My own Brush with Plagiarism in Pursuit of a PhD - and a Possible Mitigation for Claudine Gay

[Seymour Flops]

In pursuing a PhD in Ed Psych, I took online classes in which we were required to submit a ten-page research paper every week. It was a grueling pace, even for a person who enjoys sitting at the computer, and making aguments backed with sources.

When drafting, I would often copy and text that I intended to paraphrase, and include the citation. I would bold the text to remind my self to paraphrase when I made a subsequent pass. Sure enough, one time, under the deadline, I forgot to change the quote to a paraphrase. Nor did it have quote marks. When the professor checked my source, he saw that the text was identical, not paraphrased.

He gave me a blistering email, and a zero for the paper. He said "this is called 'plagiarism,' and could have you expelled." I was severely embarrased, and I explained what had happened. He wrote back in a kinder tone that he believed me because I had also left it bolded, and why would I call attention to something I had plagiarized. He accepted the paper with a lowered grade and apologized for the harshness of his first email.

I felt he did the right thing by being harsh, and told him so. I certainly was more careful in future papers. Better to be harshly spoken to in the beginning than have my dissertation thrown out or discredited later.

That may have been the missing piece for Claudine Gay, now disgraced former president of Harvard University, who was caught plagiarizing her dissertation. Doubtful that was her first time failing to attribute, or propersly paraphrase. But when her professors noticed it, they said nothing. Why?

Because she was an affirmative action student, who they may have felt required special deferrance, having been deliberately accepted into a program for which she was not qualified. Not to mention the possiblility that she would have accused them of racism, as she is accusing her detractors now.

So, they let the plagiarism slide, and slide, to the point that she herself slid right into the head of the most prestigious university in the world.

Then, she gets famous for saying the wrongness of genocide depends on context, and suddenly the amateur researchers of the internet find her out and expose her. The liberal/academic world set her up for that humiliation.

Obviously, the $900K per year Harvard will still be paying her, likely for life, will help her cope . . .

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

Thank you, Seymour Flops. Being an academic and doing extensive writing goes hand in hand.

One has to be very careful, particularly in developing each draft of the product.

AI, while helping with research, may be an insidious tool in creating drafts.

The development in technology will separate the real professionals frome wannabees.

Dr. Gay got what she deserved.

 

[NewsVine_Mariyam]

In pursuing a PhD in Ed Psych, I took online classes in which we were required to submit a ten-page research paper every week. It was a grueling pace, even for a person who enjoys sitting at the computer, and making aguments backed with sources.

When drafting, I would often copy and text that I intended to paraphrase, and include the citation. I would bold the text to remind my self to paraphrase when I made a subsequent pass. Sure enough, one time, under the deadline, I forgot to change the quote to a paraphrase. Nor did it have quote marks. When the professor checked my source, he saw that the text was identical, not paraphrased.

He gave me a blistering email, and a zero for the paper. He said "this is called 'plagiarism,' and could have you expelled." I was severely embarrased, and I explained what had happened. He wrote back in a kinder tone that he believed me because I had also left it bolded, and why would I call attention to something I had plagiarized. He accepted the paper with a lowered grade and apologized for the harshness of his first email.

I felt he did the right thing by being harsh, and told him so. I certainly was more careful in future papers. Better to be harshly spoken to in the beginning than have my dissertation thrown out or discredited later.

That may have been the missing piece for Claudine Gay, now disgraced former president of Harvard University, who was caught plagiarizing her dissertation. Doubtful that was her first time failing to attribute, or propersly paraphrase. But when her professors noticed it, they said nothing. Why?

Because she was an affirmative action student, who they may have felt required special deferrance, having been deliberately accepted into a program for which she was not qualified. Not to mention the possiblility that she would have accused them of racism, as she is accusing her detractors now.

So, they let the plagiarism slide, and slide, to the point that she herself slid right into the head of the most prestigious university in the world.

Then, she gets famous for saying the wrongness of genocide depends on context, and suddenly the amateur researchers of the internet find her out and expose her. The liberal/academic world set her up for that humiliation.

Obviously, the $900K per year Harvard will still be paying her, likely for life, will help her cope . . .

Wow this is really interesting, especially that you assume that Ms. Gay was not qualified for the position she was hired into BECAUSE you assume she was simply an affirmation hire. Also, I didn't realize that plagiarism referred to missing a citation in one's paper, I thought it meant intentionally plagiarizing the work of someone else and attributing it as your own.

Claudine Gay, one of three university presidents grilled before the House Education Committee over how they handled antisemitism on campus, issued a statement through the Harvard X account about an exchange that has drawn online ire: a tense back-and-fourth between Gay and New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik.​

​

Stefanik had asked Gay the hypothetical question: "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules on bullying and harassment?"​

​

Gay responded, "The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific and if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it."​

​

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/us/college-cheating-papers.html

​

Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas​

​

By Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi​

​

Sept. 7, 2019

​

Tuition was due. The rent was, too. So Mary Mbugua, a university student in Nyeri, Kenya, went out in search of a job. At first, she tried selling insurance policies, but that only paid on commission and she never sold one. Then she sat behind the reception desk at a hotel, but it ran into financial trouble.​

​

Finally, a friend offered to help her break into “academic writing,” a lucrative industry in Kenya that involves doing school assignments online for college students in the United States, Britain and Australia. Ms. Mbugua felt conflicted.​

​

“This is cheating,” she said. “But do you have a choice? We have to make money. We have to make a living.”​

​

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 8, 2019, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cheating Goes Global as U.S. Students Outsource College Papers.​

​

***Mod Edit: Deleted most of the copy & paste since it is against the forum rules. ​

 

[Seymour Flops]

Wow this is really interesting, especially that you assume that Ms. Gay was not qualified for the position she was hired into BECAUSE you assume she was simply an affirmation hire.

I do indeed assume that she was an Affirmative Action hire. Does that seem unfair?

Why?

Do you doubt that Harvard practices Affirmative Action, or do you feel that "Dr." Gay is so highly qualified that it would have never been needed in her particular case?

Also, I didn't realize that plagiarism referred to missing a citation in one's paper, I thought it meant intentionally plagiarizing the work of someone else and attributing it as your own.

So did I. But I got smacked for an unintentional unparaphrased quote.

Claudine Gay, one of three university presidents grilled before the House Education Committee over how they handled antisemitism on campus, issued a statement through the Harvard X account about an exchange that has drawn online ire: a tense back-and-fourth between Gay and New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik.​

​

Stefanik had asked Gay the hypothetical question: "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules on bullying and harassment?"​

​

Gay responded, "The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific and if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it."​

​

Here's the thing about that: that rule lacks specificity. It is designed such that small committees can determine whether a particular speech is bullying and harrassment, and thus banned by Harvard. It's amounts to "we'll let you know when you crossed over the line," rather than drawing a clear line for all to see.

According to Stefanik the "proper" answer is "yes, it is" however the question Stefanik asked was regarding Harvard's rules against bully and harassment and truthfully the answer should have been "in depends" which Gay answered properly.

Now if Stefanik asked if calling for the genocide of the Jewish people is "wrong" then yeah that would have allowed Gay to unequivocally state "it is", but Gay was correct in stating the answer regarding Harvard's bullying policy depends on the context and I'm sure the speaker as well as the audience.

If your point is that Dr. Gay is only a follower of the Harvard policy, well that excuse could be used almost any person on Earth except Dr. Gay. Dr. Gay was the president of Harvard, the chief creator, and enforcer of Harvard policy.

Asking about a policy against harassment & bullying with no information about who is/was involved in the incident (this is a hypothetical according to the news) is not black and white. Being asked if calls for genocide against the Jewish people is right or wrong IS black and white.

Did Dr. Gay ever say in that hearing that calling for genocide against the Jewish people is right or wrong? Any Democrat questioner who thought Stefanik was being unfair could have simply asked that. Or Gay could have said it without being asked.

I'm sure that scouring her past papers was done so that they didn't have to cite as their only reason for getting rid of her was the way she answered the Stefanik's question.

I don't doubt it. But the way she answered the question was infuriating, not just for its insensitivity to the plight of Jews under sincere threat of genocide, but for the context in which it was given. Yes. The context. I think that is what nearly every Democrat is unaware of.

The context is that Harvard, like so many tax-funded universities, has a recent history of denying free speech to conservative voices:

The truth is that Harvard’s commitment to free inquiry is inconsistent, at best. Last year, Harvard disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley for comments critical of transgender ideology. In 2021, pressured by student activists, Harvard canceled a course on innovative police tactics. In 2020, political science instructor David Kane was canned after inviting renowned social scientist Charles Murray, author of the controversial The Bell Curve, to speak to his class. Harvard admitted Kyle Kashuv, the only conservative to emerge among the Parkland activists, and then revoked his offer for comments he’d made regarding race. Heck, in 2021, Harvard ordered students to remove a possibly “offensive” Nicki Minaj flag.

Harvard's Catastrophic Hypocrisy

Harvard's sudden passion for free expression is remarkably convenient, emerging only when those saying offensive things happen to accord with campus groupthink.

www.forbes.com

If a feminists who does not fully support the latest transgender ideology is banned, but calls for the genocide of Jews must be taken in context, that is a huge double standard. The other University professors at the table have similar anti-free speech policies.

GOP congressmen demolished the presidents’ protestations of free speech loyalty, providing example after example of faculty members and outside speakers who had been muzzled, punished, or banned because of views contrary to campus orthodoxy. Those views included the assertion that sex is biological and binary, that racial preferences harm their beneficiaries, that the diversity bureaucracy inhibits academic freedom, and that an open-borders immigration policy damages the country.

Liz Magill's Hypocrisy on Free Speech

The firing of Penn president Liz Magill, along with the embattled status of her peers at MIT and Harvard, owes to an irony: they are being condemned not for their many abuses of free speech but for their one correct articulation of it.

www.city-journal.org

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 19, 2023 — It’s been 16 months since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology disinvited scientist Dorian Abbot from delivering a lecture due to his opposition to campus diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. But a new report shows that the school’s disinvitation of the geophysicist is just the tip of the iceberg of its problems with academic freedom and free expression.

According to the report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, students and faculty at MIT want the administration to protect their academic freedom and foster a culture of free expression. Until improvements are made, the reign of self-censorship, speaker disinvitations, and coerced speech will continue.

REPORT: Free speech is the missing variable in MIT’s equation

So the idea that they must be careful not to take away free speech when it comes to calling for genocide is absurd.

There are tools these days that will perform a plagiarism check on your paper so that you don't inadvertently leave out reference to your citation or source. So moving forward things should get easier for students but what do we do about this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/us/college-cheating-papers.html

​

Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas​

​

By Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi​

​

Sept. 7, 2019

​

Tuition was due. The rent was, too. So Mary Mbugua, a university student in Nyeri, Kenya, went out in search of a job. At first, she tried selling insurance policies, but that only paid on commission and she never sold one. Then she sat behind the reception desk at a hotel, but it ran into financial trouble.​

​

Finally, a friend offered to help her break into “academic writing,” a lucrative industry in Kenya that involves doing school assignments online for college students in the United States, Britain and Australia. Ms. Mbugua felt conflicted.​

​

“This is cheating,” she said. “But do you have a choice? We have to make money. We have to make a living.”​

​

Since federal prosecutors charged a group of rich parents and coaches this year in a sprawling fraud and bribery scheme, the advantages that wealthy American students enjoy in college admissions have been scrutinized. Less attention has been paid to the tricks some well-off students use to skate by once they are enrolled.​

​

Cheating in college is nothing new, but the internet now makes it possible on a global, industrial scale. Sleek websites — with names like Ace-MyHomework and EssayShark — have sprung up that allow people in developing countries to bid on and complete American homework assignments.​

Although such businesses have existed for more than a decade, experts say demand has grown in recent years as the sites have become more sophisticated, with customer service hotlines and money-back guarantees. The result? Millions of essays ordered annually in a vast, worldwide industry that provides enough income for some writers to make it a full-time job.​

​

The essay-for-hire industry has expanded significantly in developing countries with many English speakers, fast internet connections and more college graduates than jobs, especially Kenya, India and Ukraine. A Facebook group for academic writers in Kenya has over 50,000 members.​

After a month of training, Ms. Mbugua began producing essays about everything from whether humans should colonize space (“it is not worth the struggle,” she wrote) to euthanasia (it amounts to taking “the place of God,” she wrote). During her best month, she earned $320, more money than she had ever made in her life. The New York Times is identifying Ms. Mbugua by only part of her name because she feared that the attention would prevent her from getting future work.​

It is not clear how widely sites for paid-to-order essays, known as “contract cheating” in higher education circles, are used. A 2005 study of students in North America found that 7 percent of undergraduates admitted to turning in papers written by someone else, while 3 percent admitted to obtaining essays from essay mills. Cath Ellis, a leading researcher on the topic, said millions of essays are ordered online every year worldwide.​

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Mary Mbugua, a Kenyan university student, working at her computer. Ms. Mbugua has made money by writing academic essays for college students in the United States.Credit...Sarah Waiswa for The New York Times​

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“It’s a huge problem,” said Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the academic integrity office at the University of California, San Diego. “If we don’t do anything about it, we will turn every accredited university into a diploma mill.”​

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When such websites first emerged over a decade ago, they featured veiled references to tutoring and editing services, said Dr. Bertram Gallant, who also is a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity, which has worked to highlight the danger of contract cheating. Now the sites are blatant.​

“You can relax knowing that our reliable, expert writers will produce you a top quality and 100% plagiarism free essay that is written just for you, while you take care of the more interesting aspects of student life,” reads the pitch from Academized, which charges about $15 a page for a college freshman’s essay due in two weeks and $42 a page for an essay due in three hours.​

“No matter what kind of academic paper you need, it is simple and secure to hire an essay writer for a price you can afford,” promises EssayShark.com. “Save more time for yourself.”​

​

In an email, EssayShark’s public relations department said the company did not consider its services to be cheating, and that it warned students the essays are for “research and reference purposes only” and are not to be passed off as a student’s own work.​

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“We do not condone, encourage or knowingly take part in plagiarism or any other acts of academic fraud,” it said.​

A representative for UvoCorp, another of the companies, said its services were not meant to encourage cheating. “The idea behind our product design is to help people understand and conform to specific requirements they deal with, and our writers assist in approaching this task in a proper way,” the representative said in an email. “According to our policies, customers cannot further use any consultative materials they receive from us as their own.”​

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Representatives for Academized and Ace-MyHomework did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.​

​

A major scandal involving contract cheating in Australia caused university officials there to try to crack down on the practice. A similar effort to confront the industry has emerged in Britain, but not in the United States.​

Contract cheating is illegal in 17 states, but punishment tends to be light and enforcement rare. Experts said that no federal law in the United States, or in Kenya, forbids the purchase or sale of academic papers, although questions remain about whether the industry complies with tax laws.​

“Because American institutions haven’t been whacked over the head like Australian schools were, it’s easier to pretend that it’s not happening,” said Bill Loller, vice president of product management for Turnitin, a company that develops software to detect plagiarism. “But it’s absolutely happening.”​

Mr. Loller said he had worked with some colleges that have students who have never shown up for class or completed a single assignment. “They’ve contracted it all out,” he said.​

​

Contract cheating is harder to detect than plagiarism because ghostwritten essays will not be flagged when compared with a database of previously submitted essays; they are generally original works — simply written by the wrong person. But this year, Turnitin rolled out a new product called Authorship Investigate, which uses a host of clues — including sentence patterns and a document’s metadata — to attempt to determine if it was written by the student who turned it in.​

​

Some of the websites operate like eBay, with buyers and sellers bidding on specific assignments. Others operate like Uber, pairing desperate students with available writers. Either way, the identities and locations of both the writers and the students are masked from view, as are the colleges the assignments are for.​

Still, in some of the assignments that Ms. Mbugua provided to The Times, names of colleges that the essays were meant for became clear. One assignment asked students to write about a solution to a community problem, and the essay Ms. Mbugua provided described difficulties with parking around Arizona State University. “Students could always just buck up and take the walk,” the paper said.​

​

Bret Hovell, a spokesman for Arizona State University, said the school was not able to determine whether the essay had been turned in.​

In Kenya, a country with a per capita annual income of about $1,700, successful writers can earn as much as $2,000 a month, according to Roynorris Ndiritu, who said he has thrived while writing academic essays for others.​

​

A screen shot of Ace-MyHomework, which is among websites that have sprung up that allow people from all over the world to bid on American homework assignments.

​

​

Roynorris Ndiritu, 28, who asked that only part of his name be used because he feared retribution from others in the industry in Kenya, graduated with a degree in civil engineering and still calls that his “passion.” But after years of applying unsuccessfully for jobs, he said, he began writing for others full time. He has earned enough to buy a car and a piece of land, he said, but it has left him jaded about the promises he heard when he was young about the opportunities that would come from studying hard in college.​

​

“You can even get the highest level of education, and still, you might not get that job,” he said.​

In interviews with people in Kenya who said they had worked in contract cheating, many said they did not view the practice as unethical.​

As more foreign writers have joined the industry, some sites have begun to advertise their American ties, in a strange twist on globalization and outsourcing. One site lists “bringing jobs back to America” as a key goal. American writers, who sometimes charge as much as $30 per page, say that they offer higher-quality service, without British spellings or idioms that might raise suspicion about an essay’s authorship.​

​

Ms. Mbugua, the Kenyan university student, worked for as little as $4 a page. She said she began carrying a notebook, jotting down vocabulary words she encountered in movies and novels to make her essays more valuable.​

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Ms. Mbugua, 25, lost her mother to diabetes in 2001, when she was in the second grade. She vowed to excel in school so that she would one day be able to support her younger brother and sister.​

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A government loan and aunts and uncles helped her pay for college. But she also worked, landing in an office of 10 writers completing other people’s assignments, including those of American students. The boss stayed up all night, bidding for work on several sites, and then farmed it out in the morning.​

“Any job that is difficult, they’re like, ‘Give it to Mary,’” she said.​

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There were low points. During summer break, work slowed to a trickle. Once, she agonized so much over an American history paper about how the Great Depression ended that she rejected the job at the last minute, and had to pay an $18 fine.​

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But Ms. Mbugua said she loved learning, and sometimes wished that she were the one enrolled in the American universities she was writing papers for. Once, when she was asked to write an admissions essay for a student in China who was applying to the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University, she said she dreamed of what it would be like to go there herself.​

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Eventually, Ms. Mbugua said, she decided to strike out on her own, and bought an account from an established writer with UvoCorp. But UvoCorp forbids such transfers, and Ms. Mbugua said the account she had purchased was shut down.​

Now Ms. Mbugua finds herself at a crossroads, unsure of what to do next. She graduated from her university in 2018 and has sent her résumé to dozens of employers. Lately she has been selling kitchen utensils.​

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Ms. Mbugua said she never felt right about the writing she did in the names of American students and others.​

“I’ve always had somehow a guilty conscience,” she said.​

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“People say the education system in the U.S., U.K. and other countries is on a top notch,” she said. “I wouldn’t say those students are better than us,” she said, later adding, “We have studied. We have done the assignments.”​

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A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 8, 2019, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cheating Goes Global as U.S. Students Outsource College Papers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe​

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Thank you. That was very enlightening. I don't know if you wrote it yourself, or if AI did. Either way, you make your point.

I did my undergrad work in the library using physical books and microfiche. I did my graduate work with Google Scholar. I have to wonder whether research papers by today's students mean anything at all. If the universities care about the quality of their graduates, they may have to go a test based system instead of allowing students to demonstate knowledge through term papers.

 

[justoffal]

In pursuing a PhD in Ed Psych, I took online classes in which we were required to submit a ten-page research paper every week. It was a grueling pace, even for a person who enjoys sitting at the computer, and making aguments backed with sources.

When drafting, I would often copy and text that I intended to paraphrase, and include the citation. I would bold the text to remind my self to paraphrase when I made a subsequent pass. Sure enough, one time, under the deadline, I forgot to change the quote to a paraphrase. Nor did it have quote marks. When the professor checked my source, he saw that the text was identical, not paraphrased.

He gave me a blistering email, and a zero for the paper. He said "this is called 'plagiarism,' and could have you expelled." I was severely embarrased, and I explained what had happened. He wrote back in a kinder tone that he believed me because I had also left it bolded, and why would I call attention to something I had plagiarized. He accepted the paper with a lowered grade and apologized for the harshness of his first email.

I felt he did the right thing by being harsh, and told him so. I certainly was more careful in future papers. Better to be harshly spoken to in the beginning than have my dissertation thrown out or discredited later.

That may have been the missing piece for Claudine Gay, now disgraced former president of Harvard University, who was caught plagiarizing her dissertation. Doubtful that was her first time failing to attribute, or propersly paraphrase. But when her professors noticed it, they said nothing. Why?

Because she was an affirmative action student, who they may have felt required special deferrance, having been deliberately accepted into a program for which she was not qualified. Not to mention the possiblility that she would have accused them of racism, as she is accusing her detractors now.

So, they let the plagiarism slide, and slide, to the point that she herself slid right into the head of the most prestigious university in the world.

Then, she gets famous for saying the wrongness of genocide depends on context, and suddenly the amateur researchers of the internet find her out and expose her. The liberal/academic world set her up for that humiliation.

Obviously, the $900K per year Harvard will still be paying her, likely for life, will help her cope . . .

With the proliferation of the information highway and the contributions have literally millions of authors I don't know if it's possible to avoid plagiarism anymore. I think you've hit an excellent point here that probably indicates a need for the adjustment of the examination of such things.