Who here has experience with computer writing programs

[ashling]

I am grading (. . . when am I not grading?) a paper on the War Powers Act. I don't think I have ever seen one like this. I have plenty that have all sorts of inaccuracies and bad writing. Sometimes it takes a second or even a third reading of a passage to understand what the mean. Some are so bad that I require they go to the writing center on campus.

But this paper is a collection of often unrelated words generally relating to the topic. It sounds as if it was written by a computer ... or by a committee

Examples:

Without a doubt, the perseverance has efficiently required confident presidents into connecting Congress afore obligating the military in voyages away and through the retro of actions.

The necessities of the steadfastness need to successfully have banded the premier after autonomous engagements in the use of the armed in conflicts is worried.

This successfully foresees the probability of the president interim singly in such a way.

This esteems if the help of the president are tense by this determination as in encumber his receptiveness to conditions that might request for the placement of the country’s fighting.

I'm confounded.

Help, please

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Don't know how it was written, but definitely an F.

[ashling]

18. No question about that

I am trying to figure out where this cam from. Do I just give this student a zero, or a zero and a trip to see the dean?

[guardian]

52. Definitely an 'F'

Fail that student.

[librechik]

2. sounds like a foreign language being translated literally by Babblefish

a translation program which is hilariously non-sequitur-ish

[Canuckistanian]

12. That's exactly what struck me, too

I mean, who uses such an obscure word as "afore"?

[randome]

3. Someone's playing a prank on you.

That's my guess.

[ashling]

20. A prank?

I just don't see someone playing a prank with their grade like this.

It would be a shame to take all the tests, quizzes, etc. and risk getting tossed out of the class for a prank.

[hootinholler]

4. Could it have been a bought paper...

Then passed through translation to say, French and back again to English?

Any luck when you google a passage? Put it in quotes and the google treats it as a phrase search.

Whatever wrote that doesn't understand English well.

[ashling]

23. No luck with any I have tried

Interestingly enough, I caught my first instance of plagiarism that way back when I was a graduate assistant. A student had cut and paste an article from the National Review. Which prompted me to look back at an earlier paper in which the student had the presence of mind to cut the first and last paragraph.

One of the keys was the fact that one of the pieces included the phrases "last week in these pages I looked at" (or something like that and the final paragraph included "Next week I'll consider ..."

[MattBaggins]

5. Do you have ESL students in this class?

Is that the result of an ESL student using translation software?

[denverbill]

6. It almost sounds like Babelfish.

I wonder if they found an article in another language and translated it through Babelfish. But if they are smart enough to find an article in a foreign language, they would be smart enough to proof read the translation.

I wonder if there is a some program that 'unplagiarizes' articles, but replacing some verbs, adjectives, etc with similar words. That's almost what this sounds like to me.

Either way, it's an F.

[alcibiades_mystery]

7. No offense, but you shouldn't be publishing student writing

(such that it is) on a public board.

That said, this looks like a translator program. Is your student a non-native speaker of English? if so, he or she may have written the paper in his or her native language and sent it through a translation program (a fairly common occurrence).

It could also be just straight up plagiarized through a translation engine.

Third possibility: it is plagiarized with the help of a thesaurus - the student has introduced poor "synonyms" in an attempt to mask the plagiarism.

I can tell you this: it is deeply unlikely that this isn't some form of plagiarism. A student who would know the word "autonomous" wouldn't produce such incoherent prose.

[ashling]

24. That was one thought

and believe me I did consider your first admonition. I did not post this lightly.

[localroger]

8. That looks like the output of a text combination generator

These programs work by analyzing a large sample of real text, and listing what words appear together with what frequency; then random words are chosen and strung together with the same frequencies. The result tends to recognizably mimic the style of the original author, but the actual sentences don't make any sense.

[Foolacious]

17. Agreed.

And I do have a bit of experience with this kind of programming.

[ashling]

27. That was my line of thinking,

but I have no real experience with these other that humor line generators (talk like a pirate, etc.)

I also have no real knowledge of the availability of software for this, etc. ...

[Crabby Appleton]

37. Like the Chomskybot

http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl

[backscatter712]

49. Probably a Markov chain generator.

Back in '08, some wiseass used one to make a web site where you could "interview" Sarah Palin! Indistinguishable from the real thing!

Sounds like your student failed his Turing Test.

[William Seger]

58. Agree

It doesn't make enough sense to be a translation of anything meaningful -- it's just gibberish.

[jberryhill]

9. Is the student from India?

Although it sounds more like it was translated poorly from Chinese.

There are places where you can order custom term papers at low rates from Asian writing bullpens, but even they recommend that you edit to suit. This looks like either raw offshore author product, or an Indian up late on a bender while trying to pad out the word and complexity score.

[tammywammy]

56. That was my thought, a purchased paper

There's a ton of websites out there where you can pay someone to write your paper for you. I'd never heard of such a thing until a couple of years ago, there was a post here on DU linking to an article about it.

edited to add: Here's that article http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

[slackmaster]

10. Those look like the result of using Babelfish to translate something in English through a series...

...of other languages then back into English.

One of the Philip K. Dick novels discusses this as a misuse of a distributed computer system. The activity is referred to as The Game by its participants. A person is presented with some bizarre phrase or sentence, and is supposed to guess what it was before being garbled by the translation process.

For example "Serious Constrictingpath" could be a result of the name Ernest Hemingway being translated through a series of languages.

Four score and seven years ago

04:20 Et il y a sept ans

04: 20, Og syv år siden

04: 20, ??? ??ώ ??? ???ά ??ό???

04: 20 И семь лет

04: 20, और सात साल

04: 20, and seven years

[DrewFlorida]

11. Apparently you have Ms. South Carolina in your class!

Apparently you have Ms. South Carolina in your class, LMAO!

Watch her in action on this youtube link.

[ashling]

29. I have had some students like that

[randome]

51. God, that was painful to watch!

[AnotherMcIntosh]

13. It looks like it was written by a future Harvard MBA.

Of course, it could have been written by a future MBA from another school.

[lpbk2713]

14. Could have been prepared with OCR software.

A scanner is used to get the closest recognition of print from an image.

[democrat_patriot]

15. There are blog/spam programs that write nonsense like this. Looks like it.

They input keywords and out pops an article 'written' by a computer.

[bemildred]

16. The large vocabulary being used seems inconsistent with the lack of sense or grammar. nt

[Junkdrawer]

19. Word Salad = Schizophrenia

You may have a troubled student.

[Junkdrawer]

21. More here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad

[Junkdrawer]

25. I also ran it by my wife (College Professor - Theater History) and she's seen word salad....

with drugs (especially smack and speed).

[ashling]

32. Unfortunately I don't have any face to face contact

with students as this is online. I have considered that in other cases, but this is just too weird.

[Junkdrawer]

34. Word salad is quite disturbing. In the 70s, I volunteered...

at a local Help Center and saw word salad in action live and in person.

Frightening stuff.

[Junkdrawer]

42. I think the possibility of mental illness necessitates a call to the Dean....

Your school may have responsibilities. Not sure with these new virtual universities.

[ashling]

53. Thanks

[wandy]

33. I think you may have hit on something here. It would be worth looking into.......

Anyone smart enough to use a computer for OCR, translation or even in this day and age speech to text, is smart enough to check the output.

[TlalocW]

22. Anyone related to Dan Quayle in your class?

Maybe?

TlalocW

[bbgrunt]

40. or sara p.

[longship]

26. Postmodernism Generator?

The Postmodernism Generator is a delicious debunking of academic postmodernism, which was taken down by Richard Dawkins in his book, A Devil's Chaplain.

It generates similar word salad. Or, maybe the student is him/herself a postmodernist.

(There is even a Postmodernism Generator App for the iPhone.)

Either way, it seems like word salad and therefore suspicious.

[progressoid]

39. Postmodern Generator was my first thought as well.

Or someone trying desperately to sound like intelligent.

[longship]

44. Yes, but the PMG generates good grammar.

The OP's student's grammar doesn't parse. So, maybe Babelfish is the answer.

[benld74]

28. I'd like to see the sources!!!!

[kentuck]

30. A basic lack of English.

Subjects, verbs, nouns, adverbs, prepositions.

Simple sentences.

See Spot run. I like cheese. You are a genius. What is a sentence?

It seems like this person has a fairly good vocabulary but doesn't know how to use it?

[Ian David]

31. Could be someone mentally ill. Or it could be written by someone who isn't a native English speaker.

Perhaps even a foreigner in a termpaper mill.

Or, it could be a purchased term paper and someone has gone and changed a bunch of words around so that they won't get caught submitting a duplicate of someone else's.

See:

Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers
http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

Why You Should Not Buy College Term Papers
Fraudulent Custom Paper Sites, Academic Dishonesty, & Other Issues
http://suite101.com/article/why-you-should-not-buy-college-term-papers-a197449

[Fumesucker]

35. This person has a solid future in corporate communications..

That stuff sounded all intellectual and used a lot of buzzwords but the semantic content was precisely zero.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

36. Is Sarah Palin in your class?

[Dalai_1]

55. I thought it sounded familiar!

[backscatter712]

59. This confirms my theory that Sarah Palin's brain was replaced with a Markov chain generator! n/t

[immoderate]

38. Appears to be generated.

Word salad by a mentally ill person is possible, but unlikely without some spelling errors.

Some years ago, I taught a computer class to middle schoolers. For word processing, they had to write something. For many, they handed in unintelligible papers. So I invited them to read it to me. When they realized they couldn't understand what they had written, they sheepishly took it back to the computer. I said, "Don't hand me anything you haven't read first." It was an awakening.


--imm

[Junkdrawer]

41. Word Salad once through a spell checker?

Hell, Word will try to spell check on the fly.

[immoderate]

43. Good point.

Spell errors might, in that case, translate to vocabulary errors. Maybe it was a mentally ill person using a writing generator.

--imm

[RebelOne]

45. Not even word salad.

It seems like gibberish to me. And I am a former copy editor and would have to rewrite some parts of stories to make sense. I do not even see a way to rewrite these paragraphs to make any sense at all.

[Junkdrawer]

46. More on Word Salad (aka schizophasia):

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-word-salad.htm

[moondust]

47. Reminds me of that South Carolina beauty queen.

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., er, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

[Blanks]

48. Perhaps voice recognition software.

I've tried talking into the damn things and that's about how close they come to 'guessing' what I'm saying.

Obviously, if that's what happened, they should have proof read it. I've been up all night and turned in some shit (when i was in college) that didn't make sense when I read it later.

Nothing this bad I hope, but some sentences in this seem to start coherently and then taper off into strangeness. Or make sense and then a strange word appears.

I worked at a place where the boss talked into a tape recorder, and the girls typed the letters up from what he had said. The first drafts very often read like this.

[ashling]

54. I've got dragon and have that problem

sometimes. Takes a while for it to learn my speech and inflections

[ladjf]

50. My guess is that you have shown examples of computer generated prose and not a very good

program at that.

[limpyhobbler]

57. Article spinner ?

Maybe they took some other essay on the War Powers Act and fed it through an article spinner, or something like that.

A computer program than looks up words in the thesaurus and makes substitutions. Generates this kind of gibberish. Used by shady websites do generate lots of content.