FUCK I HATE PEOPLE PLAGIARIZERS

So, I finished my marketing project slides and have begun work on finishing the accounting project (an analysis of The Gap's financial reports).

It turns out that one of my accounting project group members -- yup, you guessed it -- plagiarized her contribution to our paper!

The other group member and I initially were suspicious because of the three pages she sent us, the third page was written in the first person plural and thus was obviously taken from the company's annual report.  However, the plagiarizer wrote in her original email, "The financial information is in draft form right now," so we decided to give her the benefit of the doubt that perhaps this part was just her research notes and she planned to rewrite and properly cite the information.

So, my reply to her email included the question, "Is what you sent us so far a draft that you wrote or is it notes copied from somewhere else or what?"

She replied, "the first 2 pages i wrote and the bottom is info i found."

OK, so far, so good.  She was not claiming to have written the part that she very obviously hadn't written.  Since I had the much more pressing marketing project to deal with and the accounting project isn't due until the 15th, I put off doing anything else with it for a week.

Well, I just started working on the accounting project again, and since I still don't trust her, I started plugging phrases into Google.  It turns out that the entire two pages she claims to have written herself are ripped off from Hoover's:

The Gap Company Description: She copied this paragraph word-for-word with only the following minor changes:

• replaced "ubiquitous" with "ever-present"
• deleted the reference to poplin
• updated 3,100 to 3,150
• deleted the word "iconic"
• deleted the word "budgeteer"
• deleted the fragment "each also has its own online incarnation"

So of the 112 words in the paragraph, she changed only 13 of them.  This does not count as adequate paraphrasing.

Industry Overview: Clothing Stores: She copied the "Industry Overview" and "Competitive Landscape" paragraphs word-for-word with NO changes.

Industry Forecast: She copied the opening sentence of the "Industry Forecast" section word-for-word with NO changes.

I'm not sure where she got her "Comparison to Industry & Market" and "Top Competitors" tables from, but the weird formatting strongly suggests that they were not created by her in Word (it's a Word document) but were copy/pasted off a website as well.

She does cite the source she ripped off, "Hoover's Handbook of World Business 2008", at the end of her document, but in no way does changing only 13 out of 286 words (thus copying 95% of the source word-for-word) count as "writing" something.

I am so fucking pissed.  Because *I* would have gotten an F on the project too (the professor has emphasized that plagiarism would not be tolerated) if I'd believed her and turned in the paper with her section left as is.  This woman is not some stupid little freshman who doesn't know better, she's on her last 12 credits of her MBA.  She fucking knows better and she decided to take the risk anyway and fuck the rest of us over because she's too fucking lazy to ethically research and write two fucking pages.

I AM TURNING THE BITCH IN.  I'm certain that my other group member will support me on this and we will just complete the project by ourselves.

Update: What really fucking sucks is the plagiarizer is the one who picked The Gap as our paper topic.  I don't want to write a paper analyzing the fucking Gap.  I don't even shop there.  I'd rather do Amazon.  But the non-plagiarizer and I already have 1/3 to 1/2 a paper about The Gap so it'll take us less time to finish the stupid thing than to start on a new company.

Update II: I heard back from the professor: "Thank you very much for telling me this.  You did the right thing in breaking away into a separate group.  There is nothing further that you need to do."  Dude, what are you doing up at 4am?

Comments

[Jay]

And it's just that easy to find plagiarism.. Any professor who's even thinking about it will notice the same weirdness you did and run a quick google search.

My brother's an English prof, and he has no problem at all failing people who plagiarize. Eventually someone will be dumb enough to steal something from one of his own papers :)

[Bill T]

OK, I can definitely see why you'd want to turn her in. I know I learned in grad school the subtle difference between sloppy endnotes, good footnotes, and plagiarism.

On the other hand, she hadn't actually turned the work in to the professor yet. So while she is horribly callous for risking you all, she has not yet actually committee an offense yet. Clearly she was willing to, and would have. But now that you've stopped her, she has a week to pull some crap together and get a decent grade.

I think you had two choices. If you'd really anted to screw her over, you keep her part, say thank you, then wall off her section with the appropriate Scarlet Letter tags and notes to the prof. Or, toss the crap back in her face, show her the simple Google search that caught her and call her stupid to her face. Then she either shapes up, or you toss her overboard as a failure (AND turn her in to the prof).

[Jacqueline]

Oh, she denied everything, then made up a series of contradicting stories about why she sent us that file. I'll probably post a follow up about her ridiculous excuses/explanations later.

We kicked her out of the group and I told the professor what she'd done. He can now carefully scrutinize whatever she finally turns in to him on her own.

[Jason]

So, you turned her in for emailing you a copied-and-pasted paragraph in Word? She didn't even turn it in to the professor as her work? Just emailed it to you? Unfinished? Where's plagiarism exactly? You should have dealt with her directly and not asked her ambigous questions by email: "is this a rough draft or your notes" - what the hell is the difference between those two?

[Philip Welch]

You should post her name on here so future employers will find out about this when they Google her. On the other hand, that's probably prone to legal problems.

[Jacqueline]

The problem is that we asked her directly if she wrote it and she claimed that she had. There is a *huge* difference between a rough draft that you have written yourself and material entirely copied from elsewhere. Copy/pasting something then deleting 11 words and changing 2 is not "writing" something -- regardless of whether you call it your rough draft or your final draft.

It was also obvious that she was trying to pass the writing off as her own. The words she choose to change were the unusual ones, and she had gone through and formatted the file so that the copied stuff she claimed to have written was double-spaced, the section headers were bold and centered, etc., again to try to make it appear as if it was a draft that she had written.

So, she lied to us in response to a direct question, was clearly trying to get away with something, and had obviously done no real work on the project. There is no way in hell that we would voluntarily continue working with her after that.

I "turned her in" as in reported what she'd done to the professor, I didn't go file a formal academic honor code complaint. She now has the opportunity to write a non-plagiarized paper on her own or with a different group and turn that in. I expect that the professor will scrutinize her paper much more closely than other students', so hopefully for her she's learned her lesson now and doesn't try to pull this again on the same assignment.

[NewMBA]

Well, JMPP... you're not alone. My last project of my degree ... group project, of course. The person who picked the topic (which none of the rest of us were really into) sends me an e-mail with a word doc attached.

She suggests that we just change a few words and submit. Voila.

I ended up being the compiler of the entire work, so while I never turned her in, I didn't have the time/energy to check everything she wrote. So I rewrote the whole damn thing. Just to be sure.

A day after we turned in the report, the dean sent out a letter reminding everyone that the school was using plagiarism-detection software for the first time.

Damn I'm glad I'm done.

[JorgXMcKie]

As a prof, let me say: a) I have no problem flunking plagiarizers; b) it's frequently not hard to catch [hint: when copy/pasting wikipedia, it's usually best to delete the internal comments in the article], and; c) I'm constantly amazed that grad students think they can get away with it.

Oh. And if you emailed me at 4AM, I might be up and online, too. I do some of my best work in the early hours when distractions are at a minimum, and I don't have to get up in the morning.