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Hypothesis, 2/21/2021

It would be interesting to investigate the prevalence of professors lifting ideas from undergraduate students. I have come across stories of this sort of thing happening with graduate students, but I haven't seen anything at the undergraduate level. A couple of reasons I think this could be happening (and therefore is worth exploring):

Volume: there are way more undergraduate students than graduate students. So there are more opportunities for accidentally original/novel ideas to come up in the course of class discussions, assignments, etc.

Lack of familiarity with the discipline: For one, I think this could lead to a higher potential for novel ideas, because students aren't familiar with the "rules" or norms within a discipline. But perhaps more importantly, because an undergraduate student is unlikely to be familiar, they also wouldn't know when their idea has been lifted. Whereas graduate students are operating in the same niche spheres as the faculty in their department, and are likely very aware when their ideas are being used without permission.

I'm not sure how this could be determined, per se. Many schools have a policy where they upload student work to some auditor that checks to make sure they haven't plagiarized their assignment. Perhaps that work could be checked against some mass search of online journals, and then near matches could be scrutinized to see whether a particular academic and a student had interacted in a timeline that could implicate the academic. It would be a difficult undertaking, mostly for the purpose of dunking on some academics. So it's unlikely anyone will pursue it (I certainly won't be), but it's an idea that's been rattling around in my head and I enjoy thinking about the potential implications. Damning, sure, but also encouraging for the amateur knowledge producers out there.

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