Plagiarism – An Early Warning

If anyone reading this has done any form of study before (should be most of you then), no doubt you will have been told how serious plagiarism is. One should not copy another’s work and attempt to pass it off as one’s own. The consequences of doing so can end up having you failing an assignment, or worse still, kicked off the course entirely. The thing with cheating is, somehow, someway, you stand a very high chance of being found out. So it’s best not to do it.

When I started this blog, I had a look around the internet to see if there were any other bloggers doing a similar thing to me. Last weekend, I found psychdblog.wordpress.com by a guy from Liverpool who has spent this year doing the DD101 course. It’s a good read and a nice insight into the course, and OU life.

Yesterday, I came across another blog theintermittentstudent.blogspot.co.uk by an indeterminate someone who is much further into his OU career. He also did DD101 back in 2011. This blog is also a very nice insight and I spent a good couple of hours pouring through all the posts. But then I noticed something odd. This blog just seemed all too familiar in some way. And then a lightbulb turned on inside my head.

I went back to the first blog and did a comparison. The guy from Liverpool has on some (but not all) posts lifted thoughts and opinions (in 2014) directly from the second blog (written in 2011) and passed them off as his own.

I have no idea why Liverpool man would want to do that in a blog. It achieves nothing, especially as the posts are merely a personal evaluation of that particular week’s course content.

Have a look and see for yourself. Compare this entry with this entry.

It’s all very odd if you ask me, but it does illustrate my original point in this post- if you plagiarise, someone somewhere will find out. So don’t do it.

Pre-start reading

The official course materials are still at least two weeks away, which is far too long to be going without something to get my teeth into, so I pushed the boat out and spent £22.10 on a brand new copy of “Social Sciences: The Big Issues; 3rd Edition.” by Kath Woodward. I could have followed the time honoured student ethic of saving the pennies and opted for a cheap 2nd Edition copy, and to be honest I did consider doing so.

The thing is, the DD102 course I am starting is brand new this October; a revamped version of the now finished DD101. So I am expecting all the course material to have been updated since its last refresh (as far as I can tell) in 2008. Since Kath Woodward is credited in the book as teaching this very module, I am betting the 3rd edition ties in very nicely with DD102 in much the same way the 2nd edition was recommended reading for DD101.

The book itself arrived in a timely fashion from Amazon yesterday, thanks to the 6 months of free Prime membership for being a university student (thank you, Amazon!) along with some obligatory stationery purchases. For some reason I was expecting an A4 sized book, I don’t know why. It’s funny how things like that get into your head (well, my head at least). It is, in fact, a very comfortable to hold A5 size.

I’ve only had time to skim through it from start to finish so far, picking out one or two sections on the way. Aside from a few glaring errors (Kark Marx anyone?) it looks very well written and the information is easy to digest. I think it will be an excellent companion for the Introduction to Social Sciences course I am eagerly awaiting. No doubt I will have read the whole thing by the time the course materials arrive early/mid-September.