Thursday, July 15, 2010

"Plagiarism!" the Breakaway Smash Hit from CM: THE MUSICAL

Whenever I catch another plagiarist, the joyous Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah rings in my head.
Plagiarism!
Plagiarism!
Plagiarism!
Plagiarism!

[etc, etc.... cuz when it came to lyrics, Handel did a lot with a little.]

I knew this jock would cheat on this paper.

[etc.]

The University rules
ARE THE RULES OF THIS CLASSROOM!
Oh, consequence; expulsion's next!

And ye shall fail forever and ever.

[etc.]

Cheat of cheats
And thief of words

[etc.]

Plagiarism!
Plagiarism!
Plagiarism!
[with a flourish:] Plagiarissssss--mmmmmm!
p.s. If any of you humanities people are music proffies, I would give you my KINGDOM if you set this to music.* (I'd do it myself, but unfortunately, I can't sing my way out of a paper bag.**)

*Extra credit available for submissions received in vidshizzle format.
**Note: the paper bag is my kingdom. Offer valid for a limited time. Only available in the contiguous 49 states. Sorry, Tennessee!


[Edited 7/17 to add: Ok, I just set up a creative commons license for this, so seriously--have at it!]

Licencia de Creative Commons
Plagiarism! by Dr. Snarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at collegemisery.blogspot.com.

6 comments:

  1. Did I just catch a Simpson's Treehouse of Horror reference?

    It's got Paul Anka's guarantee
    (Guarantee void in Tennessee)
    Just don't look!
    Just don't look!

    I feel like that jingle could apply to our students and our pleas for them to stick to academic sources...

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  2. This is just so fabulous, I cannot even articulate....(and THAT is saying something!)...

    I am going to put our very wonderful music/theater department on this as soon as I get back to campus!

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  3. Why not just sing Tom Lehrer's song on plagiarism?

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  4. We could totally make this "CM: The Musical" thing work. A long time ago I wrote a song called "I am the very model of an adjunct prof in winterterm" that I posted on another blog. (It's not Googleable. I tried.) If I can find it again I'll contribute it here.

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  5. Oh, joy of joys! This is brilliant!

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  6. Oh .. I *used* to quote Tom Lehrer's "Lobachevsky" in class, but I don't any more. The students apparently took it seriously. What just kills me is when I take a student aside and warn him or her about plagiarism on the first paper draft (anything you did not write your own little self needs to be in quotation marks AND cited) .... and the student changes NOTHING on the final paper ....and then complains, all the way to the Dean, about the resulting F. Such an effing waste of time -- my time, the Dean's time (she sends such cases packing) and even the snowflake's time.

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