How do you cheat effectively on a university essay? Alex Halvais is exasperated with the way his university students cheat on their papers. He's not just fed up with cheating, he's also fed up with how badly they cheat, implying that they think he's just not very bright. He's listed a bunch of common mistakes that help a prof figure out when a student is cheating:
When you "write" a sentence like "The veil of ignorance, to mention one prominent feature of that position, has no specific metaphysical implications concerning the nature of the self; it does not imply that the self is ontologically prior to the facts about persons that the parties are excluded from knowing," you have two ways of being caught up. First, while I make no claim of having anything approaching an eidetic memory (more like an idyllic memory), it may ring some dusty bells and heck, I might be able to pull the book you stole it from down off my shelf, even if you followed the advice of #3. If my memory fails to serve, as is frequently the case these days, Google Print might help out.
The second way you can trip up is by following this with your original words, which tend to be less sophisticated, or equally sophisticated material from an entirely different source that simply does not seem to make sense in this particular context.
(via Schneier)
