I’m idly interested (by which I mean I have no use for it, I’m just curious) what some other heuristics are for “obvious cheating.” Mismatch with the student’s apparent understanding of the topic? Or their writing style?
I was accused of copying a paper for, of all things, an economics class, in high school. I think what got me out of it was the completely genuine look of astonishment on my face—I had not, in fact, copied it, and had never gotten the accusation before about anything. To this day I wonder why my teacher thought I had.
Let’s see if I can list a few heuristics for cheating:
Mismatch between the writing style in different parts of the paper. If some paragraphs are poorly-punctuated and ungrammatical, and other parts are written in very formal academic language, that’s a sign that the paper may have been made by copying and pasting from other people’s writings, then filling in the cracks with their own writing.
Formal academic language is a very weak warning sign. It means you should try typing some statistically unlikely phrases into Google, just in case.
Sometimes people who are asked to summarize some assigned reading will do so by copying and pasting directly from it, and changing a bit of the wording around. This is pretty easy to detect if you’ve read it recently as well.
If a completely incompetent student suddenly turns in top quality answers, it’s unlikely that this is due to him just getting his act together.
I have no idea why your teacher thought you copied a paper for your economics class, but those are some heuristics that I’ve learned.
Thanks! I don’t remember much about how I was doing in the class otherwise, so I’m not sure either. Likely possibilities are formal language (I had turned my brain into “paper mode”) or the last one about incompetence (I was not so big on doing homework in high school, so whether I appeared competent would depend on how much I’d been participating in class).
I’m idly interested (by which I mean I have no use for it, I’m just curious) what some other heuristics are for “obvious cheating.” Mismatch with the student’s apparent understanding of the topic? Or their writing style?
I was accused of copying a paper for, of all things, an economics class, in high school. I think what got me out of it was the completely genuine look of astonishment on my face—I had not, in fact, copied it, and had never gotten the accusation before about anything. To this day I wonder why my teacher thought I had.
Let’s see if I can list a few heuristics for cheating:
Mismatch between the writing style in different parts of the paper. If some paragraphs are poorly-punctuated and ungrammatical, and other parts are written in very formal academic language, that’s a sign that the paper may have been made by copying and pasting from other people’s writings, then filling in the cracks with their own writing.
Formal academic language is a very weak warning sign. It means you should try typing some statistically unlikely phrases into Google, just in case.
Sometimes people who are asked to summarize some assigned reading will do so by copying and pasting directly from it, and changing a bit of the wording around. This is pretty easy to detect if you’ve read it recently as well.
If a completely incompetent student suddenly turns in top quality answers, it’s unlikely that this is due to him just getting his act together.
I have no idea why your teacher thought you copied a paper for your economics class, but those are some heuristics that I’ve learned.
Don’t forget to add plagiarism heuristics:
Paper is identical to Student B’s paper
and in CompSci
code-samples in paper are identical to Student B’s code samples (with possibly the comments or variable names altered)
code samples exhibit exactly the same comments/bugs as Student B’s code, even though the code is altered to look somewhat different.
Thanks! I don’t remember much about how I was doing in the class otherwise, so I’m not sure either. Likely possibilities are formal language (I had turned my brain into “paper mode”) or the last one about incompetence (I was not so big on doing homework in high school, so whether I appeared competent would depend on how much I’d been participating in class).