the way in which the play led to women's emancipation in ancient Greece:
And indeed, had it not been for the movement which followed the production of the play, in which the Athenian women were liberated from their near-slave status, Athens would most probably have lost the war with Sparta. Only the newly liberated women of Athens, bedecked with citizen status, womanning the walls of Athens, kept the Spartans out, in the last battle of the war, in a stirring reproduction of the end scene of Antigone, this time with live, rather than dead, defenders. The play provides us with a useful example of the importance of literature to society, and an important message for our own time.
Oh, right. Like that happened.
(To be honest, though, my favorite part of that paper would be the fake quotes I made up. Making up history is entertaining, sure, but there's nothing like making up fake ancient poetry. Really bad fake ancient poetry. "O, not for me the dusty hair of youth, / But let us now unto the palace go," for instance. What the hell does that mean.)
Anyway. Plagiarists should definitely steer clear of the humorists. That's my advice.
************************
*Ok, they don't ALWAYS cry. I once had a student who, confronted with the book containing the essay he had recently turned in, refused to admit he had copied it. "I can't explain it," he said. "Well, I can," I said. "Either you're so psychic you were able to channel, off the Akashic Records, an essay, word for word, published by a professor at the University of Texas in Austin in 1982, or you plagiarized. I'm betting the second."
The comments are worth reading -- my, my. Tempers were lost, words exchanged.
Last update so far, the girl and her mother called Nate. The girl cried. (They all cry, in my experience.)* She had indeed turned the paper in, as her own. The dean is or isn't involved; things aren't clear here. Nate felt sorry. But all the info's all over the net, sorry, sorry, can't take it back.
Anyway. I'm delighted, myself, with the dreadful paper Nate wrote. I especially appreciate the useless citations.
It reminds me of a paper I was handed once, in the "British Literature Survey I' course (aka "1000 years of British Literature"), which was the sort of paper no professor who was actually breathing would fail to fail. It was exceptional. It purported to be on Gulliver's voyage amongst the Houyhnhnms. It mentioned that the Houyhnhnms' voices "sound like the call of castrati," a detail I hadn't noticed in my previous 5 or 6 readings of the text, and made me pause. It went on to announce that the Houyhnhnms had read the entire works of Charles Darwin.
It was a hoot. It started out fine, and then degenerated into outright insanity. At first I thought maybe that the poor student had gone home and said to his sister, hey, I have to write a paper on this Gulliver stuff and I haven't read the book; what happens? and then she had lied through her teeth.
But the thing was too well written for that. So I went to the internet, and found it in 30 seconds -- oh, look, it's still floating around the plagiarism sites, years later -- and flunked the paper. Then I checked on the OTHER paper this student had handed in -- late -- which I hadn't gotten around to reading yet, and discovered that the other paper had also been taken off the 'net, though in its case it had been written by a member of the SCA.
So he failed the course, and got turned in to the dean, and the chair, and had to have Serious Talks with those personages, and who know where he is now.
But as for me -- I'd been inspired. For whoever wrote that Gulliver paper was brilliant. And I love him or her. And I have taken him or her for my model.
Cause it's amazing, how quickly you can churn this stuff out. And it's amazing, how easily the plagiarism sites snap them up. And there's no way in hell any professor receiving a paper on, oh, let's say, "The Staging of Six Characters in Search of an Author," is going to think that he or she has misread the text, and Pirandello has "used a technique he inherited from the 'Cirque de Soleil,' involving a trapeze hung from the catwalk." So that's my little gift to the profession -- somewhere, someplace, somebody's going to receive that paper, if they haven't already. And they're going to think, what the hell. And they're going to google it. And it's going to show up lots of places. Here, for example.
Or, for another example, somebody's getting a paper on "Gender Issues in Antigone," which mentions the way in which the play led to women's emancipation in ancient Greece:
And indeed, had it not been for the movement which followed the production of the play, in which the Athenian women were liberated from their near-slave status, Athens would most probably have lost the war with Sparta. Only the newly liberated women of Athens, bedecked with citizen status, womanning the walls of Athens, kept the Spartans out, in the last battle of the war, in a stirring reproduction of the end scene of Antigone, this time with live, rather than dead, defenders. The play provides us with a useful example of the importance of literature to society, and an important message for our own time.
Oh, right. Like that happened.
(To be honest, though, my favorite part of that paper would be the fake quotes I made up. Making up history is entertaining, sure, but there's nothing like making up fake ancient poetry. Really bad fake ancient poetry. "O, not for me the dusty hair of youth, / But let us now unto the palace go," for instance. What the hell does that mean.)
Anyway. Plagiarists should definitely steer clear of the humorists. That's my advice.
************************
*Ok, they don't ALWAYS cry. I once had a student who, confronted with the book containing the essay he had recently turned in, refused to admit he had copied it. "I can't explain it," he said. "Well, I can," I said. "Either you're so psychic you were able to channel, off the Akashic Records, an essay, word for word, published by a professor at the University of Texas in Austin in 1982, or you plagiarized. I'm betting the second."
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