Engineers vs Librarians

So to pick up a few extra bucks, I've been marking papers for one of Cate's advisors. It's a third year engineering class. I haven't taken a science class since grade 10 and flunked out of grade 11 advanced math. This falls in line with my philosophy that if they're dumb enough to hire me, I'm smart enough to do the job.

The course is on sustainability and other such issues in engineering so it isn't as math heavy as most engineering, I'm sure. It is mostly essay questions about environmental footprints and resource conservation.

I would love to rant about how poor the writing is, but the range is probably similar to any other cohort in any other discipline of undergrad. What I found funny was that the first thing I did when I started marking the first batch of assignments was to run an arbitrary (but not entirely random) sentence or two through Google to check for plagiarism. Of course I found a handful. I think that it worked out to between 5%-10% of the total number of assignments. Entire paragraphs cut and pasted without quotation marks, let alone attribution.*

Wikipedia was the most common souce, but it was just a significant minority.

So when I asked the prof whether I should bother to mark the papers with significant plagiarism she was rather taken aback: "I don't think that anyone has ever checked for plagiarism before. I wouldn't even know how to do it."

Engineers 0, Librarians 1.

Cheers

*Actually few included any sort of sources for their work. I became so jaded that I would only dock marks if they presented statistics or quantitative facts without acknowledging any outside sources. I mean, either they just made up the numbers, which is stupid, or they got them from someone else. Duh!

On this batch, I'm actually adding 5% for anyone who has included any indication that they refered to outside sources. I think that's more fair. I know that almost every one of them refered to outside sources -- well, except the ones who wrote really awful papers -- but I would be hard pressed to point to specific sentences that would prove it. So the ones who do cite their sources get a bonus to differentiate the good guys from the bad guys.

MT