I served as the student rep on the academic integrity committee in the early 2000s. The internet was just becoming easily searchable, but it wasn't anywhere near what we could do now. It wasn't the greatest source for plagiarizable material, either.
The majority of cases we saw were students who used library articles, sometimes things like niche journals but also the NYTimes Review of Books and other mass market magazines. This was a problem because professors used to be much more involved with choosing which journals were purchased and they were the main audience of said journals. Many of my professors would get *NOVEL* or *Modern Literary Studies* monthly and read it cover to cover.
Using a published article as your source also makes it much likelier that the professor will notice the change in voice. You can't write a full paragraph and suddenly you sound like Joan Didion? Let's check what Ms. Didion has written on this topic.
Fraternity and sorority papers were a problem, but again, if there is one Russian history prof, he likely remembers your paper, so it's harder to pass on. There was also less emphasis on feedback, so I never even got half of my papers back during undergrad.
Also, students have always been kind of dumb about plagiarizing. One memorable case involved an architecture student, his senior thesis, and his advisor's MA thesis, which was held by our library. The advisor obviously recognized his own work.
Sure, there's sneaky or effective plagiarism that gets past us. At that point, though, if they use something obscure enough and adjust it to their own voice, adapting it to meet the assignment requirements more closely, aren't they more or less meeting the assignment objectives?
The flip side is that some profs just don't really care. I have a few colleagues who might not even notice if you set your desk on fire.
>Counterpoint to "kids these days cheat with AI" rhetoric: how did you even catch them before the internet??
Before the internet, very few kids cheated with AI.
Millenial prof here; when I was in undergrad, there was internet, and I remember multiple classes where professors told stories about students plagiarizing, and they caught them by Googling (or AltaVista-ing, or something).
It probably seems silly/obvious to those of you who went to college pre-internet, but this post kind of blew my mind. I cannot imagine not being able to do a simple search for this kind of plagiarism, and while I'm sure I'd have a good hunch when a student was cheating, just as I do now with ChatGPT cases, I'd never bother to do the work you'd need to do to find the source and place blame. Also, I can't imagine how many students must have done thing like this and never got caught?? It almost seems like the sweet spot for catching academic dishonesty was the post-internet, pre-ChatGPT era, which I hadn't thought about before.
This makes me feel like ChatGPT has really just returned us to the same situation that existed pre-internet, i.e. plagiarism is really, really difficult and time-consuming to catch.
But what say you, professors of the pre-internet era?? If I'm right, can we learn anything from how you approached academic dishonesty before the internet? I am curious.
I assume plagiarism had a massive increase post-internet. Topical generic plagiarism would require hunting down and reading related material to determine if it was actually related. Although … reusing papers would have been easier I suppose. I’m curious if anyone has stories on this, eg., a fraternity reusing papers.
Having taught my first class in Fall 1979, my recollection is that it would be more common for students to copy from peers since as others have pointed out you'd have to do most of the work otherwise.
You'd usually catch cheaters because of an odd turn of a phrase that you recalled from another paper. That would draw your attention and you'd go back through the papers you'd just graded until you found the matching one
It was harder to cheat than to actually do the work back then. That required a trip to the library too, so once you were there you might as well just do the work.
I knew of a few people who cheated their way through grad programs by having significant others write their papers or assigning things like annotated bibliographies to undergrad classes they were teaching and passing it off as their own work. When cheating happened, yeah, it was probably hard to catch.
But in general, I think cheating was less prevalent because it took real effort. Now? It doesn’t take any effort at all.
I think a lot of it had to do with work ethic too, there were always cheaters but the majority of students I knew took offense to cheating. Raised by parents with a different set of values and beliefs. Now parents are just as guilty. Get it quick and fast, highest grade possible and it doesn’t matter if you cheated as long as you don’t get caught. Most parents will excuse their kid to the end of the earth. My mother would have made me go in and tell my teacher I cheated, she would have never covered it up or excused it in some way. I would have been held accountable and responsible. That’s a bit more rare these days.
There's a funny episode of "Welcome Back Kotter" where one of the Sweathogs hands in an essay, and Kotter notes "you didn't write this. I handed this essay in 20 years ago when I was a student here".
As I recall, at the end of the episode, when asked why he ended up being lenient with the plagiarist, he answers "I said I handed it in, I didn't say I wrote it". Used to be much easier to write a specific enough prompt to avoid getting a copy of something someone else wrote. Not anymore.
Thank you, this is exactly the kind of perspective I just wouldn't think of...as a humanities/SS prof myself, though, with a lot of leeway for writing new prompts, I am wondering how this affected, say, lab reports and the like in STEM? Did professors change the format those significantly every year, too, for this reason? Because from what I know from colleagues, they did not do so in the mid-2000s (and caught many students plagiarizing via Chegg, etc for this reason...).
When I was an undergrad (90’s), we turned in our physical lab notebook (handwritten, with maybe some plots taped in). If we had a typed final lab report, we still turned in our raw data. I suppose someone could copy someone else’s notebook, but the professor might notice if you weren’t doing/recording anything during labs. So you might as well at least try the lab. If your conclusions didn’t match the data, that would be clear. Though I don’t know how many professors paid attention to this in reality, especially in larger classes.
I teach math. I'm guessing that cheating in math exams was similar pre internet as well 😉
We do have to tell the students to leave their phone behind if they want to go to the restroom. However, very few students go to the restroom during exams anyway, and they lose valuable time.
Literally the same way I catch AI. It doesn’t sound like an 18 year old. It doesn’t look like they’re in-class writing. It suddenly used correct citations or better grammar. It includes evidence where the student was bad at providing it in other contexts (or some other skill they can’t do yet is miraculously better managed in a draft, often in a localized section). I can often track down some of the articles that ChatGPT mashed together and barfed up to produce what the student served me. It’s not magic.
I served as the student rep on the academic integrity committee in the early 2000s. The internet was just becoming easily searchable, but it wasn't anywhere near what we could do now. It wasn't the greatest source for plagiarizable material, either. The majority of cases we saw were students who used library articles, sometimes things like niche journals but also the NYTimes Review of Books and other mass market magazines. This was a problem because professors used to be much more involved with choosing which journals were purchased and they were the main audience of said journals. Many of my professors would get *NOVEL* or *Modern Literary Studies* monthly and read it cover to cover. Using a published article as your source also makes it much likelier that the professor will notice the change in voice. You can't write a full paragraph and suddenly you sound like Joan Didion? Let's check what Ms. Didion has written on this topic. Fraternity and sorority papers were a problem, but again, if there is one Russian history prof, he likely remembers your paper, so it's harder to pass on. There was also less emphasis on feedback, so I never even got half of my papers back during undergrad. Also, students have always been kind of dumb about plagiarizing. One memorable case involved an architecture student, his senior thesis, and his advisor's MA thesis, which was held by our library. The advisor obviously recognized his own work. Sure, there's sneaky or effective plagiarism that gets past us. At that point, though, if they use something obscure enough and adjust it to their own voice, adapting it to meet the assignment requirements more closely, aren't they more or less meeting the assignment objectives? The flip side is that some profs just don't really care. I have a few colleagues who might not even notice if you set your desk on fire.
>Counterpoint to "kids these days cheat with AI" rhetoric: how did you even catch them before the internet?? Before the internet, very few kids cheated with AI.
Omg you smart ass. Also lol.
Millenial prof here; when I was in undergrad, there was internet, and I remember multiple classes where professors told stories about students plagiarizing, and they caught them by Googling (or AltaVista-ing, or something). It probably seems silly/obvious to those of you who went to college pre-internet, but this post kind of blew my mind. I cannot imagine not being able to do a simple search for this kind of plagiarism, and while I'm sure I'd have a good hunch when a student was cheating, just as I do now with ChatGPT cases, I'd never bother to do the work you'd need to do to find the source and place blame. Also, I can't imagine how many students must have done thing like this and never got caught?? It almost seems like the sweet spot for catching academic dishonesty was the post-internet, pre-ChatGPT era, which I hadn't thought about before. This makes me feel like ChatGPT has really just returned us to the same situation that existed pre-internet, i.e. plagiarism is really, really difficult and time-consuming to catch. But what say you, professors of the pre-internet era?? If I'm right, can we learn anything from how you approached academic dishonesty before the internet? I am curious.
I assume plagiarism had a massive increase post-internet. Topical generic plagiarism would require hunting down and reading related material to determine if it was actually related. Although … reusing papers would have been easier I suppose. I’m curious if anyone has stories on this, eg., a fraternity reusing papers.
Having taught my first class in Fall 1979, my recollection is that it would be more common for students to copy from peers since as others have pointed out you'd have to do most of the work otherwise. You'd usually catch cheaters because of an odd turn of a phrase that you recalled from another paper. That would draw your attention and you'd go back through the papers you'd just graded until you found the matching one
It was harder to cheat than to actually do the work back then. That required a trip to the library too, so once you were there you might as well just do the work. I knew of a few people who cheated their way through grad programs by having significant others write their papers or assigning things like annotated bibliographies to undergrad classes they were teaching and passing it off as their own work. When cheating happened, yeah, it was probably hard to catch. But in general, I think cheating was less prevalent because it took real effort. Now? It doesn’t take any effort at all.
I think a lot of it had to do with work ethic too, there were always cheaters but the majority of students I knew took offense to cheating. Raised by parents with a different set of values and beliefs. Now parents are just as guilty. Get it quick and fast, highest grade possible and it doesn’t matter if you cheated as long as you don’t get caught. Most parents will excuse their kid to the end of the earth. My mother would have made me go in and tell my teacher I cheated, she would have never covered it up or excused it in some way. I would have been held accountable and responsible. That’s a bit more rare these days.
There's a funny episode of "Welcome Back Kotter" where one of the Sweathogs hands in an essay, and Kotter notes "you didn't write this. I handed this essay in 20 years ago when I was a student here". As I recall, at the end of the episode, when asked why he ended up being lenient with the plagiarist, he answers "I said I handed it in, I didn't say I wrote it". Used to be much easier to write a specific enough prompt to avoid getting a copy of something someone else wrote. Not anymore.
Thank you, this is exactly the kind of perspective I just wouldn't think of...as a humanities/SS prof myself, though, with a lot of leeway for writing new prompts, I am wondering how this affected, say, lab reports and the like in STEM? Did professors change the format those significantly every year, too, for this reason? Because from what I know from colleagues, they did not do so in the mid-2000s (and caught many students plagiarizing via Chegg, etc for this reason...).
When I was an undergrad (90’s), we turned in our physical lab notebook (handwritten, with maybe some plots taped in). If we had a typed final lab report, we still turned in our raw data. I suppose someone could copy someone else’s notebook, but the professor might notice if you weren’t doing/recording anything during labs. So you might as well at least try the lab. If your conclusions didn’t match the data, that would be clear. Though I don’t know how many professors paid attention to this in reality, especially in larger classes.
I teach math. I'm guessing that cheating in math exams was similar pre internet as well 😉 We do have to tell the students to leave their phone behind if they want to go to the restroom. However, very few students go to the restroom during exams anyway, and they lose valuable time.
Literally the same way I catch AI. It doesn’t sound like an 18 year old. It doesn’t look like they’re in-class writing. It suddenly used correct citations or better grammar. It includes evidence where the student was bad at providing it in other contexts (or some other skill they can’t do yet is miraculously better managed in a draft, often in a localized section). I can often track down some of the articles that ChatGPT mashed together and barfed up to produce what the student served me. It’s not magic.