Plagiarism

jbrst

I am a regular poster but need to stay anonymous for this one.

I'm in my final year at college and my work for this year alone decides my degree classification. During the exam period at Christmas my engagement broke up and I had to move out quickly (bad situation). I ended up sleeping on a mate's couch for a couple of weeks and it wasn't terribly conducive to getting good grades. In one module in particular I got 82% for the coursework and 50% in the exam and I chose the lecturer for that module to be my dissertation supervisor (because she had given me such a high grade in my coursework!).

Anyway during our first meeting on the dissertation she made a remark about not understanding how someone could write such a good essay and such a sh1te exam. I replied that I was never much of an exam person as I didn't want to go into the ins and outs of my personal life (and my personal issues were documented with my course director as I missed another exam and needed to explain to be allowed to resit it). I am sure at that stage it had crossed her mind that maybe I hadn't written the essay myself, but nothing more was said about it.

Fast forward to the dissertation and it was handed in no worries. Then she asked if I would also email her an electronic copy, which is very unusual, and no-one else was asked to do this by their supervisors, including people who also had her overseeing their work. I just assumed she wanted to save it somewhere and thought nothing of it, so I sent it over. It has now occurred to me that she may want it to run it through some plagiarism software or something. I have no real problem with this as I didn't plagiarise anything but I am wondering what recourse I would have if it said I did and I said I didn't. A couple of newspaper articles I got from the archives are also referenced in journal articles - how do I prove that I got them from the archives and not cribbed from someone else's work?

I understand where the suspicion might have come from, and there were several veiled suggestions about it during our meetings, but the prospect of being hauled up about it and it coming down to my word versus the software is making me terrified! I am a slightly older student and worked as a technical writer before college, so my writing can be more flowery (and perhaps academic sounding!) than the people in my class.

My real question is, if accused of plagiarism on the basis of similar phrasing or whatever the software pulls up, how do you (and can you) defend yourself?

I had to submit an electronic copy for my final year project.

If you get accused of plagiarism, go to your tutor/students' union/chaplin/mentor/whoever would be in the best position to represent you. Colleges take plagiarism very seriously, but if you have done all the work yourself you've little to worry about. Ensure you keep all notes that you might have worked on, and I'd say try to remember when you were working on x, y, z.

Software isn't infallible, btw.

Tom Dunne

Myth wrote: »

Software isn't infallible, btw.

So true. In one college I worked at, we had these slick sales people over from the UK showing us this new fandangled software to detect plagiarised work. Much to their embarrassment, during the demo, I broke it.

So yes, plagiarism software isn't 100%.

jbrst wrote: »

My real question is, if accused of plagiarism on the basis of similar phrasing or whatever the software pulls up, how do you (and can you) defend yourself?

Because colleges take it so seriously, they need to be 100% certain it has occurred, or as near to 100% as possible. I recently had a student, with weak enough English submit a 4,000 word article on a technical subject. It didn't take me more than 10 seconds on Google to find his "sources". You would be surprised how easy it is to spot work that is not the student's.

As for the electronic version, I know I read student's work on the train. It's much easier in electronic form. And as for final year dissertations, the college I am currently associated with requires it to be submitted in electronic form, so I wouldn't read anything into that.

dh2007

it's possible that she wanted an electronic copy to check the word count.

Did you go over the word count? Because if you did maybe there's a penalty attached. I know that some courses/universities take going over the word count kinda seriously so maybe that's the problem?

Going over the word count would be viewed less seriously than plagiarising.