Plagiarism Clarification

Alun Life No Comments , ,

The essay was sub­mit­ted to Cheat­house. They took a few days to check it before accept­ing it. They’ve put it in their cat­egory of ‘super’ essays, which needs the biggest con­tri­bu­tion to read it. I assume the other essays at Cheat­house under­went the same highly tax­ing review before being accep­ted. It also seems likely that many of the ‘super’ essays are of equally high quality.

Yes, I know the essay is bad. It is inten­tion­ally bad. If you look care­fully you should see that there are one or two obvi­ous errors in it to give away how bad it is. What I was inter­ested in was find­ing how out bad an essay could be and still appear in one of these essay banks.

I don’t sup­pose I should be that sur­prised that it got in. It’s already received a neg­at­ive mark from SweetKimmy225. Look­ing at SweetKimmy’s com­ments on other essays, she gets upset that people pla­gi­ar­ise essays when they sub­mit them to Cheat­house. Now I would have thought that the sort of people who ser­i­ously con­trib­ute to these things are going to be the sort of people who want to use these things. That would be the stu­dents who are too lazy to write proper essays and think pla­gi­ar­ism is ok.

I thought I did this because of sci­entific curi­os­ity, but another per­son­al­ity test (via Pharyn­gula and World Wide Rant) sug­gests it could just be an act of evil.

Help! I’ve Been Plagiarised! Possibly

Alun Politics 2 Comments , ,

A few days ago I men­tioned the Post­mod­ern­ism gen­er­ator and how it could actu­ally be use­ful. I’d also seen a web­site, which sadly I for­got to book­mark, talk­ing about pla­gi­ar­ism that sug­ges­ted that pro­fess­ors could sub­mit essays into essay banks to deter stu­dents. That soun­ded a bit like hard work. What I thought was you could gen­er­ate essays with min­imal effort on any sub­ject and then sub­mit them to the essay banks used by stu­dents who can’t quite sum­mon the effort to write their own essays.

Why do this?

Not to entrap stu­dents. More to demon­strate that the qual­ity of these sites is shock­ingly poor. I thought if I could pub­licly get a gen­er­ated essay on one of these sites and yell about it then it would act as a deterrent against using these sites.

I made a small mis­take in my logic. I thought stu­dents would want to do well. I was reminded that actu­ally they’d be per­fectly happy scrap­ing a pass. Poor essays might not be a deterrent. So I wondered “How bad could an essay be and still be accep­ted by one of these sites?”

For those of you who have more sense than money you can read the pub­lic domain ver­sion below. I am aware of the argu­ment that these sites are for ref­er­ence rather than pla­gi­ar­ism. Those of you who sub­scribe to this view can pay to read the Cheat­house ver­sion at Cheat­house . The open­ing para­graphs are free and if you scroll down you’ll see the bib­li­o­graphy. Cul­tural ref­er­ences you might need:
David Beck­ham: Eng­lish foot­baller. He’s par­tic­u­larly fam­ous for the depth of his thoughts.
Luther Blis­set. Another foot­baller who used to play for Wat­ford. His name is now used by an Italian art col­lect­ive for nov­els.
Noël Edmonds. Presenter of ‘Noël’s House Party’ which came from Crinkly Bot­tom. Intro­duced the world to Mr. Blobby.
Edward Gib­bon. Author of a well-known book on the Roman Empire, but not the one lis­ted.
Andre Young. 40-something Hip Hop­per. Records under the name Dr. Dre.

With these guid­ing influ­ences how bad could it be?
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