There's a victorian tin I keep my memories in.

[sarah_orange]

An incident in the office has just brought back an annoying memory. One of the members of my team was being berated by the team leader for claiming in his monthly report that he'd come up with idea x and the team leader, who doesn't like the colleague at all, was claiming that someone else outside of the team had come up with the idea and was upset that my colleague had suggested it was his. Thing is it's a pretty basic idea and I think they came up with it at the same time as it's the obvious solution. Which takes me back to...

The end of year project on the first year of my civ eng degree - we were given a bit of land in Leeds uni to design a multi-storey car park for. The site was a dirt car park with a number of beautiful mature trees in various places and in one corner was a crèche building. I looked at it and to me, due to the contours of the site and the layout of existing features there was one very obvious if a little distinctive solution - nothing over complex.
I designed it and took it to the final critique class. Pretty much everyone on the course had bulldozed the entire site, all the trees and levelled off the contours and built a long rectangular multi-storey. there were a couple of more artistic solutions but mostly it was the sort of artless horror that you'd expect of the creative output of 100 structural engineers (it was about this point I began to realise that I really should have made more effort to do architecture than engineering... curse my limiting art skills)

And then I noticed there was one guy, who I had never really spoken to before who had done a virtually identical design to me - keeping the trees, carefully landscaping the surrounds, making sure the crèche was preserved and had space. As I said - I'd looked at the site and it was the shape that had instantly sprung out at me so I figured it had to him too.

The lecturer went round and when he got to the second one of mine and this guy's (can't remember which way round it was) he said 'Clearly you two were working together on your designs' and probably suggested something about plagiarism/collaboration. I cannot express how angry that made me. Clearly the fact that IT STILL MAKES ME ANGRY over 17 years on may give you an idea of my ire at that point. I believe we both made small strangled noises and went away sulking.

I probably should have gone off and formed a meaningful or at least torrid relationship with the guy but he was one of those green corduroy trousers* wearing kinda guys and it would never have worked out.

*other civil engineers will completely know what I mean by this.

Comments

[miss-corinne.livejournal.com]

Gaaah. I got accused of plagarism at Oxford. I was shaking with rage :/ it never got resolved either because I was so flabbergasted by the accusation that I didn't say anything to defend myself!

Makes me seriously annoyed just thinking about it.

[sturmed.livejournal.com]

dont even get me started on this, im liable to get very violent

[hauntedunix.livejournal.com]

I got accused of plagiarism when it came to my A level coursework. I had done a fully programmed solution, written in Python, PGSQL backend..

They said I must've cheated, as everyone else did Access.

I dropped out, have a job, and earn more than the tutor who told me this.

I feel slightly better, but it still infuriates me in ways I can't explain. :)

[the-great-bj.livejournal.com]

did you have to redo all the work?

it's actually quite easy to get away with plagiarism to a certain extent in my sort of degree so a lot of the lazier students get away with it

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

nope - it was just a throw away comment. you can't actually plagarise producing a bunch of engineering schematics without almost as much effort as doing it yourself in the first place...

[the-great-bj.livejournal.com]

hahaha at least he wasn't too serious about it, you'd have been kicked off the course if you were on mine

[sinibar.livejournal.com]

I was hauled into the Prof's office with another geezer during my degree and accused (jointly) of plagiarism. I absolutely hit the roof and reminded the Prof of the legal implications of making such accusations without evidence^[1].

Some time later I was again invited to go to see the Prof, so I went, expecting a confrontation. Instead he sat me down, apologised and explained that he found it useful in situations where he thought there might have been plagiarism to make the accusation and gauge the response of the people concerned.

He then showed me the other person's work, which was strangely familiar. It was clearly based on one of my later drafts, one that had a minor (but obvious) error in it which he had copied verbatim. I was able to show drafts and notes (including one suspiciously similar to his work), he wasn't, so he was thrown off the course.

To this day I still don't know how he got hold of that draft though. He never went to my house. We didn't really know eachother. I was really careful with floppy discs and the like as I was a well known, high scoring student. I can only presume he nicked it from my bag when I wasn't looking.

[1] If I'm going down, I'm gonna go down fighting!

[waterwytch.livejournal.com]

I was lucky or unlucky to just do a diploma in motor vehicle engineering,no plagiarism accusations,if there had of been I'd probably just set fire to the staff room ,after welding the door shut,I was really full of rage as a teenager,but things were uneventful I was the only one who got a big sack of distinctions and got a good beating off my fellow students for my smug swottiness,or was it my beach buggy,or my really great hair....or all three

[(Anonymous)]

I still have my carpark design, complete with vernacular stair turrets. I think it's over there in that cardboard sleeve in the corner of my room. Shit.

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

I thought you might show up eventually Johnny... :D

do you remember green cords man? do you remember my indignation!?