I think that for the latter group, they simply can’t fathom a system of such meticulous attribution; I suspect that they see a lot of identical language on blogs/news sites, which contributes to their confusion.

College prof here. You’d think so, right? But I’m sorry to tell everyone, the answer to this is an emphatic ‘no.’

Your high school students sound like they understand plagiarism better than my college students. I don’t know what is taught in journalism school these days, but the writers on clickbait and TV news sites do the same thing Albrecht did: rewrite someone else’s article using their quotes and research. They just link the…

She didn’t just use the quotes. She used the research, ideas, argument and framing made by the original argument. From the above article, it appears she pasted the article and then just went through and changed up some of the sentences.

All of that is still taught in high school (at least everywhere I’ve ever worked and I work with students from lots of different schools, not just one). They get drilled on plagiarism and especially plagiarism through re-wording. This woman is at a prestigious school where she went through more training on plagiarism.…

I didn’t go to a great high school, but they told us that plagiarism was bad.

I was a Humanities professor at University of Chicago and can confirm that if Albrecht is there she’s taken a mandatory year of critical writing in her Core course sequence, in which she would 100% learn how to cite properly. This, in addition to extensive exposure to plagiarism rules and guidelines in orientation.…

They still rearrange the words. It has a name now: patch-writing! My students patch-write all the time and don’t seem to understand why it’s not okay, no matter how many handouts I give them and threats of a grade deduction and stern language on the assignment prompt. My husband is a few years older than me says he…

At the university I used to work for, this would get her a referral to the Office of Student Conduct, for sure. It’s not like college students aren’t told, again and again, by various folks in many ways, that plagiarism is NOT okay. Wowza.

I agree that Albrecht probably thought she’d done original work. If I understand correctly, she used the quotes collected by Herwees and cited the original Tumblr sources. Though Albrecht should have cited Herwees, I struggle to get my students to sufficiently rephrase a paraphrase instead of just changing 1-2 words.…

You may not mean these two things to be the same thing, but I find it really weird that you’re comparing the act of interviewing a friend instead of a stranger for an assignment and straight up stealing someone else’s story as if they’re comparable lessons. While you obviously tried to get away with someone that…

IF she really thinks she can graduate with this kind of work, U of Chicago does not have the high academic standards I thought it did.

I’m turning 30 shortly and I do remember (bad) teachers I had in high school explaining that you just had to ‘write in your own words’ to avoid plagiarism. (It’s not technically wrong but it’s pretty woefully incomplete, as far as explanations go.) Still, I got the right understanding of it at some point!!

Yeah, I was a TA in grad school and was always surprised how many students thought that simply rearranging the sentence structure/changing a couple of words meant that it was no longer plagiarism. That’s not how it works! We were explicitly taught in undergrad and grad school what plagiarism was and the consequences.…

I learned that in sixth grade when we were sternly told not to copy stuff word for word out of the World Book Encyclopedia.

I suspect that her professsors will be reviewing all her writings once they hear about this. Also her claim of ignorance 

I teach college students, mostly non-majors in STEM classes, and every class I teach dedicates a full hour to understanding what plagiarism is. We do an exercise, corrected and discussed in class, that every student has to complete before the first written assignment is due so that I am sure that all of my students…

To me the “failure to cite sources” is a feeble attempt at downplaying the deed. Like “I didn’t lift the entire article wholesale, I only failed to properly attribute some quotes”. Of course that doesn’t pass the smell test when entire sections are copied if not word for word, at least thought for thought. It is absolu…

It’s not even really an excuse, it’s an admission. There’s something Trumpian about describing an offense and then using that description as your defense. Like, “I’m not a drug dealer, I just give people illegal narcotics in exchange for money.” Huh??

Even as a high schooler in a subpar public school “don’t plagiarize” was beaten into our brains much more forcefully than constructive lessons on how to write well were. I don’t for a second believe that this was a fine distinction that was lost on her. MOREOVER, she goes to the University of Chicago, which has a VERY…