Case of the 16,569-word Essay

Imagine that you are employed as a “reader” for a university professor who assigns a 16,000-word essay each week to be written out longhand. It is your job to screen the essays submitted for any hint of plagairism and, where possible, to determine who has copied from whom.

One semester you read an essay that seems very much like another you have read. Comparing the first three pages of the two papers you find that they are completely identical. Then on page 13 of one essay (#1) you find the word “organic” and the word “orgasmic” in the same place on the other essay (#2). In context “organic” make sense, but “orgasmic” is riscible.

Q:What is your initial conclusion?

Later you come across another seemingly identical paper (#3). This one not only has the organic/orgasmic error on page 13, but also a substitution of “erratic” for “erotic” on page 20, a change of “historical” to “hysterical” on page 33 and “mitosis” in a place on page 37 where only “meiosis” would make sense.

Q:What do these observations suggest?

The next paper (#4) you read is just like #3 except it doesn’t have the mitosis/meiosis error. Yet another essay (#5) reveals all of the errors found in #4 except for the erratic/erotic substitution. And finally, essay #6 contains the following errors: organic/orgasmic; erratic/erotic; hysterical/historical; and a substitution of “feces” where only “theses” would make sense, even in an essay on political philosophy .

1.
...Organic...
...Erotic...
...Historical...
...Meiosis...
...theses... / 2.
...Orgasmic...
...Erotic...
...Historical...
...Meiosis...
...theses... / 3.
...Orgasmic...
...Erratic...
...Hysterical...
...Mitosis...
...theses...
4.
...Orgasmic...
...Erratic...
...Hysterical...
...Meiosis...
...theses... / 5.
.. Orgasmic..
...Erotic...
...Hysterical...
...Meiosis...
...theses... / 6.
...Orgasmic...
...Erratic...
...Hysterical...
...Meiosis...
...feces...

Q:Who copied from whom? Can you construct a family tree showing the “modifications with descent”among the various essays submitted?

The errors noted would be annoying even to a reader not concerned with plagairism, but in most cases the reader would still be able to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs in which they occurred. The essay might still “work.” These errors are like the neutral mutations that arise over time in the genome of any organism, although this example is more like such occurances as they are found in asexually reproducing organisms which have only a single parent.

Q:What organisms reproduce only asexually?

Q:What parallels can you draw between a 16,000-word essay being passed down imperfectly from student-to-student and genetic information being passed down with occasional mutations in mitochondrial DNA?

Rev’d. 2006 Michael Bucher, College of San Mateo