Russian ex-spy Anna Chapman has found herself at the center of a plagiarism scandal after prominent bloggers accused her of “copy-pasting” from a book by a Kremlin spin doctor.

It was reported Tuesday that her column in the best-selling Komsomolskaya Pravda daily is an almost word-for-word copy of an article in a book by Oleg Matveyechev.

Chapman, 29, who was deported from the United States last year along with nine other Russian sleeper agents, has been keeping a high profile in Russia, modeling, editing a magazine, giving lectures and taking a role in the pro-Kremlin youth movement.

In her column about the 19th-century poet Alexander Pushkin who died in a duel with a French officer in 1837, Chapman argued that the 1917 revolution and the ensuing bloodshed could have been prevented if Pushkin, who died at the age of 37, had lived to provide moral guidance.

“Just half a century later, liberals and socialists flooded Russia and killed the czar, heading for the revolution,” she wrote. “I’m confident that things would have been different if Pushkin had had time to write his mature works.”

Could student plagiarism actually be reduced? And could it be reduced not through fear of being caught, but through … education?

The evidence in a study released Monday suggests that the answer to both questions is Yes — which could be welcome news to faculty members who constantly complain about students who either don’t know what plagiarism is or don’t bother to follow the rules about the integrity of assignments they prepare.

While many instructors have reported anecdotal evidence of the success of various techniques they have used in a few courses, this study is based on a much larger cohort, including a control group. The study found that a relatively short Web tutorial about academic integrity and plagiarism can have a significant impact on whether students plagiarize, with the greatest gains (for integrity) coming among student groups that are statistically more likely to plagiarize — which are those with lesser academic credentials.

Further, surveys of the participants suggest that it was the education involved — not fear of detection — that led to the differences.

The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is by Thomas S. Dee, associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College, and Brian A. Jacob, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy at the University of Michigan.

A report released today by the plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn confirms what a lot of teachers already know: that students are copying content from online sources. According to the report, for both high school and college students, Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers were the top two most popular sources of lifted copy.

But another interesting fact emerged from the report about the difference between high school and college students. While 31% of content matches for high school students came from social and “content-sharing” sites (like Facebook or Yahoo Answers), just 26% of the matches for college students originated there.

College students were more likely to use content from cheat sites and paper mills, the report finds: 19.6% of content matches in college students’ papers came from those sites, whereas just 14.1% of matches to high school students’ papers. College students were also more likely to turn to news sites — 16.6% versus 12.3% of college students. And even though Wikipedia was the most popular source for copied content, encyclopedias in general constituted roughly 11-12% of content for both populations.

The data from this report comes from TurnItIn’s own business: some 128 million content matches from 33 million student papers (24 million from higher education and nine million from high school) over a one-year period. That is, when students’ papers were submitted to TurnItIn, its system found passages from those papers matched content available on the open Web.

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Posted by Hannah Vinter on November 2, 2011 at 6:22 PM
“Thou shalt not plagarise”. This phrase surely must be somewhere near the top of the ten commandments of journalism.

Hence in 2005, when David Simpson, then-cartoonist for The Tulsa World, was found to have redrawn somebody else’s work, the paper’s publisher Robert E. Lorton III dismissed him, saying he had committed “the cardinal sin of a newsroom”. The story was reported at the time by the AP and picked up by Sign On San Diego.

Still, there’s no peace for the wicked; history has repeated itself. After his dismissal from The Tulsa World, Simpson was hired by the Urban Tulsa Weekly but, as Poynter reports, he was fired yesterday for further instances of copying other people’s work.
And Simpson’s not the only news professional recently brought up for plagiarism. Another Poynter article published on Monday points out that a journalist from the Journal Register Company’s Middletown Press was found to have plagiarised “significant portions” of an article about a man charged with disorderly conduct from a local Patch website.

The plagarism was discovered and the Editor of the Press published a note, saying that the similarities between the articles “violates both our policies at The Middletown Press, Journal Register Company and Digital First Media, as well as basic journalistic standards. Walt Gogolya, the reporter who wrote the article, is no longer employed at The Middletown Press.”

Both of these cases seem pretty obvious instances of deliberate copying. Still, the issue isn’t always so clear, and even big name publications can be subject to criticism. An article in Media Bistro today pointed out that when the New York Times published a story about Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s alleged involvement in a sexual harrasment case, it failed to credit Politico, the organisation which had the scoop. With more than a dash of sarcasm, author of the article Betsy Rothstein points out “Weirdly, the NYT cites HLN and Fox News — so they do understand the concept of attribution.” Yet, in the article in question, Politico is not named.

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