Things Not Yet Noted

XV is up at Brandon Watson's Siris! As Brandon is your host, you can count on having a rich festive experience. Mysteriously missing from this Carnivalesque (probably my own fault for having failed to nominate it), but not to be missed on that account: Geoffrey Chaucer's"The Cipher of Leonardo," 17 May. Dan Brown should have such talent.

Our colleague, Hugo Schwyzer, has an article,"It's More Than the Photos," Inside Higher Ed, 22 May, in which he distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy sports initiation rites.

H-Survey is, ah, surveying its subscribers for recent examples of student plagiarism. Two interesting ones are a) from Pittsburg State University in Kansas:

I have to share a wonderfully awful example of plagiarism, though it's not in history. For a beginning ceramics course here a student discovered a lot of pots seemingly abandoned on the drying shelves, so he scratched his name on them and turned them in. Just one problem: they were the instructor's pots!

and b) from an on-line instructor at Kaplan University:

I am teaching for an online institution and my department requires all papers to be run through Turnitin. The service gives you an"originality report" that show what per cent of the material appears in other sources in their databases. I have had at least 1-2 cases per section of 25 students each term. The plagiarism appears to be of two types. 1) plagiarism of several web sites which are pieced together - a paragraph copied and pasted from this source, and then a paragraph pasted from another source, etc. 2) papers that have large overlaps with other student papers. This is usually caused by one of two things - students copying/paraphrasing with 1-2 words differences from an assigned text or student finding/purchasing the same paper from some internet service. One of the wildest cases was a student recently who turned in a paper which Turnitin flagged as 86% from other sources. It seemed to be plagiarism of type 1 - copying from several web sites, especially Wikipedia. I reported the plagiarism and gave the student an F. Then things got weird. I was contacted by Turnitin because an instructor at another college (not online) had had a student turn in a paper with a 96% match with the plagiarized one. The instructor wanted to see my student's paper to confirm the plagiarism. I sent the paper to that instructor with the note that the paper HIS student had copied was already a plagiarized paper. After we e-mailed each other and compared notes, it appears that somewhere out in cyber space is an"UR" copy of a paper that BOTH students copied, and which was itself cobbled together by plagiarizing. The other possiblity is that somehow my online student from state A had somehow knew (or had friends who knew) this student in state B. Possible but from what we could see, not likely.

Best conversation of the week: among Tim Burke, Alan Jacobs, Withywindle, and others at Burke's"ACTA Report ‘How Many Ward Churchills?'," Easily Distracted, 17 May.