My Blog was plagiarized!

All my course syllabi now contain a clear policy on plagiarism.   I quote the Student Handbook or the current course catalog where the term is defined and punishments described.  Usually the rules offer a range of possibilities for punishments, from failing an assignment to expulsion from the school; this gives initial discretion to the faculty member.   (Expulsion hearings usually require the Dean to petition the administration to convene one.)  My usual rule is this: if you are found to plagiarize, you fail.  


I tell all my students that if it is easy for you to find something on the web, it's even easier for me to find it, too.  (Not because I'm smarter than they are, but because I'm putting in a specific phrase from a suspect paper, so I get exactly what I'm looking for right off the bat.)   That doesn't stop students, of course; a case has just come up for me, with the usual results.  But it got weird for me last year.

I do have a few articles published in scholarly journals, and it would not be too difficult for students to find them via the databases like Academic Search or J-STOR (which they have free access to via the library).   Of course, plagiarizing the professor's own words would probably be a brazenly stupid thing to do.   But what if you don't know it's his/her words you're stealing?

Back in 2011, I discovered that a post I'd written for a long-deleted blog is now for sale at about a dozen different "free term papers"-type sites. Of course, not every site is giving my post away; some are selling it for as much as fifteen dollars.  And no, I don't see any of that action, nor would I want to cash in and allow someone to steal my ideas for a good grade. 

Is it worth my effort to try and have this essay removed? Probably not. Somebody else can pass it along, if they've used it, and it might take me too long to prove that I was the originator of the essay.  But what I can do is publish the fact that this essay is mine in the hopes of scaring people away from using it.   In my own courses,  I post links to the various pages where this essay is available, and I tell them that these sites are stealing my ideas and so are their clientele.   The fact that I know this goes on makes the students aware that I am aware.   Just that fact helps reduce the problem, like seeing a cop car on the highway makes everyone slow to the speed limit.

I can also post something on some of the various academic list-serv's that I belong to, and post at the many online forums of the professional societies I have joined, telling people that if they come across an essay with the same title as my post, it's a case of plagiarism.   It's much easier to combat this sort of thing with more information, rather than to attempt to suppress it. 

The name of the post?  "School of Rock: Selling it to the Man?"  Go ahead.   Search for it.  Yep, I wrote that about seven, eight years ago. It is pretty damn good, though not laden with academic jargon and maybe not apropos for a film class assignment; it's more or less a review.  But it's out there, and it seems that anyone can pass it off to their teachers and professors and claim it is theirs. The best that I can do is raise hell about it without reaching for the phone and calling my lawyer.