One of the departments I work in on occasion deals strictly with postgraduate coursework programs (that is, the students do a 1-2 year postgraduate degree sans a research component). Today I heard this lovely gem:
A student had submitted an essay on some particular subject, not sure what. When it was run through Turnitin however, it did pick up some flags and the tutor had a closer look at it. Now, within Turnitin, when it flags something, if you click on the flag, it'll say what the original source is.
This student had at least cited their sources for whatever it was that had been flagged, but the tutor then had a closer look and found that when they clicked on the flags, Wiki-fucking-pedia was coming up.
Turns out that the student had gone to Wikipedia and had copied individual sentences into their essay here and there, but only stuck to sentences which had citations already, then would cite the actual source that sentence in Wikipedia used.
(So for example, if a student copied the line "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," straight from Wikipedia, they'd then go and cite Charles Dickens "A Tale of Two Cities" as the source)
We aren't hard-asses about Wikipedia (especially since that department gets a lot of mature-age students) and see it as a good jumping-off point, but still!
And the student's efforts came to naught - they have to resubmit, will be counselled and their only option for this paper is a pass.
A student had submitted an essay on some particular subject, not sure what. When it was run through Turnitin however, it did pick up some flags and the tutor had a closer look at it. Now, within Turnitin, when it flags something, if you click on the flag, it'll say what the original source is.
This student had at least cited their sources for whatever it was that had been flagged, but the tutor then had a closer look and found that when they clicked on the flags, Wiki-fucking-pedia was coming up.
Turns out that the student had gone to Wikipedia and had copied individual sentences into their essay here and there, but only stuck to sentences which had citations already, then would cite the actual source that sentence in Wikipedia used.
(So for example, if a student copied the line "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," straight from Wikipedia, they'd then go and cite Charles Dickens "A Tale of Two Cities" as the source)
We aren't hard-asses about Wikipedia (especially since that department gets a lot of mature-age students) and see it as a good jumping-off point, but still!
And the student's efforts came to naught - they have to resubmit, will be counselled and their only option for this paper is a pass.
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