taryneast comments on Eight Short Studies On Excuses - Less Wrong

210 Post author: Yvain 20 April 2010 11:01PM

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Comment author: Relsqui 30 September 2010 08:14:07AM 3 points [-]

I'm idly interested (by which I mean I have no use for it, I'm just curious) what some other heuristics are for "obvious cheating." Mismatch with the student's apparent understanding of the topic? Or their writing style?

I was accused of copying a paper for, of all things, an economics class, in high school. I think what got me out of it was the completely genuine look of astonishment on my face--I had not, in fact, copied it, and had never gotten the accusation before about anything. To this day I wonder why my teacher thought I had.

Comment author: sketerpot 30 September 2010 05:30:05PM *  10 points [-]

Let's see if I can list a few heuristics for cheating:

  • Mismatch between the writing style in different parts of the paper. If some paragraphs are poorly-punctuated and ungrammatical, and other parts are written in very formal academic language, that's a sign that the paper may have been made by copying and pasting from other people's writings, then filling in the cracks with their own writing.

  • Formal academic language is a very weak warning sign. It means you should try typing some statistically unlikely phrases into Google, just in case.

  • Sometimes people who are asked to summarize some assigned reading will do so by copying and pasting directly from it, and changing a bit of the wording around. This is pretty easy to detect if you've read it recently as well.

  • If a completely incompetent student suddenly turns in top quality answers, it's unlikely that this is due to him just getting his act together.

I have no idea why your teacher thought you copied a paper for your economics class, but those are some heuristics that I've learned.

Comment author: taryneast 07 February 2011 10:22:27AM *  3 points [-]

Don't forget to add plagiarism heuristics:

  • Paper is identical to Student B's paper

and in CompSci

  • code-samples in paper are identical to Student B's code samples (with possibly the comments or variable names altered)
  • code samples exhibit exactly the same comments/bugs as Student B's code, even though the code is altered to look somewhat different.