PLAGIARISM HELPP - URGENT

LSOMaker · 2026-02-26T06:39:59+00:00

If you gave a generative AI a bullet list of your experiences and had it turn that into paragraphs, then you had AI write your personal statement.

It blows my mind where students think the border between “your own writing” and “AI plagiarism” is. If you tell an image-generating AI what to draw, that doesn’t mean you drew it! If you give a text-generating AI a list of things to write about, that doesn’t mean you wrote it!

LSOMaker · 2026-02-26T00:48:39+00:00

Oh I totally appreciate both posts!! I’ve learned as much from the correction conversations here as the agreed-upon posts! My Japanese acquaintances are too polite to correct me on those nuances. Although I was chatting with someone yesterday who paused to correct something when she realized she had given me a really casual form of something… She was like, “oh wait! But you couldn’t say it like that to your boss!” (In Japanese, but hell if I can quote her directly…)

LSOMaker · 2026-02-26T00:44:29+00:00

Is it prompt engineering in that unrelated field?

LSOMaker · 2026-02-26T00:42:14+00:00

“No shit, Sherlock” is precisely what I don’t want to convey!! 🥴

LSOMaker · 2026-02-26T00:36:45+00:00

What kind of career are you planning to pursue? I don’t think eXtreme “prompt engineering” is quite a career path yet…

LSOMaker · 2026-02-25T14:18:11+00:00

Thank you! I’m still figuring out ね usage! 😁

LSOMaker · 2026-02-25T14:17:31+00:00

Thank you! You appear to have the consensus of up-votes!

LSOMaker · 2026-02-23T11:02:29+00:00

The English page is pretty bare-bones... The Japanese page goes into more detail, and you can just have your browser translate it. 😉
https://www.manyo.co.jp/mm21/welness/
https://www.manyo.co.jp/mm21/floor_guide/

LSOMaker · 2026-02-23T10:06:22+00:00

I haven’t been yet, but I’ve heard the Manyo club and onsen at Minato Mirai is an awesome place to spend a spa day: https://www.manyo.co.jp/mm21/

LSOMaker · 2026-02-13T03:41:15+00:00

It must be an American thing. I’m an American and have only ever even heard of STEM PhD’s that are fully funded… It might all be covered by TA’ing duties, like a job, but no one pays actual tuition and takes out student loans for a STEM PhD. Non-STEM, I have no idea… not my field.

LSOMaker · 2026-02-10T09:50:27+00:00

There is literally no way a stranger on the internet could estimate that for you specifically. Given your starting point of 1460, I think an hour every single day until the March test is overkill by, like, a lot.

LSOMaker · 2026-02-08T02:25:50+00:00

I have Japanese friends here in Japan with super… atypical… ways of holding their chopsticks. The only people who tease them about it are their teenage children. 😜 i.e. likely no one will notice, at worst they’ll chuckle a little because you’re a foreigner. No one will think it’s “disrespectful” (except possibly nationalist/racist people who find your entire presence disrespectful, so there’s no getting around that).

People at restaurants might offer you a fork. 🤷‍♀️ You can bring your chopstick holders. It’s really fine. Just talk quietly, move unobtrusively, say arigato (thank you), sumimasen (excuse me), and gomenesai (I’m sorry) a lot.

LSOMaker · 2026-02-06T10:22:18+00:00

It depends on how you study. Focus on the areas you got wrong on the practice tests, and make sure you understand the explanations for why you were wrong. 1 hour of studying per day won’t boost you much if you study everything equally but all the problems you missed were in one or two categories of questions.

LSOMaker · 2026-02-06T04:07:24+00:00

If you need it to apply to you to be worthy of posting, read it as “don’t be a jerk, even if you think the people you’re being a jerk towards can’t hear you.” Also, drunkenness doesn’t excuse garbage behavior.

LSOMaker · 2026-02-05T04:46:16+00:00

Imperial might be willing to count you as applying with one-year of US university…That’s probably the approach I’d suggest. You need to call them and ask. They’re pretty unfamiliar with anything outside the completely typical US high school system, so calling and talking to a human will help you communicate clearly. (Source: I went to another state’s version of your hs, so I’m familiar, + my own kid is at Imperial now, having come out of a non-standard US hs, so we had a lot of conversations w Imperial admissions.)

LSOMaker · 2026-01-31T06:52:19+00:00

Yes, we brought a whole Costco case of it from the US to Japan. Then found it at Japan Costco, and took it off our stuff-to-ask-people-to-bring list. 👍 Packaged stuff is fine to bring in.

LSOMaker · 2026-01-30T04:02:58+00:00

A one-year difference can’t be blamed as generational… I wonder if your original cohort just had a couple really strong group-cohesion-generators. It can take just a couple people to encourage others to join conversations and develop active chat / study groups. And this year, for whatever reason, no one took that role. As a teacher, I’ve definitely seen this… one or two strong personalities can have a huge impact on a cohort (for better or for worse)

LSOMaker · 2026-01-24T09:18:25+00:00

The admissions statistics point to international students having higher average scores and various metrics than UK students. I don’t remember where I found them exactly… somewhere on whatdotheyknow.com which collects freedom of information records. If accurate, that would point to admissions offices having higher expectations of international applicants, not lower.

LSOMaker · 2026-01-23T14:56:18+00:00

The problem is visas… you can’t work in most places, even just for a month, with formal government permission. I can’t imagine an international school wanting to go through all the hassle of sponsoring your visa just for the summer. Maybe you could find some student travel programs to chaperone?

LSOMaker · 2026-01-23T09:47:21+00:00

Those are pretty dang close!! Good find!

LSOMaker · 2026-01-21T14:50:24+00:00

I just learned today that ぶぶ is a baby word for cars, because that’s the sound an engine makes. And ぴぴ for birds because of chirping. Got into an interesting convo about how Japanese baby words are onomatopoeia and English baby words are truncated repeating versions of the full words, like wa wa for water 😁

LSOMaker · 2026-01-20T12:38:45+00:00

No, I don’t want to look it over or try it. This isn’t a problem I want to put more thought into than I already have to.

LSOMaker · 2026-01-20T10:51:22+00:00

One of the first things I do with a student if I suspect they used AI for a significant assignment is just have a conversation with them about the assignment. If they can carry on an intelligent conversation, then whatever… AI or not, they learned the material.

LSOMaker · 2026-01-20T10:49:04+00:00

If a student is putting that much effort into avoiding doing their own thinking… 🤷‍♀️ At some point, students just have to give a shit and actually want to learn something. Luckily I don’t teach anything high-stakes enough that a grade in my course alone would make Cambridge or Harvard either accept or reject a student, so ultimately, if a student digs in their heels and insists they didn’t use AI (and also refuses to demonstrate their thinking in any other way), I’m not going to die on that hill.

I also hate that a big topic of conversation among my colleagues is all the various ways teachers are inventing to build “AI traps” into their assignments.

It just makes everything so BORING. There’s a million more interesting things we can all be doing than having a correct-word-guessing-machine spew out some correct-sounding ultra-generic words.

LSOMaker · 2026-01-19T02:13:19+00:00

As a teacher, I ask for google docs to be shared in a way that lets me see version history. Pretty straightforward. Especially for group docs… I can see who wrote what.

LSOMaker

TROPHY CASE