Sinster Buttocks

[MsGuy]

No, you dirty minded perverts, this post has nothing to do with my drooping cheeks.

It's refers to an article from the Guardian about 'Rogeting', the latest wrinkle in the eternal war between plagiarising students and the tight assed teachers who seek to reveal their sins and put a few stripes of just punishment on their bottoms.

For those of you who have never had the unique pleasure of grading & (just for the sake of argument) reading a three foot high stack of student essays while under a tight deadline from the dean's office to get her the results so the little darlings could graduate ( or not) with the rest of their class, here's the essential background information:

Students long ago discovered that, by searching obscure nooks and crannies of the internet, they could find (and cut and paste) material suitable for nearly any essay topic yet, at the same time, unlikely to be familiar to the poor sot assigned to read the stuff.

Now some of you might think this a win win solution to the essay problem: the students are spared the agony of actually writing an essay and the teacher (or more likely his grad students) is spared having to read hundreds, possibly thousands, of pages of the most excruciatingly bad writing this side of nurse novels for teenage girls.

But no, the teachers, being the rigid, judgmental party poopers they are, resisted this benign solution by insisting that students do their own work or face the righteous wrath of the educational establishment.

Soon enough teachers, with the help of friendly forces in the IT departments, devised software that scanned even the darkest corners of the internet looking for a match to the suspect essay. Disaster all around.

Does it need to be said that students, like other sinners, proved reluctant to give up their evil ways? Which brings us, dear reader, by the most circuitous route possible, back to Rogeting!

[AdamSmith]

Hah! Great.

Necessary, I can see. Rundown of some of that plagiarism detection software: http://elearningindustry.com/top-10-free-plagiarism-detection-tools-for-teachers

When I needed to turn out a quick and dirty article recently, I tried a somewhat similar approach to Sinister Buttocks. I patched together a draft blatantly lifted from several sources on the topic, then ran it back and forth through several online translation engines. Say, from English to French to German to Cape Verdean to etc. etc. Changing from one translation engine to another each time. Then of course finally back into English.

Naturally the end result required some manual fixing of nonsense that had gotten in. But that was a lot easier than an honest week's work writing an original piece from scratch.

[AdamSmith]

So humor writer Richard Armour (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Armour) in either his book English Lit Relit or The Academic Bestiary, can't recall which, has a passage that goes somewhat like this (reconstructing from memory):

"...Of course the struggling young academic's teaching burden will necessarily include trying to catch out those students who think they can get away with turning in others' writing and calling it their own.

"So, for example, the history lecturer can expect to come across a passage in a student essay that sounds possibly like something vaguely recalled from somewhere in Gibbon. After a weekend of combing through dusty pages, the suspect material is finally located, deep in the fourth volume of Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James the Second.

"It is worth all the trouble, not to mention one of the peculiar rewards of the profession, to be able then to write on the hapless student's paper, 'This was clearly lifted wholesale from Macaulay, History IV. Should you wish to plagiarize in future, I suggest you utilize a more obscure source.'"

[AdamSmith]

P.S. Interesting piece on Macaulay (in -- tellingly? -- The Weekly Standard).

http://www.weeklystandard.com/keyword/Lord-Thomas-Babington-Macaulay