Stealing a Thesis Idea...

I have a fifteen page paper due soon and I had a couple ideas for my thesis. I went to the prof. to see what he thought of them and he said they were ok. This was on friday.

On wednesday, during our class meeting (there are only 6 of us in this seminar) the prof said, "I've got some Emergency Thesis ideas for those of you who need one..." and then he proceeded to give the class my thesis idea. WTF is with that? Can somebody show me what is up with this guy? Same guy who kicked me out of class for illness. Am I a glutton for punishment? Am I simply stupid? Do I hang on waaaaay too long?

your thoughts, please.

I think I would go and have a chat with someone higher up the chain. That sounds bang out of order to me.

I'm with Dana on this one - report him to his bosses immediately.

Yes, put it on record.

I'm with all of the above.
This prof is a liability.
Get someone to start looking into it asap.

Wow. I just can't believe you have to attend his classes after all of that. Why do you have to be in his classes? There isn't a different professor that teaches the same subjects?

I don't have to be in his class---it's half my own stupid fault. He's the only one teaching this particular thing; as a matter of fact, it's the first time my uni has ever taught this particular subject and it so happens to be my favorite subject...isn't it funny how he is the only one teaching it? It was nearly a guarantee that I would sign up. Why do I go back for more from this guy? the really depressing thing is that I think he's a republican,to boot.

Brianna;495083 wrote:

I think he's a republican,to boot.

I know he has lied, stolen, cheated, and abused you badly... but, that's a terrible thing to say about a fellow human being. :lol2:

But is he a gay republican? :)

Better tell me who he is so I don't get stuck with him. Seriously!

Have a chat with him first; maybe he didn't do it on purpose? (yeah right.) At least he could tell the other 5 he fucked up and they can't use your idea. Or knows you had the idea first.

That bites, Bri.

I don't know if you get on well with the other five or not, but you should let them know that it was your idea. At least then there wont be more than one of you upset if this all blows up.

I agree that you should go see someone higher up from this guy. If he really is that bad, then you need to do something about it. Maybe he wont be reprimanded or disciplined because of your complaint, but if every student who has a problem with him makes a complaint, then the uni is eventually going to see a pattern and start to wonder.

You could stand to come out of this rich if you go directly to the dean and tell him that the prof told you you'd get an A if you slept with him. And if you can manage to sleep with him you can also say the prof reneged on the deal.

But that's just how I manged to graduate magna (inappropriate term) laude.

I'd say forget about it.

He may have had the idea in his emergency thesis bag before you talked to him about using it. He may be fucking with you or just incompetent.

Regardless, an idea is worthless without implementation. Ideas are not unique to individuals nor are they limited resources. They aren't something over which you can exert proprietary control. The same ideas spring up in multiple places and success comes with little regard to who "thought of it first."

Write the best paper you can. That's about the only reasonable course of action.

Cicero;495094 wrote:

But is he a gay republican? :)

Aren't they all, secretly?


Seriously, if the situation is as you described, that behaviour sounds very incorrect.

I can think of a few possible explanations:
1. He's a doddery old fool who found this idea in his head, had forgotten where it came from, and decided to be "nice" and throw it out to the students. Or maybe not old and doddery, but a mistake along these lines.
2. The idea is in fact not at all original, but has been around for years, and this time every year he hauls it out for those students who still haven't thought of a thesis topic.
3. He is a jerk. He is screwing you around, belittling you, probably because he perceives your ability and has learned to eliminate all potential rivals immediately.
4. He fancies you, and this is his idea of seduction and foreplay. ;)

If you were in an Australian uni I would suggest you start by seeing one of the student/academic support officers in the students union. Do you have an equivalent service over there?
If you want to take it further, getting something in writing promptly is important. Get that paper trail going.
The problem is, each uni is quite a small community, and this guy is in a field you like. Stomping on his toes will likely come back to haunt you. Even if you have nothing more to do with him, other people will hear about it.
On the other hand, if you don't complain, it establishes a precedent for that kind of behaviour.

How does having your thesis idea copied really affect you?

If you do complain, do so tactfully and in accordance with all the official rules and procedures. For goodness's sake avoid the angry email reflex. But I'm sure you knew that.

Good luck.


P.S. Fifteen pages is not a god-damn thesis. I wouldn't even start saying "sub-thesis" until you pass 10,000 words. Maybe we use the terms differently.

Yet another reason I'm glad I didn't go to college

Perry Winkle;495187 wrote:

I'd say forget about it.

He may have had the idea in his emergency thesis bag before you talked to him about using it. He may be fucking with you or just incompetent.

Regardless, an idea is worthless without implementation. Ideas are not unique to individuals nor are they limited resources. They aren't something over which you can exert proprietary control. The same ideas spring up in multiple places and success comes with little regard to who "thought of it first."

Write the best paper you can. That's about the only reasonable course of action.

It's not just a paper, its a thesis. Universities spend half their time ramming down their students' throats the 'don't accidentally plagiarise' message and this tutor is giving away Bri's ideas for her thesis? It's not like we're talking a mid term essay. This is the fucking thesis, it all leads to it. Trying to come up with something original enough to be worthwhile, in an Arts and Humanities subject is really fucking difficult. I am currently tearing my hair out on that very issue, as is half my year.

I'd say something. I'd be fucking furious.

Ideas are not unique to individuals nor are they limited resources. They aren't something over which you can exert proprietary control.

Very much depends on the idea. If your 'idea' amounts to a new way of looking at a topic that sheds new light onto it, damn right you can exert proprietary control over it. If that tutor wants to have a grab bag of emergency ideas for the students who are struggling, he should bloody well go off and think of a few, not steal the idea of a student who's taken it seriously enough to have one. It was clearly good enough to steal,. therefore it was good enough to use. And, no, if sombody else decides to do that idea now, it'd be a bloody dangerous one for Bri to do.

Christ on a bike, I'd not let that one rest. Not a fucking chance in hell.

Brianna;495049 wrote:

On wednesday, during our class meeting (there are only 6 of us in this seminar) the prof said, "I've got some Emergency Thesis ideas for those of you who need one..." and then he proceeded to give the class my thesis idea.

I don't understand why that is stealing? Remember, you do a thesis and he learns from your thesis. If the thesis idea is good, then he learns more by fostering competition on that question. The fact that he suggested your idea as a thesis implies it is a very good question. A question that may result in numerous answers AND may be approached from different perspectives.

A friend from Harvard Law described this same problem. People would literally hide or make unavailable the research material that others needed. All part of the learning process. Many people researching the same questions and challenged by others who did the same research.

Fostering competition on a question is not despicable. I can appreciate why one would resent competition on a thesis. But good questions often demand and result in numerous and different answers.

@Perry Winkle & ZenGum.... just a reminder, it was more than one idea. I believe that makes it intentional.

Having others working on the same idea puts a strain on resources, like library books and research materials.

If all else fails, there is always kicking him in the cunt.

The most effective reaction would have immediately after he made the offer to the class. As in a quick burst of incredulous laughter and followed by, "Why are you giving away my ideas, huh?" Now, though, I'd approach the instructor and ask for suggestions to make the thesis better than your original idea. But I'd remain non-confrontational at this point because I don't see that it would benefit you to be otherwise.

xoxoxoBruce;495227 wrote:

@Perry Winkle & ZenGum.... just a reminder, it was more than one idea. I believe that makes it intentional.

That doesn't make sense. Because he repeated one of Brianna's several thesis topics doesn't necessarily make the coincidence intentional.

xoxoxoBruce;495227 wrote:

Having others working on the same idea puts a strain on resources, like library books and research materials.

True. But I've been in classes in both my undergraduate and graduate programs where anywhere from 5-60 people all had the same exact topic. There was little if any effect on the outcomes due to overtaxed library resources.

IIRC, Bri is in an undergraduate program. You're lucky if most students go beyond Wikipedia and e-Journals. I don't think strain is an issue.

Additionally, the UK and Australia folks should be reminded that usually what we call a thesis in the US is not what you would consider a thesis; they are often just longish essays. In the States we tend to call any paper over about 5 pages a research paper or thesis. This is particularly true of State schools, in my experience.

My advice, if you feel you must pursue this: Don't make any accusation before you have the facts. At this point the premises don't support the conclusion many are drawing.

I'm not quite getting what the knee-jerk reaction is all about in here.. a 15 page paper is not a life-altering experience. If this class has been taught before, then this same material has been covered before, that means some common ideas and controversies around the subject matter will be re-discussed every time the class is taught. Is it not so unlikely that Bri happened to come up with a good idea that others, like the prof. had thought of before? I'd say good for her for thinking of a thesis statement that is on par with something the professor recommends to the other students. It shows she is engaged in the subject matter and has found something on her own that is a question she wants answered.

Also I don't know where you are taking classes Bri, but there's a nifty service called OhioLink where you can essentially have access to the entire library catalogs of many university and college libraries across the state. They will ship books to you. I have never had a problem finding the resources for large papers even though I attend a small university.
http://www.ohiolink.edu/members-info/

Perry Winkle;495248 wrote:

IIRC, Bri is in an undergraduate program. You're lucky if most students go beyond Wikipedia and e-Journals. I don't think strain is an issue.

It's an undergraduate program, not vocational school. :right:

We're not allowed to use Wikipedia, at least not in any of my classes.

Juniper;495252 wrote:

We're not allowed to use Wikipedia, at least not in any of my classes.

and being "not allowed" stops you? puleaze ;)

Well citing Wikipedia or pulling any information straight off there is bad form, and usually outright prohibited. But, Wiki is a great tool to find other resources since everything *should* be, not always is, sourced by something credible. Just scroll down to the references section and bam.

Perry Winkle;495248 wrote:

That doesn't make sense. Because he repeated one of Brianna's several thesis topics doesn't necessarily make the coincidence intentional.

OK, my bad. I thought he gave the class all the ideas she presented to him.

As long as it's correct. Yes, I have used Wikipedia as you say, but you still have to make sure of the sources. Which is hard to do if they're not physically available to you. I don't know if I'd trust Wikipedia to say that a certain fact came from a certain source for purposes of Works Cited.

Anyway, that's not really the point.

It's hard to judge this without knowing what the class is, and how specific of a thesis was needed. I'm guessing that for a 15-page paper (and I'm also guessing it's on a particular poet, as she mentioned writing one the day we met in the library), it's going to be something fairly specific with a limited number of sources.

Say you're studying Milton (it's not, I don't think, but a good comparison). How many potential thesis statements could you come up with for a 15 page paper? In this case, yes, I'd say that offering hers to the class was a really crappy thing to do.

It's true that ideas can't be copyrighted. Many times a freelance journalist/magazine writer has gotten up in arms after her queries were rejected, then she saw an article on that exact topic in a subsequent issue of that publication. The defense is that someone else may have just beat her to the punch, or sent a better query, but the suspicion is that the editor took the idea and assigned it to one of his "regulars." Hard to prove, but it does give you a sick feeling in the gut.

OK, I've looked up the course in my handy-dandy online catalog and am relieved to see that I won't have to deal with that teacher for a while. I remember you mentioning the name, Bri.

Bbbbbut.... that is a grad level course. How'd you get in?

To Zengum: I believe that when Bri says "thesis" she is not referring to the paper itself, but rather to the main argument of the paper, a "thesis statement." We would call the resulting paper a "thesis." A longer work would be a "dissertation." But I could be wrong, I'm new at this stuff; this is my first year with 300's and above.

But now I have to write a 10-page "thesis" on Rita Dove. :D

At the very least, the guy has been inept - he's caused Brianna to think he took her ideas and passed them on without acknowledgement. He should have mentioned to her that some of the ideas she came up with were already part of his "emergency" set. Or said, "Hey, those are all good ideas - I usually make suggestions to students having trouble setting a topic, can I use these for that?"

It probably isn't as terrible as I first thought, due to the difference in the use of the word thesis. But it's still poor tutoring in my opinion.

Juniper;495276 wrote:

Bbbbbut.... that is a grad level course. How'd you get in?

At the undergrad uni I went to all it took was a signature from the professor. This made a lot of sense when you were in undergrad but looking to go to graduate school, as some classes were paired undergrad/graduate courses -- it means you can knock out both the undergrad and graduate course requirements in one go.

Regarding my Wikipedia comment: Referencing Wikipedia by proxy is popular for slackerly sorts. To do this you lookup the Wikipage and cite the sources that Wikipedia cites for the facts you need to use.

I have never done this, but I know quite a few people who don't think anything of the practice.

Perry Winkle;495317 wrote:

I have never done this, but I know quite a few people who don't think.

Fixed for you :)

I, and most profs and most universities in the US, use plagiarism software that checks submitted papers against any text available through google, including wikipedia and other reference sites. It also checks published journals, and checks against language used in every other paper turned in to any of the other profs using the software.

The cool thing, for me anyway, is that it doesn't just check for direct quotation, it looks for clusters of infrequently used words, looks for similar structures with synonyms, and shows me the students' paper next to the suspected source along with highlighting to indicate content they think was lifted.

The first day of class, I give my students a brief demonstration of how it works. The quality and originality of the writing has gone up very dramatically as soon as they knew it was in play.

You know in my day, we had to plagiarize everything by hand, using actual printed books!

Many universities over here do the same thing SM. We use the Turnitin system at mine.

I recently used a plagiarism checker on my own paper, just to make damn sure nobody could accuse me of plagiarism even by accident. I passed. :)

Plagiarism software is used in most if not all uni's here. It's interesting that this is not even necessary in some cases when students lift entire paragraphs from online sources and don't even correct the formatting to match their own work.

I mean seriously, if you're going to use something from the internet, at least put it into your own words and make sure you use the right font! ;)

ZenGum;495191 wrote:

Aren't they all, secretly?


Seriously, if the situation is as you described, that behaviour sounds very incorrect.

I can think of a few possible explanations:
1. He's a doddery old fool who found this idea in his head, had forgotten where it came from, and decided to be "nice" and throw it out to the students. Or maybe not old and doddery, but a mistake along these lines.
2. The idea is in fact not at all original, but has been around for years, and this time every year he hauls it out for those students who still haven't thought of a thesis topic.
3. He is a jerk. He is screwing you around, belittling you, probably because he perceives your ability and has learned to eliminate all potential rivals immediately.
4. He fancies you, and this is his idea of seduction and foreplay. ;)

If you were in an Australian uni I would suggest you start by seeing one of the student/academic support officers in the students union. Do you have an equivalent service over there?
If you want to take it further, getting something in writing promptly is important. Get that paper trail going.
The problem is, each uni is quite a small community, and this guy is in a field you like. Stomping on his toes will likely come back to haunt you. Even if you have nothing more to do with him, other people will hear about it.
On the other hand, if you don't complain, it establishes a precedent for that kind of behaviour.

How does having your thesis idea copied really affect you?

If you do complain, do so tactfully and in accordance with all the official rules and procedures. For goodness's sake avoid the angry email reflex. But I'm sure you knew that.

Good luck.


P.S. Fifteen pages is not a god-damn thesis. I wouldn't even start saying "sub-thesis" until you pass 10,000 words. Maybe we use the terms differently.

Pssst. There is a long history with said, prof. I'm not sure if you were around when the rash of utter bullshit broke out...:mad:

He's already "on report". Big time. :D

Ah, ignorance. (sigh)

I have now read posts from before I joined, thanks to Cicero's hint. OK, I see what's going on. Sort of.

I personally can't see being so in love with any subject that I'd take the class if taught by a prof who's such an ass. Unless you felt you had something to prove to the prof, or to yourself. Which I can understand, but don't grok how it'd be really productive.

But that's just me and I'm not in those shoes.

It's a graduate level class---I got in with senior permission.

I'm going to decide not to care about this whole thing.

You're a bigger human being than I am Bri, I'd have been bouncing off the walls by now. Not exactly a good way forward lol, probably wold have made myself a bunch of enemies!

Brianna;495567 wrote:

I'm going to decide not to care about this whole thing.

Good. Then you will be even less prepared for the next round of utter bullshit he dishes out. :D

Wait until he starts doing things you can't even prove anymore. That will be fun.

Clodfobble;495384 wrote:

You know in my day, we had to plagiarize everything by hand, using actual printed books!

I once read an article by somebody who used to work for a "term paper for sale" business (pre-Internet days). Their shitck was that they provided "research services." As a result, every paper they supplied was stamped "For Research Purposes" on each page.

But in practice, if a customer was "good"--polite, paid on time, didn't make unreasonable deadline requests--the stamp would be small and at the bottom of each page, where it could be easily whited out before photocopying. The rude customers who made hairy nuisances of themselves had the stamp in large letters across the main text of the paper, so that somebody had to retype it before it could be submitted.

Submitting somebody else's work as my own never appealed to me. Stressful as I find doing assignments, the buzz of handing in a completed piece is wonderful. These people are missing out on a really nice part of university.