Plagiarism on blogs OK. In college, frowned upon.

I know there can be a shady line between paraphrasing and plagiarism in academic writing, but Jezus, check out the shit writing I got from a senior at the University of Minnesota yesterday. Her, myself, and three others had to write a 40 some odd page paper about technology as perceived in American culture. We ended up watching a variety of techno-centric American films and sort of breaking them down one at a time. She decided to watch the movie Minority Report.

          A few parts of her writing jumped out at me as I read. Not only because they seemed like the words of a person with very lofty thoughts, but also because they didn’t necessarily align nicely with the context of our paper. So I decided to check her words for authenticity.

          If you ever want to find out if someone plagiarized, you don’t have to search the dusty corners of the library. After all, it takes time to go the library. Instead, to quickly determine if words are plagiarized, pretend that you are the laziest person on Earth and begin to research the topic yourself. That’s what I did.

          I decided to search wikipedia for “Minority Report.” Sure enough, I found where her information was lifted from. Keep in mind, this is the only part of her paper that I decided to check up on. You can tell she tried to paraphrase the original words; instead she basically just ended up using the synonym feature in MS Word to exchange random words to at least make them look different. However, I did notice that one sentence is lifted almost verbatim.

          I ended up asking her to further revise her section; pointing out the similarities of the writing. She was embarrassed, but agreed. The whole thing was awkward.

 

Wikipedia:

The main theme of Minority Report is the classical philosophical question of free will vs. determinism.[13][14] One of the main questions the film raises is whether the future is set or whether free will can alter the future.[15] As critic C.A. Wolski commented, “At the outset, Minority Report… promises to mine some deep subject matter, to wit do we possess free will or are we predestined to our fate?”[13] However, there is also the added question of whether the pre-cogs visions are… accurate, or has it in some way been tampered with?

 

Her copy:

The main theme of Minority Report is the orthodox philosophical paradox of free will versus determinism. Questions such as: Is the future a concrete certainty or can free will rewrite the potential processes and actions of individuals or groups of people? As critic C.A. Wolski commented, “At the outset, Minority Report… promises to mine some deep subject matter, to wit do we possess free will or are we predestined to our fate?” Also, the movie raised suspicions on whether pre-cog visions are consistently reliable or can they be manually altered? If you know what lies in your future, do you have the power and capacity to change it?

 

I don’t know, I thought it was interesting…

 

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