By comparison, if you steal as an infant, you get off easy. If you steal as an adult, you don't. Screwing up parallel parking is a mistake, plagiarism is not.
Based on the definition of plagiarism in the article, I'm not 100% convinced that only intentional plagiarism counts as plagiarism - it seems like omitting proper markings around something intended to be a quote, or dropping a \cite line under a section rephrasing an idea mentioned in another paper could be enough to be considered a mild form of plagiarism, to be punished with a "light" punishment that "only" derails your academic career for half a year.
Given the concept of "self-plagiarism" and given the treatment I've seen honest students (at a different university) receive for alleged plagiarism (turns out there are only so many unique ways to implement a fizzbuzz-level piece of homework), I'm not willing to blindly assume common sense here.
This isn’t stealing. Using a meaningless sentence isn’t a very big deal. In academia we care about plagiarism because we care very deeply about the misattribution of academic credit. In practice this does not mean borrowing a sentence in an acknowledgements section, which is sad and embarrassing. It means stealing full ideas and written sections to take credit for them. We treat this much more harshly at the early student level to dissuade serious violations later in life. We do this for the same reason we demand exceptional performance on the parking section of the driving test, even though many licensed adult drivers are terrible at parking and society survives just fine.
In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their "decrease" to "increase" because she was studying a different set of data.
Gay’s 1993 essay, "Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations," lifts sentences and historical details from two scholars, David Covin and George Reid Andrews, with just a few words dropped or modified. Covin is not cited anywhere in the essay.
And if you'd read the article you'd know it starts by saying, "What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive."
Don't be silly. If I write a sentence in a paper that happens to be identical to a sentence someone else wrote, I've now committed plagiarism even if I had no way of knowing that sentence even existed!
tgsovlerkhgsel|2 years ago
Given the concept of "self-plagiarism" and given the treatment I've seen honest students (at a different university) receive for alleged plagiarism (turns out there are only so many unique ways to implement a fizzbuzz-level piece of homework), I'm not willing to blindly assume common sense here.
matthewdgreen|2 years ago
nvm0n2|2 years ago
https://freebeacon.com/campus/this-is-definitely-plagiarism-...
In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their "decrease" to "increase" because she was studying a different set of data.
Gay’s 1993 essay, "Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations," lifts sentences and historical details from two scholars, David Covin and George Reid Andrews, with just a few words dropped or modified. Covin is not cited anywhere in the essay.
And here are more examples
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1733977126020481266
And if you'd read the article you'd know it starts by saying, "What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive."
wredcoll|2 years ago