Duke Senior’s Commencement Speech Appears to Plagiarize 2014 Address by Harvard Student

[Anonymous]

PP A bit of a correction. Outline was round one. In round 2 the contestants delivered a draft orally to the selection committee. Committee member says they weren't told to check for plagiarism.

https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2022/05/duke-university-commencement-speaker-selection-process-committee-did-not-check-for-plagiarism-according-to-committee-member

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The irony is that if she were like my kids who couldn't be bothered putting in the effort to be strivers, she'd be fine today.

Here's the thing - she's likely been getting away with this forever. No way this is her first rodeo at cheating, copying, and plagiarizing.

She finally got caught because she did it on too big of a stage. Her scheming has worked in the classroom and offices for many years. In short, she believed her own bullsh#t.

I imagine that at least half the kids accepted to these highly competitive schools have lied and cheated. It’s impossible to believe that so many tens of thousands of kids are that perfect. Duke got what they wanted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The irony is that if she were like my kids who couldn't be bothered putting in the effort to be strivers, she'd be fine today.

Here's the thing - she's likely been getting away with this forever. No way this is her first rodeo at cheating, copying, and plagiarizing.

She finally got caught because she did it on too big of a stage. Her scheming has worked in the classroom and offices for many years. In short, she believed her own bullsh#t.

See also Mackenzie Fierceton.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-dredging

Nothing like Mackenzie Fierceton. Give me a break.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't know about the rest of it but I wouldn't judge someone's background based on their accent. A friend is a refugee from a non English speaking country. Her accent in English is perfect, she sounds like a well-educated midwesterner, but only because her family was desperate to put their experience in their native country behind them and devoted in outsized share of resources to being sure there children spoke unaccented English.

How about judging her based on having the resources to hire a PR firm for crisis management?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Does anybody else think both speeches sound meandering and boring?

Aren’t all commencement speeches meandering and boring?

Admiral McRaven gave the only interesting one I’ve ever heard (which starts off by acknowledging how boring and unmemorable commencement speakers are).

I did think that at least this Duke grad was smart enough to not talk about what she learned in Navy Seal training.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxBQLFLei70

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To its credit, it's the Duke school newspaper which carried the story first.

Apparently Duke required those who wanted to give the speech to submit an outline. The decision as to which speech would be given was based on the outline. So, the exact speech wasn't submitted for preapproval.

And she was an editor for the same paper...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To its credit, it's the Duke school newspaper which carried the story first.

Apparently Duke required those who wanted to give the speech to submit an outline. The decision as to which speech would be given was based on the outline. So, the exact speech wasn't submitted for preapproval.

And she was an editor for the same paper...

Clearly she made some enemies at the paper!

Molly Ivens spoke at my graduation -- she was pretty memorable But the students speeches are usually so boring and rote that I'm really surprised anyone remembered a past speech well enough to recognize it. They all basically use similar words to convey similar concepts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s a sad state of things when an administrator would have to think of running a plagiarism check on the college grad speaker.

It should be routine. Kids high school papers are all checked I assumed that continued through college.

It is a bit of surprise that they don’t check these things. When I worked on the Hill, we ran all speeches through software that checked for plagiarism (and this was more than a decade ago).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s a sad state of things when an administrator would have to think of running a plagiarism check on the college grad speaker.

It should be routine. Kids high school papers are all checked I assumed that continued through college.

It is a bit of surprise that they don’t check these things. When I worked on the Hill, we ran all speeches through software that checked for plagiarism (and this was more than a decade ago).

I'd be curious to know if a plagiarism algorithm would catch it. She actually worked very hard rearranging every phrase. The side by side, makes it clear she didn't just regurgitate something that had been shared with her, but labored over hiding the origins. She better have the PR firm working up responses to whatever's about to be discovered in the rest of her published work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s a sad state of things when an administrator would have to think of running a plagiarism check on the college grad speaker.

It should be routine. Kids high school papers are all checked I assumed that continued through college.

It is a bit of surprise that they don’t check these things. When I worked on the Hill, we ran all speeches through software that checked for plagiarism (and this was more than a decade ago).

I'd be curious to know if a plagiarism algorithm would catch it. She actually worked very hard rearranging every phrase. The side by side, makes it clear she didn't just regurgitate something that had been shared with her, but labored over hiding the origins. She better have the PR firm working up responses to whatever's about to be discovered in the rest of her published work.

It seemed like the thesaurus was getting a good work out I agree. Was she taught that you can't take things word for word and call them your own, but can rearrange things a bit, kind of like not making an exact copy of a Picasso painting but rather doing something " in the style of..."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I really want to know more about her family now. How rich is she exactly?

+1. Did she also get full financial aid and/or scholarship under false pretenses?

[Anonymous]

So on brand for Duke.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So on brand for Duke.

This year from our school 10 kids applied to Duke including my DS but Duke took the kid with the absolute worst grades and with no real extracurricular. Parents are very rich and apparently donated and kid has two other siblings attending. They did not even take any other kid - most of whom were really great students. After this experience, I am turned off by Duke and somehow this headline affirms my thoughts on the school.

[Anonymous]

Typical Dukie behavior

[Anonymous]

It's pretty easy to spot plagiarism if you know the student. It's interesting that the student newspaper she was news editor for broke the story, I would assume some of her fellow students looked at the speech and could tell she didn't actually write parts of it. Then all you need to do is google the parts that don't look correct.

Duke has been known as a rich kids from the northeast school for a while.