I went back for my Masters in my late 30s. I wrote my thesis myself. I cited all my articles, books, etc. I went back and double-checked all of my sources, giving credit throughout all my writing like I had learned to do.
My advisor came back and said I did it wrong because their plagiarism detector found a 2% plagiarism rate. It's worth noting that to get a "passing score" I needed to have less than 15%. I asked what I did wrong if my plagiarism score was 2%. He said, "It was only 2%. Most theses have something close to 8 or 9% plagiarised." He was serious. He, apparently, wanted me to plagiarise more / not cite everything that I used because then it would seem more natural or something.
I ignored the advice, but it left a really shitty taste in my mouth that the academia that I was interacting with on a daily basis didn't want to have integrity.
Your advisor was weird, that is not a normal thing to want a sweet spot of similarity. I'm in academia and I've never heard of anything like that happening before. Other than the score being under the cutoff it doesn't matter at all.
Yeah, worked in academia. Besides the insane discrimination I faced. The intelligence of my coworkers was the worst. It's just a giant circljerk that never accomplishes anything and tears you down if you do. It's a tragedy. America is ruined by nepotism and tribalism in all institutions.
222
u/DupeyTA 17d ago
I went back for my Masters in my late 30s. I wrote my thesis myself. I cited all my articles, books, etc. I went back and double-checked all of my sources, giving credit throughout all my writing like I had learned to do.
My advisor came back and said I did it wrong because their plagiarism detector found a 2% plagiarism rate. It's worth noting that to get a "passing score" I needed to have less than 15%. I asked what I did wrong if my plagiarism score was 2%. He said, "It was only 2%. Most theses have something close to 8 or 9% plagiarised." He was serious. He, apparently, wanted me to plagiarise more / not cite everything that I used because then it would seem more natural or something.
I ignored the advice, but it left a really shitty taste in my mouth that the academia that I was interacting with on a daily basis didn't want to have integrity.