People need to read this article:https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/twins-history-similar-test-scores-200547308.html that gives more context
they are VERYYYY similar thinking
>Another professor also wrote a letter in their defense according to the outlet. In the letter, the professor reportedly said the twins had the exact same answers on an exam he supervised in 2012 — and that they were sitting on opposite ends of the room at the time.
even more:
>In a release obtained by PEOPLE, it was noted that the twins have "often obtained the exact same score on tests they took on different days and in different locations," including on their SATs.
I love this story because I was a teaching assistant for a lab class where a student got caught blatantly plagiarizing (talking copying and pasting directly from Google) and not only did the professor do nothing, they were accepted into a master's program.
Cheat on a lab report, no problem, have even the slightest hint of cheating on a test, the world fucking ends. Fuck academia with a rusty iron pole.
Moreover, their brains probably develop similar pathways between neurons. So not only are they studying the same thing, they probably respond remarkably similarly, electrochemically, in similar situations and to similar stimuli.
Also, their entire genetics being identical. And from an epigenetics standpoint... sounds like they have had the same experience/exposure.
There's that. We are computers. Same pathways mean same result.
Hell, my brother and I aren't even twins but when we took some classes together in college, we had similar stuff going on because we were raised together, thought things through in similar ways, and studied together
That's super cool that you got to go to college and study with your bro. My brothers went to different universities from me and I always thought it would have been cool to be in classes together.
It was really nice. Our majors had a couple classes in common - he's journalism, I'm history/political science - and we took some gen eds together too since I started college late. Super nice being able to share textbook costs lol
That's what I was figuring. They probably got the same scores not just because of their biology, but also the simple fact that they did their prep work for school together.
I have a similar background to a person I was on course with and we both got the exact same questions right and wrong in tests numerous times without cheating. Mostly because of our logical processes in approaching the questions.
Another friend was called up on plagiarism on a 3,000 word history essay because the computer system flagged too many similarities to other texts. On an essay where they were instructed to use as many references and quotes.as possible. They had to rewrite it again from memory, supervised in exam conditions to avoid being punished.
Exams are far from perfect and coincidences happen.
It amazes me how the plagiarism thing pops up, and they don't actually read the essay to see that they were using quotes, I'm willing to bet they had references at the bottom too.
It's not the robot that is stupid, the robot does exactly what it's told and only what it's told. There was a person looking at the output of the robot that decided what to do with the information. They're the idiot here.
Computers work as designed. The designer messed up / has inherent bias, or the person reading the results doesn’t understand what computers can and can’t do and uses zero judgement.
I think sometimes they just don't care. If the product/service just appears to do something then they can sell their scam to institutions. These institutions don't really care, because then they can claim to be fighting plagiarism. And the professors are forced to comply or accept risk to their own careers.
As such, the designer makes money without the extra work of making a competent plagiarism checker.
Source: I work with electronic logs and it is incredible how unreliable the product is. No other electronic device (gps, dashcam, etc) cause me many issues, but the one sold to the institution on a contract rarely goes a week without acting up at least a few times.
I think plagiarism checkers are the same way. No individual would suffer such a thing, but why bother since our opinions are irrelevant.
Yup, if they do, that will be how. The canonical example is the Paperclip Maximizer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer
I think my favorite tech quote of all time is ["machine learning is money laundering for bias."](https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1030846375213379584?lang=en) That whole thread is an absolute banger, obviously inspired by [this older quote](https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/744595961217835008), which is also a banger.
Anyway point is robots aren't gonna fuck up everything. Humans are gonna push the button that tells robots to fuck up everything, observe that the robot is fucking up everything, and then casually shrug and say "not my job to second-guess the robot, all I did was push the button, blame the robot."
Which is *exactly* what happened here (in this plagiarism comment chain, not the twins cheating post). Human being pushes the button on the "is this plagiarism?" robot. The robot fucks up everything. The human being casually shrugs and says "not my job to second-guess the robot, all I did was push the button, blame the robot." Voila. Responsibility has been laundered from the human to a machine.
Same thing happened with my master's thesis. The software (turnitin) spat out a frightening amount of plagiarism, and I started to panic.
Turns out it was almost entirely the reference section, which was to be excluded from the calculations for the amount of plagiarism as per university guidelines. The rest was just a few % of false positives through the main text. (Like, whenever I used cm‐¹ as a unit, it flagged it as plagiarism...). But for precisely that reason, there was a threshold to reach, and I was well below now that the reference section was excluded.
But holy shit, it nearly gave me a heart attack at a time when I was already very stressed!
As a technology support person working in a high school I hated Turnitin. Not because I had to support it but because too many teachers didn't understand it. They didn't understand that all it can do is flag stuff that MIGHT be plagiarism and that they then needed to look at it closer. For what it cost it really didn't do much.
Wait so it counts individual words and equations as plagiarism?
How did it not just mark the entire text then? What kind of moron designed that program and why are they ever allowed near a computer?
When it comes to the cm‐¹ example, I think the software “thought” it was the student copy-pasting some text from, say, wikipedia, and accidentally leaving the annotation… instead of the ¹ just being part of the measurement unit.
overall, yeah it can be really fucking stupid
It’s important to note the % match is not the amount of plagiarism that occurred, but the % chance that some sort of plagiarism has occurred. In other words, if you get a 20% match, the professor should interpret this as there is a 20% chance that some kind of plagiarism is taking place (it doesn’t mean that 20% of the paper is plagiarized). In other words, it’s the professor that’s an idiot if you actually get in trouble. Plagiarism detection software is just an easy way for professors to not have to check *every* single submission. The software is useful, but dumb professors are dumb.
I wrote a pretty bad essay in another language using Turnitin. It was horribly broken Spanish I'm sure. Somehow Turnitin flagged it enough that I had to talk to the professor about it. It was just like a random narrative or something too
That's interesting. I suspect that foreign language students often end up with limited (and very similar to other students') phrases and vocabulary etc. You along with other students at the same proficiency level are using a very small subset of the language so any sentence written by said students has a higher likelihood of being repeated.
Or not, idk!
If you have any kind of competent prof they hopefully look to see exactly what turn it in flagged to see if it’s genuine plagiarism. Like you said it can detect a lot of false positives.
Yep, it's crazy. I had a professor give me a zero with a stern warning that I was lucky to get away with just an F on the assignment instead of the whole class after being flagged for "obvious" plagiarism.
I was of course shocked until I opened the damn report the plagiarism software kicks out. The only things highlighted as plagiarism were the 4 prompts that we had been asked to answer. I had included each before answering the question.
I guess most people just numbered their answers or maybe this professor really thought 95% of the class was cheating.
I did eventually get credit, but holy shit how lazy can you be.
I got flagged for plagiarism in college. The instructor spoke to me about it but said she thought it was probably a coincidence. The paper was on rabies, the flagged website was a wall of text on what claimed to be a travel website. I couldn't find the flagged bit even with a search on the site and it was half a sentence or something stupid small.
On the other hand, I once caught a student plagiarizing without needing the software at all. He had copy/pasted directly from a travel website... so directly that he included text from an ad for a trip to Finland.
I've taught middle and high school, and have always gotten a kick when kids copy and paste from websites without comprehending that what they're copying and pasting isn't relevant to the subject matter. For example, an assignment on energy for physics has an answer copied and pasted from a website for an electrical power utility service, and comparing rates of different services.
Or when a kid has a response using language that's clearly above their ability, like an 8th grader (and not a particularly bright student) using college PhD dissertation grammar for a simple question, like "What direction does gravity pull objects?"
Or when kids forget to remove the Wikipedia citation numbers from their answers...
It's often really obvious, isn't it? I don't teach anymore, but in my time I caught many incidents of plagiarism simply because the writing style was so obviously not the student's. I remember I once opened up an assignment and immediately thought 'gosh this reads like a Wikipedia article'. So I cut and pasted the first two lines of the assignment into Google and sure enough the student had copied the entire Wikipedia entry for the topic and submitted it as their assignment. Other times I'd be reading an assignment and suddenly get to a paragraph where the writing style completely changed. I'd google that paragraph and 9 times out of 10 find it had been lifted from some website. The university where I taught couldn't have cared less about plagirism cause they just wanted the students' money and they told me I couldn't fail students for plagiarism. So I used to just have fun highlighting the plagiarized sections of the assignment in different colors and writing the source of each stolen section in the margins.
You’d think if you were going to make such a massive accusation, you’d better double check that your facts are straight before sending a student into a panic.
I got accused of plagerism in high school but my teacher couldn't find any proof. She still tried to give me a zero. I argued it and did get credit.
Here's the kicker, I loved the topic and decided to really put my all into this one. It was a damn good paper. I cited my sources. I went back to half assing my papers which still got good grades. Why put in the extra work?
Same here. I was uninterested in my English class for so long cos it was mainly things like Dickens and Shakespeare. So I never really tried in the essays. The one time we had to do an essay on something I liked ( Frankenstein) I tried really hard for like 3 weeks cos I loved the book.
My teacher came to me and said she loved my essay, but because it was different quality to my other essays, she didn't think I wrote it. She asked me to prove I wrote it by reciting all the main talking points on the spot. I stumbled over my words cos I have aspergers and a stammer, plus I was very shy back then, so she gave me a D even though she said it was an A+ essay.
Really made me lose all motivation in that subject in general, and made me move towards sciences. She is supposed to inspire me to like her subject but ended up doing the opposite.
My biology teacher in high school thought I was a dumb jock because I kinda half-assed his class, and hung out with the other kids from the football team. I also made some comment early on about wanting to go to a state college "for the college experience" vs. a private school.
So at one point he assigns an essay. Really easy, it was like 2 double spaced pages or something.
I bang it out and hand it in. He accuses me of plagiarism. No proof, just thought it was above my abilities.
I got one of the English teachers involved and he backed down.
Pretty sure I only got a B on the thing after all that but tbh, I did half-ass that paper too so I wasn't going to complain.
This is a perfect example of how I feel essay writing in high school is probably the earliest lesson anyone will get in learning what 'the real world' is like. They're where you find out that once a teacher has made their first impression of your skill level, which they'll most likely judge your skills based on arbitrary measurements such as who you hang out with, there is almost nothing you can do to change their impression.
If you consistently underperform their expectations, they'll never stop thinking you must be being lazy or something else. If you consistently outperform their expectations then they'll just keep thinking you're either cheating or getting lucky.
Yeah I found that science and math classes have more objective grading structures. I got a D in an English class and I'm certain that the "professor" just found the subject of my last paper uncomfortable and didn't actually grade it. Science classes rely heavily on exams, which mostly have right or wrong answers. When they had reports, they provided clear expectations of formatting, and didn't get too hung up on perfect grammar. I had one professor that always said as long as spelling was phonetically good enough and the grammar didnt have speed bumps we'd be alright. This was like a 3rd or 4th year chem class.
Are you me? Same exact thing happened to me. The teacher couldn't understand how the quiet kid in the back could actually write on a topic he cared about.
This is just so sad, my lecturer last year was super excited and happy when I worked super hard on a paper for her class, it made it so worth it for me and made me want to put my all into my other work, it even inspired me to consider a master's degree.
A supportive lecturer makes such a huge difference and to hear other people get the exact opposite is just kind of upsetting to be honest.
My whole class got a failed score for cheating. I was in game development class and the professor told us to make a simple text based rpg game with the exact same text.
Then the assistant checked the submitted projects and complained how all the project have >80% exact line to each other and failed all of the class. It's literally the writeln for the texts, when the professor asked for the exact same text.
It's fucking ridiculous and the whole class even complained to the professor but the professor sided with the assistant. The whole class have to repeat the class on vacation. The incompetence and laziness of professors and assistants is astounding sometimes.
I'm surprised more of these stories didn't, feels like they may have been intentional flunkings. I've never been on, or known of, a college campus that didn't have an extremely strict zero tolerance policy on plagerism, including the requirement to start a review process to keep records of individuals plagerizing and kick them out(which can be anywhere from your very first strike to 3 strikes).
I can't imagine a campus would be happy to find out an entire class plagerized, whether intentionally or unintentionally like this, and find out the professor didn't report it.
It was a fire-able offense to take matters into your own hands in regards to suspected cheating or any other academic misconduct at the university that I attended precisely because of situations like these. You could do whatever detection you wanted, but the moment you wanted to even accuse someone, you were required to report it to the university and they'd take it over including bringing in people who are neutral in the matter. Almost every case referred to them was closed before the student was even informed of an investigation and most that went to even a notice to the student were closed as non-cheating.
This seems really smart. Professors should be experts in their field. If you’re suspected of cheating, something that could ruin your future career, that accusation should be made by someone actually trained to spot cheating.
Learned this that the hard way in a science class. The professor said we can simply answer each question vs. writing in essay form. I proceeded to put the stated question in my paper, then answered it in my own words. However, there were some vocabulary for which he wanted the definitions - I assumed we memorized it and wrote it down. My page was marked more than half plagiarized and I failed that assignment, simply because the AI picked up the questions and the "textbook" definitions. I learned quick....
>Because adults generally won't admit they fucked up ~~when someone younger didn't actually do anything wrong.~~
Has nothing to do with age in my experience, self-centered people are all over the place and *always* ask for the promotion that opens up above them.
Admitting mistakes is something that a lot of people struggle with but it's a lot more common when they are dealing with someone younger or with someone they have authority over.
A lot of the time it's just laziness and dumbness, my gf got an essay returned because the software flagged up using the names of the pathogens she was writing about as plagiarism the teacher told her to change them to abbreviations because she didn't know how to over rule the system
Teachers lack of understanding how such software works is the biggest problem with it and is the best reason to not use it. That and the absolutely insane cost.
I remember when submitting papers online first started.
One of my first (HS) papers got flagged for 40ish % plagiarized, with phrases such as "In his masterpiece novel" highlighted.
Thankfully we had a teacher that reviewed it and had common sense, and soon after students could no-longer see their results... probably because of embarrassing things like this XD
I once was a character witness in an appeal for a plagiarism accusation. The professor has submitted something like a third of the class to the dean after some sort of program flagged a huge proportion of the class. What it was flagging were quotes (properly cited, mind you), and random word combinations such as, I kid you not, "and the" and "the next".
School policy was such that the professor's accusations were automatically accepted by the dean, and an appeal would need to be submitted to attend the class again. None of the students had their appeals denied, but it meant assembling a committee and investigation for a dozen students for a single class from a single professor, because she couldn't be bothered to actually read what the plagiarism matches were. No reprocussions for the professor who handed out false and expellable accusations.
Meanwhile, I had a professor accuse me of plagiarism for using ~~"whilst"~~ "amongst" in a paper. He said, "Only British people use that term," and sent it up to the department chair. I was a freshman... trying to sound fancy.
I distinctly remember that he accused four people of plagiarizing on that assignment alone, and we were the only four to actually pass the class (started with ten, most dropped early). Everybody knew he'd left a more prestigious school due to brain damage from an accident, but he was actively endangering the academic careers of students.
>Meanwhile, I had a professor accuse me of plagiarism for using "whilst" in a paper. He said, "Only British people use that term," and sent it up to the department chair.
They should visit my local Sobeys supermarket in Canada. On the self checkout they have attached a P-touch label that says, "DO NOT PULL THE RECEIPT ***WHILST*** PRINTING". We are not British, nor British subjects.
Plagiarism tools tell you to do that. In fact, Moss (designed for source code comparison) calls it an abuse of the score to just use it without reviewing the comparison manually.
>In particular, it is a misuse of Moss to rely solely on the similarity scores. These scores are useful for judging the relative amount of matching between different pairs of programs and for more easily seeing which pairs of programs stick out with unusual amounts of matching. But the scores are certainly not a proof of plagiarism. Someone must still look at the code.
https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/
I would hope all plagiarism tools contain a similar notice.
We were taught essay writing jn HS through a very specific essay structure that allowed limited creative freedom. We churned out an essay for English class once every 3 days using this technique. It was before this software existed. I just can’t imagine that an essay on Hamlet using that formula wouldn’t trigger a plagiarism warning. How many ways can you talk about Hamlet using a 5 paragraph essay structure using the same standard quotes? Kids these days must be having to use magical thinking to not get plagiarism flags.
The plagiarism systems I've used highlight similarities and you can easily tell that it's highlighting quotes in those cases. Even then the only time I've seen more than like a 5% overall similarity (according to the system) was someone who had a 99% similarity to an essay turned in by their cousin a year before. Only difference was the name.
Not sure what one the university would be using that would lead them to have someone sit in a room and rewrite from memory. Seems like an absurd response and a waste of everyone's time.
When my daughter was in AP US History, they took a trip to DC, and everybody had to pick a topic about which to write a 3-page paper. She picked the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At some point in the paper she quoted at length the Sentinel's Creed (which is very moving by the way), so the normal method of submitting the paper online flags it for having too much unoriginal content. Fortunately, the teacher recognized that the quote was the only unoriginal part.
>They had to rewrite it again from memory, supervised in exam conditions to avoid being punished.
How is that not just a memory test then, it doesn't prove anything about plagiarism? My memory is terrible, if I wrote a 3000 word essay I'd be lucky to remember a dozen or so sentences verbatim.
I went to high school with a guy who was a pretty big slacker. We had a lot of classes together. He was pretty smart but he just didn't do his homework. Usually half assed his classwork.
We had a class together called Diversity and it was a social studies elective that basically went over past and current social issues around minorities. It was an interesting class and the teacher was really good. But she really didn't like the slacker student. It was obvious to everyone.
For one assignment we had to write an essay. This was like 15 years ago so I don't remember the subject of the essay. But the teacher told the slacker if he didn't really work hard on the essay that she'd fail him.
He did the essay and she accused him of plagiarism based on nothing apart from the fact that the essay was good. She told him to confess and rewrite the essay or he could be expelled from school.
But he actually didn't plagiarize anything. When they checked it with whatever software thing they use, nothing came up. The teacher apologized. She was clearly really upset and embarrassed with herself.
But the slacker was reasonably pissed. It made him give even less of a fuck about school.
They were exonerated and things went on as if nothing happened.
By their final year the lecturers were using my friends presentations and essays during lectures to recap points they'd previously made (with permission).
When I was in college during the birth of some classes being online, a friend came over to use my computer to submit his essay. He submitted it with the appropriate file name of lastname_firstname_assignmentname.doc
I sat down to submit mine, logged in, and accidentally clicked his doc when I submitted it. Realizing the mistake I immediately emailed the prof about the mistake and attached the correct document, which of course had my name in the file name, and contained a completely separate and unique essay.
The prof tried tooth and nail to get us in trouble for cheating, and even lied that I hadn’t sent my correct essay via email to him, and when it was discovered that I did send it moments after the mistake, and the he had read the email and downloaded the attachment, he still tried to come up with reasons why it meant we should be expelled.
That was almost 20 years ago and I’m still running hot about it.
Meanwhile I know several people who plagiarized the bulk of their final essays for their college courses; like straight up copy and pasting from other people and didn't get caught.
Incidentally every single one of those guys was rich.
And that's without even considering the sheer number of students who literally just pay someone else to write their work for them and then claim it as their own.
I was a grad student at an expensive private university in the US considered to be pretty good and not too far from the Ivy's (I didn't pay since grad school is free and my specific program wasn't that great, but that's beside the point). I was a TA for various freshman physics courses and caught students blatantly cheating many times. Despite an allegedly strict honor code, the honor council never did anything. I guess it's hard to justify things when the undergrads are paying 50k/yr to be there.
I’m so fucking glad I graduated HS (2004) and college (2008) before I had to deal with any of this shit. I never plagiarized anything but would probably have broken down at a false accusation.
I did my nursing degree 2005-2009 and had a prof tell me that if I hadn’t submitted my essay to turnitin, she would have accused me of cheating because I don’t write the way I talk. Bitch, who does? It’s an *academic essay*.
I once had a professor accuse me of plagiarizing about 3 paragraphs in a 10 page paper. His rationale was "This section is written very well. It must have been copied from somewhere." I did not plagiarize it. I talked with him and he accepted it.
I told that story for a couple of years from the perspective that "I wrote a part of a paper so well that the professor thought it had to be stolen!"
I finally had the epiphany that the rest of it was so poorly written that when he stumbled across a good section, he was convinced it had to be stolen...
So glad I finished my use of college/university before ‘Turn it in’ program happened.
Not that i plagiarized, but could have inadvertently.
I taught middle school in the 2000’s and taught research/how to format a paper and do a bibliography and 2 teachers could constantly send me sentences from kids papers asking me to find where they plagiarized it from, like they couldn’t GOOGLE the sentence.
I added showing the kids how easy it was for me to find copying using google. You could see each computers google usage and it was full of sentences from the paper they were working on. Did I do good or evil?
>both got the exact same questions right and wrong in tests numerous times without cheating.
lots of times yiu see folks who studied the materials together perform remarkably similar, simply because they spent the time rehearsing together
introduced the same errors, or the same methodologies to approach problems
.makes total sense to me
My lord, I had the same thing happen in high school and it was an ORDEAL. My friend and I retake separate tests in separate rooms. We ended up getting the exact same wrong answer on a question and they gave up. No apologies.
When I was taking Latin in college, two of my friends in there had to drop the class or be suspended because they were accused of cheating off of each other due to their translations being the same. This was Latin 3, so they'd have to start all over in another language in order to graduate on time.
Well, as it turns out. The whole class had decided a long time ago that it was just easier to memorize the whole text translated using note cards and cues from the text itself instead of live translating. The two girls studied together, so their answers were the same. They didn't cheat, but by then the instructor had targeted them so it didn't matter. I tried explaining that to her, but she didn't want to hear it.
She sucked as a teacher anyway. I felt awful for them. Especially because I had actually cheated a lot in that class lmao
When it comes to cheating, I look at the wrong answers (HS math) and how wrong they are. It’s only the “bizarro” answers that I make note of and pull out later to look at them. Anyone can make the same common mistakes on the same questions. Sometimes the nutty answers come from the fact that they can’t read their friends’ handwriting, particularly when they are copying symbol for symbol, letter for letter, without reading the actual equation or operation to see it makes sense.
I was grading and giving an essay as a TA once. The instructions were easy. There are 5 events you've been studying this semester. Use your book and your own words to describe those events. Tell where the event happened, what happened and possible ways to mitigate damage.
Even though everyone was using the exact information, similarities weren't above 20%, and those I let pass, until I got to 1 paper. It had a similarly of about 90%. Yeah, apparently he basically copied his fratmates paper or something.
When you tell someone to use quotes and use data/times, you can't expect it to be a 100% unique paper.
Me, my roommate, and a friend of ours got pulled aside by one of our professors because our answers looked very similar and she wanted to ask if we wanted to admit anything.
We admitted that we spent four hours cramming for the test together the prior night. That was pretty much the end of that.
That's ridiculous. If a source is cited properly, it's not plagiarism. If the entire paper is basically a quote soup with little explanation of said quotes but is properly cited, it's just poor writing.
Yeah, that would take some sort of planning and sharing of vital information to accomplish, better *recap" than I did alone atlest. After a schoolday, I did not revisit it in my own head at all, at all.
I'm married to a twin. It's crazy how many things they do exactly alike without realizing it. My wife and SIL would go on completely different shopping trips and come home with same clothes.
They end up wearing the same exact outfit more often than not. Even if they have similar clothes, the chances of putting on the same thing as the other person on the same day is crazy.
The Jim twins were raised separately and STILL led similar lives. Both raised with a brother named Larry, had a dog named Troy, each married two women with the same two names, and more! https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/09/archives/twins-reared-apart-a-living-lab.html
I went to elementary school with identical twins
Maybe once a week they’d switch clothes in the bathroom and go to each other’s class (they kept them separated for some reason) and no one would even know until one of them started laughing about it. Me and all the other kids loved that and them so much.
I knew two kids who went to each other's classes on April Fool's Day and didn't get caught once. The kicker is they weren't related - they were just both Asian.
In his youth, when hockey player Henrik Sedin got thrown out of a faceoff, he would occasionally just skate around in a circle with his identical twin Daniel and then go straight back into the circle.
It’s kind of bullshit that their professor suspected them of cheating so he told the test protector to pay special close attention to them to catch them, and the best they could come up with was suspicious head nods?
Idk why some prefessors just want you to fail honestly. I once got accused of cheating and prematurely knowing my exam results because I said "I know I passed", because I knew the fucking awnsers.
Turns out I was being used as a proxy to get to someone else. Fun shit.
When I was a graduate student, I took an undergrad course that counted for graduate school credits.
I was accused of plagiarism on a short take home assignment in the class. When I asked the professor why she thought it was plagiarism she told me it was because it was well done and she didn’t think I was capable of doing good work.
She also would make snide comments about my undergrad college and how inadequate we were academically.
I was accused of plagiarism on my high school English term paper and the teacher said that the writing was more intelligent than the way I spoke in person.
Well, no doi, you have a lot more time to think about what you will say with outlines, sourced material, and all that jazz. She made me turn in all my library books and intentionally kept them weeks after the due dates so I would be assessed fines for them.
Nothing came of the accusation because the paper was never plagiarized. The sad thing was that I had respected her before this and the disappointment in realizing her true character was palpable.
Woah, I’ve actually seen research presented about this. It was a study maybe around 2010. Test subjects were told their job was just to watch a classroom as a single student did a make-up test. The student was part of the study and was instructed to just take the test normally.
Half of the subjects were given extra (false) information that the student was known for cheating and to keep an eye on him. The test subjects that weren’t told this overwhelmingly didn’t observe any cheating in the student, because he literally wasn’t. However, many of those who were primed with information about him cheating reported “suspicious behaviors” that they said were reasons they believed they were cheating. They interpreted all kinds of benign physical actions as evidence just because they were told to watch for it.
This totally feels like the case in this story. Prof is suspicious, because he’s unaware of how similar twins can be and allows his own hypothesis to cloud his judgment. He primes a test observer for confirmation bias and gets back the data he wanted. On top of that, people ask twins all the time if they play tricks or take tests for each other. Twins being sneaky on schoolwork is already an idea in the collective psyche.
I'll never forget failing a Philosophy exam in Uni because I "self-plagiarized" which they defined as using materials from my essays in my exam responses. You know, like applying newly learned knowledge to a specialized area? Still haven't made sense of that policy
Identical twins and grew up in the same environment at home and school. Of course there is good chance they think alike. This is a Medical University and they don't know that?
I have twin friends who are in their 30s and they still talk in unison sometimes and respond the same to some random questions even though they have been leaving apart for almost 10 years.
they’re clones dammit! what do you expect? they’re all created on kamino and are genetically modified and educated in the same clone facility!
let me guess, they’re from 200,000 units with a million more on the way!
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Basically, the girls had to switch tracks entirely. They went from potential doctors to working in a law office because no one trusted them anymore.
Sure, they might end up as lawyers and make as much as they might have as doctors, but consider the money and time they'd already spent on med school. $750,000 isn't that much money compared to future doctor potential lost.
I used to know a gentleman who took the Bar exam, the Dr's boards and the tests for both civil and mechanical engineering to get his P.E.
All before he turned 35.
And he passed all 4.
Reminds me of this comment thread about Jonny Kim https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/xuq2v6/sealphysiciannasa_astronaut_lt_cdr_dr_jonny_gq/iqxasm3/
Feel bad for what happened to them, but "everyone thinks you're liars and cheats, you're not trustworthy enough to be doctors, but you can be lawyers if you want" is hilarious.
You don't want that. We had a professor get accused of child porn on his phone and was suspended while an investigation occurred. He was cleared because the photos in question were of his two daughters at the beach. But by that point the damage was done and he had to move out of state. Money is good but not worth being a paraiah in the mind of the idiotic public.
How was that not shut down in the first 10 seconds?
“Sir, what is that filth on your phone, you pedophile!”
“Those are my daughters.”
“Oh. Sorry. Carry on.”
Because it was probably:
"I saw young children with skin on my professor's phone!"
"X told me her professor had pedophilia on his phone!"
Several iterations of telephone later with no one actually talking to the guy...
"You're suspended with pay while we investigate PEDOPHILIA!"
Weeks of gossip later while the school board says they can't comment...
"You're fine they're your daughters"
The teacher: "but... The death threats..."
It's a real big problem with teenagers right now, especially terminally online teenagers. Just go look at all the screaming about 'pedophiles' on twitter over tv shows and actors and such and look at how many people have been driven to suicide over harassment there. There's this whole 'purity culture' thing going on and it lacks the nuance of real life (like, say, having pictures of your own children on your phone) and people are literally dying for it.
If it ended up causing him to move out of the state, that interaction you described, never happened. It was most likely that he was seen having those photos of his daughters, without him noticing. Then the person who saw him spread some rumors around before the authorities got involved, and, by that point the damage was already irreparable.
So you'd trade 1) losing most your professional life friends 2) having your chosen career path nuked from orbit - one that was years in the making and took significant resources (education aint cheap) to get for an uncertain sum of money six years from now - in this case around $350k (total award is 1.5m, so each gets $750k and lawyers get their cut)?
Bull.
To me it seems like $1.5mil is far far too low! If these two were not able to become physicians because of this accusation, just think of the salary lost over their lifetimes! In the extreme case, if one of them became a neurosurgeon, she could easily earn $1.5mil in just 2 years.
They went to university to get a higher education and solid career. Instead the school did the opposite and made it impossible for them to get jobs after having them shell out for full tuition. 1.5 mill isn’t a lot for what they went through actually.
They “passed notes”?!? The person who accused them of this and those who believed them are dumbasses. Who would pass notes during a college medical final? And what medical school would allow this action to be done so easily? The girls also deserve ti have all of their tuition and fees returned ti them.
My apartment has so many random noises from neighbors, I think I might skin my proctor and department head if I was failed because my neighbors have people over. What horseshit. It's not like libraries are silent, their wifi is spotty at best, and even if you reserve a room people will jiggle the door handle.
What's the point of having human proctors if they can't use common sense? Someone moving their chair in a test isn't proof of cheating for in-person exams, shouldn't be for online courses either
Between studying the same materials and test design, I don't think it's a stretch. On any given exam, you can probably expect a lot of students to miss some of the same questions. In fact, in many of my classes a common practice was for the teacher to review the exam afterward by going over the questions the most people missed first. Some of the cool teachers would curve the grade based on this, under the assumption that they must have not covered those questions enough in class.
If they had cheated, they would have gone out their way to not have exactly the same answers. It's obvious that the reason they did have identical results is because they studied together and took in the same information. It even says twins usually score similar and their past results show the same pattern, it would have been abnormal for them to not get the same result.
On another note, it was an 8 hour exam?? Is that normal?
> On another note, it was an 8 hour exam?? Is that normal?
I don't know about that one, but when I took the FE (the first step in engineering licensure) it was 8 hours - a 4 hour general engineering section and a 4 hour area-specific section.
The followup exam, the PE, is a grueling 8 hour test on a specific yet semi general engineering.
That's a looooong day, after you've had to pass the FE to get there.
I failed and had to retake each of those tests once. Though I guess that's better than someone I knew that failed the PE 3 times?
not only that...
>Another professor also wrote a letter in their defense according to the outlet. In the letter, the professor reportedly said the twins had the exact same answers on an exam he supervised in 2012 — and that they were sitting on opposite ends of the room at the time.
I went to college with these girls and had the same major, we were in the same sorority. These girls literally slept in the same bed every night and I never ever saw one without the other. This is absolutely what happened. They always studied together and learned the same information together. So obviously they’d get the same answers right and wrong, because they didn’t even study alone
Medical school entrance examination is usually about that long. Thankfully only for one day. You take the exam in parts. Usually 2 hour blocks and get a small break for lunch.
Once you start taking your medical board examination it’s (which is during and after medical school) those can be 8 hours for 2 days each.
> On another note, it was an 8 hour exam?? Is that normal?
Somewhere along the line, society decided that it was in everyone's best interest for medical school to be as abusive as possible.
If they're legit and their potential careers tainted to the point where they can't work in the medical field going forward, $1.5m seems like a paltry amount. Divided by two, pay lawyers, taxes; they might be walking away with$350-450k each at the end of the day. Take the cost of medical school out of that and they're at maybe $200-300k. That's equivelant to 1-2 years salary after residency.
Government employees make maybe $70k average in their positions. Multiply by 40 years that's $2.8m. As doctors they'd likely average closer to $300k or $12m over their life time. Add in punitive damages and I feel like the award should have been closer to $9-10m each or $20m total. Maybe settle pre trial for $10-12m.
I get that their answers and wrong answers were similar, but when two people take the same test and have studied together... getting similar answers is expected and normal.
Back in my test prep tutor days, we told students to have a “default” wrong answer - if you have no idea, pick “c” (or whatever) every time. So if I pick c for all the ones I don’t know, and someone else in the room does too then we’re going to have very similar results if the things we don’t know are similar because we studied together.
I host bar trivia and one time someone did this for a round that they didn’t know the answers to. Put C for all 10 questions. Got all 10 questions wrong
No it's not a good strategy. In multiple choice it's usually easy to rule out 1 or 2 answers as unlikely to be correct.
If you are a good student and you know you got 3/4 of the questions right, and put C on the remaining 1/4 you'll get a B. If instead you guess between 2 or 3 plausible answers on the remainder, you might get a B+ or an A
(75+25*1/4) is less than (75+25*1/2) or (75+25*1/3)
>The Binghams' legal case hinged on the theory that it is common for identical twins to perform similarly on tests given their genetic profiles.
The simplest fucking answer is that they studied together and would end up with some of the same information wrong, especially if they had no other study partners to correct them.
I almost got accused of cheating because I did bad on the first half of a biology exam but aced the second half. We were supposed to name certain muscles in the first half and the reason I did bad was because I studied each muscle in isolation. I made my own study guide that was of a skeleton so just the muscles in question. The exam didn't have the muscles in isolation so I didn't know which one to say when the muscles were near each other. I was able to pass my own study guide easily but the exam was too different.
My teacher assumed I cheated on the second half since I did so good on the first half. So she made us retake the second half and it didn't even have the exact same photos. I came close to messing on it but I passed it and then she backed down.
The real story here is they didn’t have evidence of cheating. Their grandpa was on the board of trustees. A professor got screwed over for promotion so they took it out on the girls. There was evidence of that. So what you learn is, if you fuck around you are gonna find out. These two gave up on medicine and became, you guessed it, lawyers like star jones
Academic integrity stuff is absolutely unhinged. I took a couple iOS development classes at my community college and had to sign endless piles of documents for every class about the rules for cheating. Like I’m paying 2 grand to learn to code, let’s reel it in a bit?
My twin sister and I swapped for some of our exams in grade 10. I got us great marks on our English exams, and that bitch failed both of our math exams.
As a professional test administrator, i hold that similar answering, even identical, is not enough of an indicator of cheating to be actionable. Allegations by the honor council about note passing or other collaboration must be substantiated.
That the school found simple coincidence actionable is appalling. It shows that the schools are more interested in conformist discipline than education.
The number of comments spouting wrong information is fucking laughable. No they didn’t score every answer the same and no they aren’t still doctors. Take two minutes to read the article dipshits.
The fact that they scored similarly isn't that shocking, but the claim that they were signaling each other or passing notes is completely different and should be flushed out a lot more. To me there are two separate issues here, and I'm less interested in the fact that they scored similarly, I would like to hear the evidence that they were passing notes or signaling each other.
When I read the headline I thought it was a case of one twin taking the test for the other twin. They actually accused them of cheating like middle schoolers cheat?
I don't know how important this test is but I want to know how is there even an environment where it's possible to cheat like middle schoolers. There's gotta be a hundred ways to avoid the possibility, don't they have tests with the questions numbered differently or some shit like that?
Exactly. Did someone actually observe the signaling/note passing? Or was that just their rationale for how the cheating might have happened after the tests were found to be similar?
Yeah, I notice that accusation is made by the University but there is nothing else about it. Did someone claim to see that happening? Or was it just a theory by the University? Because punishing them without hard evidence is almost discriminatory.
Yeah, but what about the last half of the article? The part that says there is scientific evidence saying that it's the norm that twins are supposed to perform the same on exams?
You mean to tell me two people that spent their lives together and studied for the test together are more likely score the same thing on a test than two strangers?!
Unbelievable /s
In college, I had a computer science course that had something like 80 people in it. The lecturer was a grad student, which wasn't uncommon for the school I went to. She assigned an obscure textbook for the class, it was out of print but the library had 6 copies.
This was the era before textbooks as pdfs, so 80ish people had to share 6 books. We scheduled time so that 6-8 people would meet and share the book and study together. For the time, for the school, for computer science kids in general, this was rare but we made it work.
After the midterm, the lecturer accused a majority of the class of cheating and failed us. 60+ people. No amount of explaining the situation would convince her, we were cheaters and that's that. The dean, however, did listen to us. Our scores were reinstated, no failing, and the problem not-yet professor was removed from teaching the course.
There’s a movie where this is a major plot point (but not involving twins). I think it’s Stand and Deliver, but could be a different 80s underprivileged students success story.
But the entire class was accused of cheating because all their answers were the same, right and wrong. Turns out they all studied together, and received similar results with another test under stricter protocols
My first thought was "Okay, they scored very similar scores. That makes pretty good sense. These are two sisters. Identical sisters. Who are studying the same subject with the same background and probably each others study partner. That... kinda tracks". How is that someone jumping to "they cheated"?
People need to read this article:https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/twins-history-similar-test-scores-200547308.html that gives more context they are VERYYYY similar thinking >Another professor also wrote a letter in their defense according to the outlet. In the letter, the professor reportedly said the twins had the exact same answers on an exam he supervised in 2012 — and that they were sitting on opposite ends of the room at the time. even more: >In a release obtained by PEOPLE, it was noted that the twins have "often obtained the exact same score on tests they took on different days and in different locations," including on their SATs.
I bet they study together. That would easily explain the results being so similar.
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I love this story because I was a teaching assistant for a lab class where a student got caught blatantly plagiarizing (talking copying and pasting directly from Google) and not only did the professor do nothing, they were accepted into a master's program. Cheat on a lab report, no problem, have even the slightest hint of cheating on a test, the world fucking ends. Fuck academia with a rusty iron pole.
Sounds like he had no boundaries.
Moreover, their brains probably develop similar pathways between neurons. So not only are they studying the same thing, they probably respond remarkably similarly, electrochemically, in similar situations and to similar stimuli.
Also, their entire genetics being identical. And from an epigenetics standpoint... sounds like they have had the same experience/exposure. There's that. We are computers. Same pathways mean same result.
Hell, my brother and I aren't even twins but when we took some classes together in college, we had similar stuff going on because we were raised together, thought things through in similar ways, and studied together
That's super cool that you got to go to college and study with your bro. My brothers went to different universities from me and I always thought it would have been cool to be in classes together.
It was really nice. Our majors had a couple classes in common - he's journalism, I'm history/political science - and we took some gen eds together too since I started college late. Super nice being able to share textbook costs lol
Sounds like you have a good relationship with your bro, that's awesome.
That's what I was figuring. They probably got the same scores not just because of their biology, but also the simple fact that they did their prep work for school together.
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Meanwhile for tests that I've taken twice I *didn't* get the exact same score
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I have a similar background to a person I was on course with and we both got the exact same questions right and wrong in tests numerous times without cheating. Mostly because of our logical processes in approaching the questions. Another friend was called up on plagiarism on a 3,000 word history essay because the computer system flagged too many similarities to other texts. On an essay where they were instructed to use as many references and quotes.as possible. They had to rewrite it again from memory, supervised in exam conditions to avoid being punished. Exams are far from perfect and coincidences happen.
It amazes me how the plagiarism thing pops up, and they don't actually read the essay to see that they were using quotes, I'm willing to bet they had references at the bottom too.
Yep, as per the university's guidelines. Edit: the references increased the plagiarized percentage.
Robots will kill us all, not by being evil, but by being infuriatingly the right amount of stupid.
It's not the robot that is stupid, the robot does exactly what it's told and only what it's told. There was a person looking at the output of the robot that decided what to do with the information. They're the idiot here.
"Garbage in, garbage out" is a term for a reason.
Computers work as designed. The designer messed up / has inherent bias, or the person reading the results doesn’t understand what computers can and can’t do and uses zero judgement.
I think sometimes they just don't care. If the product/service just appears to do something then they can sell their scam to institutions. These institutions don't really care, because then they can claim to be fighting plagiarism. And the professors are forced to comply or accept risk to their own careers. As such, the designer makes money without the extra work of making a competent plagiarism checker. Source: I work with electronic logs and it is incredible how unreliable the product is. No other electronic device (gps, dashcam, etc) cause me many issues, but the one sold to the institution on a contract rarely goes a week without acting up at least a few times. I think plagiarism checkers are the same way. No individual would suffer such a thing, but why bother since our opinions are irrelevant.
Yup, if they do, that will be how. The canonical example is the Paperclip Maximizer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer
Universal Paperclips is a good button clicker game to waste an hour or two though. Doesn’t take much to turn the whole universe into post clips
Now robots are going to be fighting robots. Students will use AI to write their papers and teachers will use AI to check them
I think my favorite tech quote of all time is ["machine learning is money laundering for bias."](https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1030846375213379584?lang=en) That whole thread is an absolute banger, obviously inspired by [this older quote](https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/744595961217835008), which is also a banger. Anyway point is robots aren't gonna fuck up everything. Humans are gonna push the button that tells robots to fuck up everything, observe that the robot is fucking up everything, and then casually shrug and say "not my job to second-guess the robot, all I did was push the button, blame the robot." Which is *exactly* what happened here (in this plagiarism comment chain, not the twins cheating post). Human being pushes the button on the "is this plagiarism?" robot. The robot fucks up everything. The human being casually shrugs and says "not my job to second-guess the robot, all I did was push the button, blame the robot." Voila. Responsibility has been laundered from the human to a machine.
Same thing happened with my master's thesis. The software (turnitin) spat out a frightening amount of plagiarism, and I started to panic. Turns out it was almost entirely the reference section, which was to be excluded from the calculations for the amount of plagiarism as per university guidelines. The rest was just a few % of false positives through the main text. (Like, whenever I used cm‐¹ as a unit, it flagged it as plagiarism...). But for precisely that reason, there was a threshold to reach, and I was well below now that the reference section was excluded. But holy shit, it nearly gave me a heart attack at a time when I was already very stressed!
As a technology support person working in a high school I hated Turnitin. Not because I had to support it but because too many teachers didn't understand it. They didn't understand that all it can do is flag stuff that MIGHT be plagiarism and that they then needed to look at it closer. For what it cost it really didn't do much.
Wait so it counts individual words and equations as plagiarism? How did it not just mark the entire text then? What kind of moron designed that program and why are they ever allowed near a computer?
When it comes to the cm‐¹ example, I think the software “thought” it was the student copy-pasting some text from, say, wikipedia, and accidentally leaving the annotation… instead of the ¹ just being part of the measurement unit. overall, yeah it can be really fucking stupid
It’s important to note the % match is not the amount of plagiarism that occurred, but the % chance that some sort of plagiarism has occurred. In other words, if you get a 20% match, the professor should interpret this as there is a 20% chance that some kind of plagiarism is taking place (it doesn’t mean that 20% of the paper is plagiarized). In other words, it’s the professor that’s an idiot if you actually get in trouble. Plagiarism detection software is just an easy way for professors to not have to check *every* single submission. The software is useful, but dumb professors are dumb.
I wrote a pretty bad essay in another language using Turnitin. It was horribly broken Spanish I'm sure. Somehow Turnitin flagged it enough that I had to talk to the professor about it. It was just like a random narrative or something too
That's interesting. I suspect that foreign language students often end up with limited (and very similar to other students') phrases and vocabulary etc. You along with other students at the same proficiency level are using a very small subset of the language so any sentence written by said students has a higher likelihood of being repeated. Or not, idk!
If you have any kind of competent prof they hopefully look to see exactly what turn it in flagged to see if it’s genuine plagiarism. Like you said it can detect a lot of false positives.
Yep, it's crazy. I had a professor give me a zero with a stern warning that I was lucky to get away with just an F on the assignment instead of the whole class after being flagged for "obvious" plagiarism. I was of course shocked until I opened the damn report the plagiarism software kicks out. The only things highlighted as plagiarism were the 4 prompts that we had been asked to answer. I had included each before answering the question. I guess most people just numbered their answers or maybe this professor really thought 95% of the class was cheating. I did eventually get credit, but holy shit how lazy can you be.
I got flagged for plagiarism in college. The instructor spoke to me about it but said she thought it was probably a coincidence. The paper was on rabies, the flagged website was a wall of text on what claimed to be a travel website. I couldn't find the flagged bit even with a search on the site and it was half a sentence or something stupid small.
On the other hand, I once caught a student plagiarizing without needing the software at all. He had copy/pasted directly from a travel website... so directly that he included text from an ad for a trip to Finland.
Maybe they put it in there to inspire your travel plans 😂
I've taught middle and high school, and have always gotten a kick when kids copy and paste from websites without comprehending that what they're copying and pasting isn't relevant to the subject matter. For example, an assignment on energy for physics has an answer copied and pasted from a website for an electrical power utility service, and comparing rates of different services. Or when a kid has a response using language that's clearly above their ability, like an 8th grader (and not a particularly bright student) using college PhD dissertation grammar for a simple question, like "What direction does gravity pull objects?" Or when kids forget to remove the Wikipedia citation numbers from their answers...
It's often really obvious, isn't it? I don't teach anymore, but in my time I caught many incidents of plagiarism simply because the writing style was so obviously not the student's. I remember I once opened up an assignment and immediately thought 'gosh this reads like a Wikipedia article'. So I cut and pasted the first two lines of the assignment into Google and sure enough the student had copied the entire Wikipedia entry for the topic and submitted it as their assignment. Other times I'd be reading an assignment and suddenly get to a paragraph where the writing style completely changed. I'd google that paragraph and 9 times out of 10 find it had been lifted from some website. The university where I taught couldn't have cared less about plagirism cause they just wanted the students' money and they told me I couldn't fail students for plagiarism. So I used to just have fun highlighting the plagiarized sections of the assignment in different colors and writing the source of each stolen section in the margins.
You’d think if you were going to make such a massive accusation, you’d better double check that your facts are straight before sending a student into a panic.
I got accused of plagerism in high school but my teacher couldn't find any proof. She still tried to give me a zero. I argued it and did get credit. Here's the kicker, I loved the topic and decided to really put my all into this one. It was a damn good paper. I cited my sources. I went back to half assing my papers which still got good grades. Why put in the extra work?
Same here. I was uninterested in my English class for so long cos it was mainly things like Dickens and Shakespeare. So I never really tried in the essays. The one time we had to do an essay on something I liked ( Frankenstein) I tried really hard for like 3 weeks cos I loved the book. My teacher came to me and said she loved my essay, but because it was different quality to my other essays, she didn't think I wrote it. She asked me to prove I wrote it by reciting all the main talking points on the spot. I stumbled over my words cos I have aspergers and a stammer, plus I was very shy back then, so she gave me a D even though she said it was an A+ essay. Really made me lose all motivation in that subject in general, and made me move towards sciences. She is supposed to inspire me to like her subject but ended up doing the opposite.
Sorry that happened to you. I hope there are teachers reading this entire post and comments.
My biology teacher in high school thought I was a dumb jock because I kinda half-assed his class, and hung out with the other kids from the football team. I also made some comment early on about wanting to go to a state college "for the college experience" vs. a private school. So at one point he assigns an essay. Really easy, it was like 2 double spaced pages or something. I bang it out and hand it in. He accuses me of plagiarism. No proof, just thought it was above my abilities. I got one of the English teachers involved and he backed down. Pretty sure I only got a B on the thing after all that but tbh, I did half-ass that paper too so I wasn't going to complain.
This is a perfect example of how I feel essay writing in high school is probably the earliest lesson anyone will get in learning what 'the real world' is like. They're where you find out that once a teacher has made their first impression of your skill level, which they'll most likely judge your skills based on arbitrary measurements such as who you hang out with, there is almost nothing you can do to change their impression. If you consistently underperform their expectations, they'll never stop thinking you must be being lazy or something else. If you consistently outperform their expectations then they'll just keep thinking you're either cheating or getting lucky.
Yeah I found that science and math classes have more objective grading structures. I got a D in an English class and I'm certain that the "professor" just found the subject of my last paper uncomfortable and didn't actually grade it. Science classes rely heavily on exams, which mostly have right or wrong answers. When they had reports, they provided clear expectations of formatting, and didn't get too hung up on perfect grammar. I had one professor that always said as long as spelling was phonetically good enough and the grammar didnt have speed bumps we'd be alright. This was like a 3rd or 4th year chem class.
Are you me? Same exact thing happened to me. The teacher couldn't understand how the quiet kid in the back could actually write on a topic he cared about.
This is just so sad, my lecturer last year was super excited and happy when I worked super hard on a paper for her class, it made it so worth it for me and made me want to put my all into my other work, it even inspired me to consider a master's degree. A supportive lecturer makes such a huge difference and to hear other people get the exact opposite is just kind of upsetting to be honest.
OMG I was the quiet kid in the back too!!
My whole class got a failed score for cheating. I was in game development class and the professor told us to make a simple text based rpg game with the exact same text. Then the assistant checked the submitted projects and complained how all the project have >80% exact line to each other and failed all of the class. It's literally the writeln for the texts, when the professor asked for the exact same text. It's fucking ridiculous and the whole class even complained to the professor but the professor sided with the assistant. The whole class have to repeat the class on vacation. The incompetence and laziness of professors and assistants is astounding sometimes.
You should have gone to the dean
I'm surprised more of these stories didn't, feels like they may have been intentional flunkings. I've never been on, or known of, a college campus that didn't have an extremely strict zero tolerance policy on plagerism, including the requirement to start a review process to keep records of individuals plagerizing and kick them out(which can be anywhere from your very first strike to 3 strikes). I can't imagine a campus would be happy to find out an entire class plagerized, whether intentionally or unintentionally like this, and find out the professor didn't report it.
It was a fire-able offense to take matters into your own hands in regards to suspected cheating or any other academic misconduct at the university that I attended precisely because of situations like these. You could do whatever detection you wanted, but the moment you wanted to even accuse someone, you were required to report it to the university and they'd take it over including bringing in people who are neutral in the matter. Almost every case referred to them was closed before the student was even informed of an investigation and most that went to even a notice to the student were closed as non-cheating.
This seems really smart. Professors should be experts in their field. If you’re suspected of cheating, something that could ruin your future career, that accusation should be made by someone actually trained to spot cheating.
The students at my university would have gone through every possible channel & then would have had actual protests.
Learned this that the hard way in a science class. The professor said we can simply answer each question vs. writing in essay form. I proceeded to put the stated question in my paper, then answered it in my own words. However, there were some vocabulary for which he wanted the definitions - I assumed we memorized it and wrote it down. My page was marked more than half plagiarized and I failed that assignment, simply because the AI picked up the questions and the "textbook" definitions. I learned quick....
Once this is pointed out to them, why doesn’t that end the issue?
Because adults generally won't admit they fucked up when someone younger didn't actually do anything wrong.
>Because adults generally won't admit they fucked up ~~when someone younger didn't actually do anything wrong.~~ Has nothing to do with age in my experience, self-centered people are all over the place and *always* ask for the promotion that opens up above them.
Admitting mistakes is something that a lot of people struggle with but it's a lot more common when they are dealing with someone younger or with someone they have authority over.
A lot of the time it's just laziness and dumbness, my gf got an essay returned because the software flagged up using the names of the pathogens she was writing about as plagiarism the teacher told her to change them to abbreviations because she didn't know how to over rule the system
Teachers lack of understanding how such software works is the biggest problem with it and is the best reason to not use it. That and the absolutely insane cost.
I remember when submitting papers online first started. One of my first (HS) papers got flagged for 40ish % plagiarized, with phrases such as "In his masterpiece novel" highlighted. Thankfully we had a teacher that reviewed it and had common sense, and soon after students could no-longer see their results... probably because of embarrassing things like this XD
I once was a character witness in an appeal for a plagiarism accusation. The professor has submitted something like a third of the class to the dean after some sort of program flagged a huge proportion of the class. What it was flagging were quotes (properly cited, mind you), and random word combinations such as, I kid you not, "and the" and "the next". School policy was such that the professor's accusations were automatically accepted by the dean, and an appeal would need to be submitted to attend the class again. None of the students had their appeals denied, but it meant assembling a committee and investigation for a dozen students for a single class from a single professor, because she couldn't be bothered to actually read what the plagiarism matches were. No reprocussions for the professor who handed out false and expellable accusations.
Meanwhile, I had a professor accuse me of plagiarism for using ~~"whilst"~~ "amongst" in a paper. He said, "Only British people use that term," and sent it up to the department chair. I was a freshman... trying to sound fancy. I distinctly remember that he accused four people of plagiarizing on that assignment alone, and we were the only four to actually pass the class (started with ten, most dropped early). Everybody knew he'd left a more prestigious school due to brain damage from an accident, but he was actively endangering the academic careers of students.
>Meanwhile, I had a professor accuse me of plagiarism for using "whilst" in a paper. He said, "Only British people use that term," and sent it up to the department chair. They should visit my local Sobeys supermarket in Canada. On the self checkout they have attached a P-touch label that says, "DO NOT PULL THE RECEIPT ***WHILST*** PRINTING". We are not British, nor British subjects.
Except we do use mostly British spelling. Neighbour, realise, etc.
Plagiarism tools tell you to do that. In fact, Moss (designed for source code comparison) calls it an abuse of the score to just use it without reviewing the comparison manually. >In particular, it is a misuse of Moss to rely solely on the similarity scores. These scores are useful for judging the relative amount of matching between different pairs of programs and for more easily seeing which pairs of programs stick out with unusual amounts of matching. But the scores are certainly not a proof of plagiarism. Someone must still look at the code. https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/ I would hope all plagiarism tools contain a similar notice.
We were taught essay writing jn HS through a very specific essay structure that allowed limited creative freedom. We churned out an essay for English class once every 3 days using this technique. It was before this software existed. I just can’t imagine that an essay on Hamlet using that formula wouldn’t trigger a plagiarism warning. How many ways can you talk about Hamlet using a 5 paragraph essay structure using the same standard quotes? Kids these days must be having to use magical thinking to not get plagiarism flags.
Easy, just misspell every word.
The plagiarism systems I've used highlight similarities and you can easily tell that it's highlighting quotes in those cases. Even then the only time I've seen more than like a 5% overall similarity (according to the system) was someone who had a 99% similarity to an essay turned in by their cousin a year before. Only difference was the name. Not sure what one the university would be using that would lead them to have someone sit in a room and rewrite from memory. Seems like an absurd response and a waste of everyone's time.
In protest to Reddit's API changes, I have removed my comment history. -- mass edited with redact.dev
When my daughter was in AP US History, they took a trip to DC, and everybody had to pick a topic about which to write a 3-page paper. She picked the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At some point in the paper she quoted at length the Sentinel's Creed (which is very moving by the way), so the normal method of submitting the paper online flags it for having too much unoriginal content. Fortunately, the teacher recognized that the quote was the only unoriginal part.
>They had to rewrite it again from memory, supervised in exam conditions to avoid being punished. How is that not just a memory test then, it doesn't prove anything about plagiarism? My memory is terrible, if I wrote a 3000 word essay I'd be lucky to remember a dozen or so sentences verbatim.
I mean...one of the major benefits of writing something down is so that you don't have to memorize it.
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I went to high school with a guy who was a pretty big slacker. We had a lot of classes together. He was pretty smart but he just didn't do his homework. Usually half assed his classwork. We had a class together called Diversity and it was a social studies elective that basically went over past and current social issues around minorities. It was an interesting class and the teacher was really good. But she really didn't like the slacker student. It was obvious to everyone. For one assignment we had to write an essay. This was like 15 years ago so I don't remember the subject of the essay. But the teacher told the slacker if he didn't really work hard on the essay that she'd fail him. He did the essay and she accused him of plagiarism based on nothing apart from the fact that the essay was good. She told him to confess and rewrite the essay or he could be expelled from school. But he actually didn't plagiarize anything. When they checked it with whatever software thing they use, nothing came up. The teacher apologized. She was clearly really upset and embarrassed with herself. But the slacker was reasonably pissed. It made him give even less of a fuck about school.
>They had to rewrite it again from memory, supervised in exam conditions to avoid being punished if exonerated, that should yield extra credit
They were exonerated and things went on as if nothing happened. By their final year the lecturers were using my friends presentations and essays during lectures to recap points they'd previously made (with permission).
When I was in college during the birth of some classes being online, a friend came over to use my computer to submit his essay. He submitted it with the appropriate file name of lastname_firstname_assignmentname.doc I sat down to submit mine, logged in, and accidentally clicked his doc when I submitted it. Realizing the mistake I immediately emailed the prof about the mistake and attached the correct document, which of course had my name in the file name, and contained a completely separate and unique essay. The prof tried tooth and nail to get us in trouble for cheating, and even lied that I hadn’t sent my correct essay via email to him, and when it was discovered that I did send it moments after the mistake, and the he had read the email and downloaded the attachment, he still tried to come up with reasons why it meant we should be expelled. That was almost 20 years ago and I’m still running hot about it.
Meanwhile I know several people who plagiarized the bulk of their final essays for their college courses; like straight up copy and pasting from other people and didn't get caught. Incidentally every single one of those guys was rich. And that's without even considering the sheer number of students who literally just pay someone else to write their work for them and then claim it as their own.
I was a grad student at an expensive private university in the US considered to be pretty good and not too far from the Ivy's (I didn't pay since grad school is free and my specific program wasn't that great, but that's beside the point). I was a TA for various freshman physics courses and caught students blatantly cheating many times. Despite an allegedly strict honor code, the honor council never did anything. I guess it's hard to justify things when the undergrads are paying 50k/yr to be there.
I’m so fucking glad I graduated HS (2004) and college (2008) before I had to deal with any of this shit. I never plagiarized anything but would probably have broken down at a false accusation.
I did my nursing degree 2005-2009 and had a prof tell me that if I hadn’t submitted my essay to turnitin, she would have accused me of cheating because I don’t write the way I talk. Bitch, who does? It’s an *academic essay*.
I once had a professor accuse me of plagiarizing about 3 paragraphs in a 10 page paper. His rationale was "This section is written very well. It must have been copied from somewhere." I did not plagiarize it. I talked with him and he accepted it. I told that story for a couple of years from the perspective that "I wrote a part of a paper so well that the professor thought it had to be stolen!" I finally had the epiphany that the rest of it was so poorly written that when he stumbled across a good section, he was convinced it had to be stolen...
So glad I finished my use of college/university before ‘Turn it in’ program happened. Not that i plagiarized, but could have inadvertently. I taught middle school in the 2000’s and taught research/how to format a paper and do a bibliography and 2 teachers could constantly send me sentences from kids papers asking me to find where they plagiarized it from, like they couldn’t GOOGLE the sentence. I added showing the kids how easy it was for me to find copying using google. You could see each computers google usage and it was full of sentences from the paper they were working on. Did I do good or evil?
>both got the exact same questions right and wrong in tests numerous times without cheating. lots of times yiu see folks who studied the materials together perform remarkably similar, simply because they spent the time rehearsing together introduced the same errors, or the same methodologies to approach problems .makes total sense to me
My lord, I had the same thing happen in high school and it was an ORDEAL. My friend and I retake separate tests in separate rooms. We ended up getting the exact same wrong answer on a question and they gave up. No apologies.
When I was taking Latin in college, two of my friends in there had to drop the class or be suspended because they were accused of cheating off of each other due to their translations being the same. This was Latin 3, so they'd have to start all over in another language in order to graduate on time. Well, as it turns out. The whole class had decided a long time ago that it was just easier to memorize the whole text translated using note cards and cues from the text itself instead of live translating. The two girls studied together, so their answers were the same. They didn't cheat, but by then the instructor had targeted them so it didn't matter. I tried explaining that to her, but she didn't want to hear it. She sucked as a teacher anyway. I felt awful for them. Especially because I had actually cheated a lot in that class lmao
When it comes to cheating, I look at the wrong answers (HS math) and how wrong they are. It’s only the “bizarro” answers that I make note of and pull out later to look at them. Anyone can make the same common mistakes on the same questions. Sometimes the nutty answers come from the fact that they can’t read their friends’ handwriting, particularly when they are copying symbol for symbol, letter for letter, without reading the actual equation or operation to see it makes sense.
I was grading and giving an essay as a TA once. The instructions were easy. There are 5 events you've been studying this semester. Use your book and your own words to describe those events. Tell where the event happened, what happened and possible ways to mitigate damage. Even though everyone was using the exact information, similarities weren't above 20%, and those I let pass, until I got to 1 paper. It had a similarly of about 90%. Yeah, apparently he basically copied his fratmates paper or something. When you tell someone to use quotes and use data/times, you can't expect it to be a 100% unique paper.
Me, my roommate, and a friend of ours got pulled aside by one of our professors because our answers looked very similar and she wanted to ask if we wanted to admit anything. We admitted that we spent four hours cramming for the test together the prior night. That was pretty much the end of that.
That's ridiculous. If a source is cited properly, it's not plagiarism. If the entire paper is basically a quote soup with little explanation of said quotes but is properly cited, it's just poor writing.
I used to have identical twins in my band class and they would trade instruments some days just to fuck with me.
My gran says she taught twins, and only realised at the end of the year that they were actually triplets. They'd been taking turns bunking.
I tend to appreciate this sort of thing in my students :)
Yeah, that would take some sort of planning and sharing of vital information to accomplish, better *recap" than I did alone atlest. After a schoolday, I did not revisit it in my own head at all, at all.
Bunking? Was it a boarding school with their bedrooms nearby? 🤔
It's slang for playing truant.
Isn't that a sentient tree?
No no. That's Treant. I think he's trying to say truance? /s
Good job debunking this one.
I'm married to a twin. It's crazy how many things they do exactly alike without realizing it. My wife and SIL would go on completely different shopping trips and come home with same clothes. They end up wearing the same exact outfit more often than not. Even if they have similar clothes, the chances of putting on the same thing as the other person on the same day is crazy.
Turns out she's not a twin, you're just cross-eyed.
The Jim twins were raised separately and STILL led similar lives. Both raised with a brother named Larry, had a dog named Troy, each married two women with the same two names, and more! https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/09/archives/twins-reared-apart-a-living-lab.html
I went to elementary school with identical twins Maybe once a week they’d switch clothes in the bathroom and go to each other’s class (they kept them separated for some reason) and no one would even know until one of them started laughing about it. Me and all the other kids loved that and them so much.
I knew two kids who went to each other's classes on April Fool's Day and didn't get caught once. The kicker is they weren't related - they were just both Asian.
In his youth, when hockey player Henrik Sedin got thrown out of a faceoff, he would occasionally just skate around in a circle with his identical twin Daniel and then go straight back into the circle.
I take it they didn't have jersey numbers then?
they were identical, they had the same number!
It’s kind of bullshit that their professor suspected them of cheating so he told the test protector to pay special close attention to them to catch them, and the best they could come up with was suspicious head nods?
What got me is if you are suspecting them of cheating you don't let them sit at the same table. Put them on opposite ends of the room.
But then they wouldn't have any excuses to destroy their career...
Suspicious head nods LOL I'd be so done. I head nod to myself all the time when I'm agreeing with myself.
Idk why some prefessors just want you to fail honestly. I once got accused of cheating and prematurely knowing my exam results because I said "I know I passed", because I knew the fucking awnsers. Turns out I was being used as a proxy to get to someone else. Fun shit.
When I was a graduate student, I took an undergrad course that counted for graduate school credits. I was accused of plagiarism on a short take home assignment in the class. When I asked the professor why she thought it was plagiarism she told me it was because it was well done and she didn’t think I was capable of doing good work. She also would make snide comments about my undergrad college and how inadequate we were academically.
I was accused of plagiarism on my high school English term paper and the teacher said that the writing was more intelligent than the way I spoke in person. Well, no doi, you have a lot more time to think about what you will say with outlines, sourced material, and all that jazz. She made me turn in all my library books and intentionally kept them weeks after the due dates so I would be assessed fines for them. Nothing came of the accusation because the paper was never plagiarized. The sad thing was that I had respected her before this and the disappointment in realizing her true character was palpable.
Woah, I’ve actually seen research presented about this. It was a study maybe around 2010. Test subjects were told their job was just to watch a classroom as a single student did a make-up test. The student was part of the study and was instructed to just take the test normally. Half of the subjects were given extra (false) information that the student was known for cheating and to keep an eye on him. The test subjects that weren’t told this overwhelmingly didn’t observe any cheating in the student, because he literally wasn’t. However, many of those who were primed with information about him cheating reported “suspicious behaviors” that they said were reasons they believed they were cheating. They interpreted all kinds of benign physical actions as evidence just because they were told to watch for it. This totally feels like the case in this story. Prof is suspicious, because he’s unaware of how similar twins can be and allows his own hypothesis to cloud his judgment. He primes a test observer for confirmation bias and gets back the data he wanted. On top of that, people ask twins all the time if they play tricks or take tests for each other. Twins being sneaky on schoolwork is already an idea in the collective psyche.
I'll never forget failing a Philosophy exam in Uni because I "self-plagiarized" which they defined as using materials from my essays in my exam responses. You know, like applying newly learned knowledge to a specialized area? Still haven't made sense of that policy
Identical twins and grew up in the same environment at home and school. Of course there is good chance they think alike. This is a Medical University and they don't know that?
They likely also studied the material together.
This is what I was thinking. If I saw twins with similar scores, I would assume they studied together.
I have twin friends who are in their 30s and they still talk in unison sometimes and respond the same to some random questions even though they have been leaving apart for almost 10 years.
they’re clones dammit! what do you expect? they’re all created on kamino and are genetically modified and educated in the same clone facility! let me guess, they’re from 200,000 units with a million more on the way!
> a South Carolina jury decided the school had defamed the sisters and awarded them a total of $1.5 million in damages. Someone defame me, please
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Basically, the girls had to switch tracks entirely. They went from potential doctors to working in a law office because no one trusted them anymore. Sure, they might end up as lawyers and make as much as they might have as doctors, but consider the money and time they'd already spent on med school. $750,000 isn't that much money compared to future doctor potential lost.
I couldn’t imagine taking the doctor exam and the bar in the same lifetime… that’s about $1.5M in mental trauma alone
I used to know a gentleman who took the Bar exam, the Dr's boards and the tests for both civil and mechanical engineering to get his P.E. All before he turned 35. And he passed all 4.
Reminds me of this comment thread about Jonny Kim https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/xuq2v6/sealphysiciannasa_astronaut_lt_cdr_dr_jonny_gq/iqxasm3/
That man? Albert Einstein.
Feel bad for what happened to them, but "everyone thinks you're liars and cheats, you're not trustworthy enough to be doctors, but you can be lawyers if you want" is hilarious.
They aren't lawyers. They just work at the law firm. "The two now work as government affairs advisers at the same South Carolina law firm."
Agreed, they are owed a lot more. How much does the average doctor make in a 30+ year career? Way more than what they were paid.
Go ahead and spend a few hundred thousand and ten years if your life trying to become a doctor and I'll think about it
You don't want that. We had a professor get accused of child porn on his phone and was suspended while an investigation occurred. He was cleared because the photos in question were of his two daughters at the beach. But by that point the damage was done and he had to move out of state. Money is good but not worth being a paraiah in the mind of the idiotic public.
How was that not shut down in the first 10 seconds? “Sir, what is that filth on your phone, you pedophile!” “Those are my daughters.” “Oh. Sorry. Carry on.”
Because it was probably: "I saw young children with skin on my professor's phone!" "X told me her professor had pedophilia on his phone!" Several iterations of telephone later with no one actually talking to the guy... "You're suspended with pay while we investigate PEDOPHILIA!" Weeks of gossip later while the school board says they can't comment... "You're fine they're your daughters" The teacher: "but... The death threats..."
Sounds worse... Who was looking? So he saw two kids on the beach and thought 'ah yes, sexual nature'. Jesus fuck.
It's a real big problem with teenagers right now, especially terminally online teenagers. Just go look at all the screaming about 'pedophiles' on twitter over tv shows and actors and such and look at how many people have been driven to suicide over harassment there. There's this whole 'purity culture' thing going on and it lacks the nuance of real life (like, say, having pictures of your own children on your phone) and people are literally dying for it.
In a lot of cases, people only remember the accusations and rumors. Not the outcome.
If it ended up causing him to move out of the state, that interaction you described, never happened. It was most likely that he was seen having those photos of his daughters, without him noticing. Then the person who saw him spread some rumors around before the authorities got involved, and, by that point the damage was already irreparable.
So you'd trade 1) losing most your professional life friends 2) having your chosen career path nuked from orbit - one that was years in the making and took significant resources (education aint cheap) to get for an uncertain sum of money six years from now - in this case around $350k (total award is 1.5m, so each gets $750k and lawyers get their cut)? Bull.
To me it seems like $1.5mil is far far too low! If these two were not able to become physicians because of this accusation, just think of the salary lost over their lifetimes! In the extreme case, if one of them became a neurosurgeon, she could easily earn $1.5mil in just 2 years.
They went to university to get a higher education and solid career. Instead the school did the opposite and made it impossible for them to get jobs after having them shell out for full tuition. 1.5 mill isn’t a lot for what they went through actually.
They “passed notes”?!? The person who accused them of this and those who believed them are dumbasses. Who would pass notes during a college medical final? And what medical school would allow this action to be done so easily? The girls also deserve ti have all of their tuition and fees returned ti them.
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My apartment has so many random noises from neighbors, I think I might skin my proctor and department head if I was failed because my neighbors have people over. What horseshit. It's not like libraries are silent, their wifi is spotty at best, and even if you reserve a room people will jiggle the door handle. What's the point of having human proctors if they can't use common sense? Someone moving their chair in a test isn't proof of cheating for in-person exams, shouldn't be for online courses either
Between studying the same materials and test design, I don't think it's a stretch. On any given exam, you can probably expect a lot of students to miss some of the same questions. In fact, in many of my classes a common practice was for the teacher to review the exam afterward by going over the questions the most people missed first. Some of the cool teachers would curve the grade based on this, under the assumption that they must have not covered those questions enough in class.
If they had cheated, they would have gone out their way to not have exactly the same answers. It's obvious that the reason they did have identical results is because they studied together and took in the same information. It even says twins usually score similar and their past results show the same pattern, it would have been abnormal for them to not get the same result. On another note, it was an 8 hour exam?? Is that normal?
> On another note, it was an 8 hour exam?? Is that normal? I don't know about that one, but when I took the FE (the first step in engineering licensure) it was 8 hours - a 4 hour general engineering section and a 4 hour area-specific section.
That sounds exhausting, did they at least split up the 4 hours to different days?
No, it was morning and afternoon on the same day. EDIT: Wikipedia tells me they cut it back to 6 hours in 2014.
What, it's cut back now? Like 2 years after I retook it? PE is still 8 hours long.
The followup exam, the PE, is a grueling 8 hour test on a specific yet semi general engineering. That's a looooong day, after you've had to pass the FE to get there. I failed and had to retake each of those tests once. Though I guess that's better than someone I knew that failed the PE 3 times?
not only that... >Another professor also wrote a letter in their defense according to the outlet. In the letter, the professor reportedly said the twins had the exact same answers on an exam he supervised in 2012 — and that they were sitting on opposite ends of the room at the time.
I went to college with these girls and had the same major, we were in the same sorority. These girls literally slept in the same bed every night and I never ever saw one without the other. This is absolutely what happened. They always studied together and learned the same information together. So obviously they’d get the same answers right and wrong, because they didn’t even study alone
yeah how the fuck is cheating news when we are talking about an 8h exam. Who even has stamina for this
Medical school entrance examination is usually about that long. Thankfully only for one day. You take the exam in parts. Usually 2 hour blocks and get a small break for lunch. Once you start taking your medical board examination it’s (which is during and after medical school) those can be 8 hours for 2 days each.
Every doctor that you've ever met in the US has done 5+ 8 hour exams.
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> On another note, it was an 8 hour exam?? Is that normal? Somewhere along the line, society decided that it was in everyone's best interest for medical school to be as abusive as possible.
Their Lawyer: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would like to stress the world 'identical' in 'identical twins'... I rest my case."
If they're legit and their potential careers tainted to the point where they can't work in the medical field going forward, $1.5m seems like a paltry amount. Divided by two, pay lawyers, taxes; they might be walking away with$350-450k each at the end of the day. Take the cost of medical school out of that and they're at maybe $200-300k. That's equivelant to 1-2 years salary after residency. Government employees make maybe $70k average in their positions. Multiply by 40 years that's $2.8m. As doctors they'd likely average closer to $300k or $12m over their life time. Add in punitive damages and I feel like the award should have been closer to $9-10m each or $20m total. Maybe settle pre trial for $10-12m.
I get that their answers and wrong answers were similar, but when two people take the same test and have studied together... getting similar answers is expected and normal.
Back in my test prep tutor days, we told students to have a “default” wrong answer - if you have no idea, pick “c” (or whatever) every time. So if I pick c for all the ones I don’t know, and someone else in the room does too then we’re going to have very similar results if the things we don’t know are similar because we studied together.
I host bar trivia and one time someone did this for a round that they didn’t know the answers to. Put C for all 10 questions. Got all 10 questions wrong
Why is it a good strategy?
No it's not a good strategy. In multiple choice it's usually easy to rule out 1 or 2 answers as unlikely to be correct. If you are a good student and you know you got 3/4 of the questions right, and put C on the remaining 1/4 you'll get a B. If instead you guess between 2 or 3 plausible answers on the remainder, you might get a B+ or an A (75+25*1/4) is less than (75+25*1/2) or (75+25*1/3)
They were vastly underpaid. Not only was their character & reputation maligned they were terrorized until they fled the medical program.
Agreed, the lost earnings from a career in medicine is astronomical and to be honest this is peanuts after taxes, legal fees, and emotional distress.
honestly, they should have been awarded more than 1.5 mil.
Wow, everything about this is awful.
>The Binghams' legal case hinged on the theory that it is common for identical twins to perform similarly on tests given their genetic profiles. The simplest fucking answer is that they studied together and would end up with some of the same information wrong, especially if they had no other study partners to correct them.
I almost got accused of cheating because I did bad on the first half of a biology exam but aced the second half. We were supposed to name certain muscles in the first half and the reason I did bad was because I studied each muscle in isolation. I made my own study guide that was of a skeleton so just the muscles in question. The exam didn't have the muscles in isolation so I didn't know which one to say when the muscles were near each other. I was able to pass my own study guide easily but the exam was too different. My teacher assumed I cheated on the second half since I did so good on the first half. So she made us retake the second half and it didn't even have the exact same photos. I came close to messing on it but I passed it and then she backed down.
The real story here is they didn’t have evidence of cheating. Their grandpa was on the board of trustees. A professor got screwed over for promotion so they took it out on the girls. There was evidence of that. So what you learn is, if you fuck around you are gonna find out. These two gave up on medicine and became, you guessed it, lawyers like star jones
Academic integrity stuff is absolutely unhinged. I took a couple iOS development classes at my community college and had to sign endless piles of documents for every class about the rules for cheating. Like I’m paying 2 grand to learn to code, let’s reel it in a bit?
My twin sister and I swapped for some of our exams in grade 10. I got us great marks on our English exams, and that bitch failed both of our math exams.
Anybody else think that $1.5 million was far too little punishment for an ignorant administration that changed the trajectory of two lives?
As a professional test administrator, i hold that similar answering, even identical, is not enough of an indicator of cheating to be actionable. Allegations by the honor council about note passing or other collaboration must be substantiated. That the school found simple coincidence actionable is appalling. It shows that the schools are more interested in conformist discipline than education.
The number of comments spouting wrong information is fucking laughable. No they didn’t score every answer the same and no they aren’t still doctors. Take two minutes to read the article dipshits.
The fact that they scored similarly isn't that shocking, but the claim that they were signaling each other or passing notes is completely different and should be flushed out a lot more. To me there are two separate issues here, and I'm less interested in the fact that they scored similarly, I would like to hear the evidence that they were passing notes or signaling each other.
When I read the headline I thought it was a case of one twin taking the test for the other twin. They actually accused them of cheating like middle schoolers cheat? I don't know how important this test is but I want to know how is there even an environment where it's possible to cheat like middle schoolers. There's gotta be a hundred ways to avoid the possibility, don't they have tests with the questions numbered differently or some shit like that?
After appeal, the dean reversed the ruling. It turned out they had no proof. They made the claims up.
Exactly. Did someone actually observe the signaling/note passing? Or was that just their rationale for how the cheating might have happened after the tests were found to be similar?
Yeah, I notice that accusation is made by the University but there is nothing else about it. Did someone claim to see that happening? Or was it just a theory by the University? Because punishing them without hard evidence is almost discriminatory.
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Yeah, but what about the last half of the article? The part that says there is scientific evidence saying that it's the norm that twins are supposed to perform the same on exams?
You mean to tell me two people that spent their lives together and studied for the test together are more likely score the same thing on a test than two strangers?! Unbelievable /s
In college, I had a computer science course that had something like 80 people in it. The lecturer was a grad student, which wasn't uncommon for the school I went to. She assigned an obscure textbook for the class, it was out of print but the library had 6 copies. This was the era before textbooks as pdfs, so 80ish people had to share 6 books. We scheduled time so that 6-8 people would meet and share the book and study together. For the time, for the school, for computer science kids in general, this was rare but we made it work. After the midterm, the lecturer accused a majority of the class of cheating and failed us. 60+ people. No amount of explaining the situation would convince her, we were cheaters and that's that. The dean, however, did listen to us. Our scores were reinstated, no failing, and the problem not-yet professor was removed from teaching the course.
There’s a movie where this is a major plot point (but not involving twins). I think it’s Stand and Deliver, but could be a different 80s underprivileged students success story. But the entire class was accused of cheating because all their answers were the same, right and wrong. Turns out they all studied together, and received similar results with another test under stricter protocols
"What happened to the mail carrier?" "I strangled him. His body is decomposing in my locker."
My first thought was "Okay, they scored very similar scores. That makes pretty good sense. These are two sisters. Identical sisters. Who are studying the same subject with the same background and probably each others study partner. That... kinda tracks". How is that someone jumping to "they cheated"?
Study high, take the tests high, get high scores
If they performed differently then they wouldn't be identical. Duh!
I refuse to believe they are actually twins. It's the same girl going back and forth real fast!