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62 Comments
- kida001, on 10/12/2007, -10/+58No, the people who plagiarize are the ones responsible...this post is stupid.
- MikeKnoop, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Ignorance isn't an excuse. It is drilled into our heads since 6th grade that plagarism is wrong, and our school district follows suit by issuing suspensions for it.
-Mike - Andy.D, on 10/12/2007, -7/+17Did you try to read TFA? Obviously not. The point was that someone in the UK argues that teachers need to make sure students know how to use sources properly, that you can't just assume that they do. Plagiarism is not an obvious wrong like murder.
The article covers her opinion and responds to it. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10***** aaaz
- bitterg, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10"Baroness Deech, who heads the UK's student complaint agency, argues that teachers and technology share the responsibility."
...yeah, along with students. Some of my friends have no problems stealing a line or two from a website, because they think it saves them time. Until they get caught, they'll keep doing it no matter what a teacher "teaches" them. - gridbread, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8From what I've seen, plagiarism happens quite often due to the fact a lot of assignments have a question which has one true answer, anything else is a deviation from the correct response and is wrong.
So you're limited to what you can write regardless, and with most of the work you don't come equipped with that knowledge by default.
So you do your research, collecting various bits of information and you end up just rewording it, remixing it, and there is very little room for creativity/original work.
They're basically demanding that you learn how to plagiarize without being detected.
On the other hand plagiarism in free-form writing assignments is simply unacceptable, there is no excuse to not create your own original content when working on something without constraints and limitation. - TimDigg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Minor Plagiarism = honest mistake, minor oversight, misunderstanding of how to cite something
Major Plagiarism = waiting until the last possible second to write a paper
- Convicted Plagiarist... :(
and it was noone's fault but my own - mathmanjeffy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Ever been a teacher?
The general trend in society is that students need to learn more and more advanced topics younger and younger. In order to accomplish this phenomenal feat, curriculum is forced on teachers by legislatures who know very little about the capabilities of the students they govern. Increased curriculum without a reformed and unified system means the teacher has a few choices on hand, all of which need to deal with increased content while not increasing the time to teach it. When you need to do that, any new tool that can be added to your arsenal in order to teach for understanding quicker can and should be used.
Now, add that to the increased saturation of computers and technology to 1st world societies (where this becomes an issue). It becomes unrealistic to not teach students by using the technology on hand and, in fact, would be counterproductive. You suggest we teach students as they "used to" be taught while they live in a world that resembles very little of what "used to" be. Computer technology is here to stay and can and will be used in schools for quite some time to come, as it should be.
Where lies the problem, then? Put simply, students are expected to receive this curriculum wholly and fully. For various reasons, either because of absenteeism, lack of academic motivation, learning disabilities, etc., the student does not work to achieve the level of understanding that is expected of them. This issue compounds upon itself each year the student is in school. "Hold them back a grade" you might say. But in the current political environment where academic achievement is based solely on graduation rates and test proficiency, and federal funding is therefore also based on that, no school can afford to hold back a significant portion of their student population for the sake of academic achievement.
If you really wish to go "old school," then examine the responsibilities placed upon the school in order to train a student to live in society. Increasingly, schools are expected to teach students work ethic and morality, something largely left to the parents in "old schools." Teachers are not trained for this nor should they be expected to be; furthermore, when in the busy school day would you expect Teachers of already overloaded curriculums to focus on such things? - Jagdhund, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Engineers
- DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7> these days teachers are JUST as lazy as the students
Maybe. My experience is that a lot of them just don't grok technology, and they don't understand the ethical issues associated with using something like turnitin.com.
I get regular requests from academics asking for assistance with turnitin. I try to talk them out of using it. Apart from the ethical problem of handing over student's intellectual property to a private organisation in a foreign country (turnitin is American I believe?), there's the issue of trust: submitting all work to turnitin et al is taking a "guilty until proven otherwise position".
Then there's the bit where the *only* type of plagiarism that text matching tools can find is literal copy/paste style reproduction of others work. There's no capability to identify plagiarism of ideas, and no capability to identify plagiarism by unattributed paraphrasing. Its trivially easy to dodge that type of software by shuffling words around, or keeping a thesaurus beside you.
Plagiarism is possibly best circumvented by designing assessment tasks that are difficult to answer without making original contributions. Using the same assignment task semester after semester will *obviously* attract plagiarism.
"Plagiarism is evil" is *not* something that is drummed into all students from grade 6. Maybe that happens in the US, it certainly happens here in Australia, but in other bits of the world, other sorts of things are acceptable. We have massive problems with international students, particularly from the "sub continent" who are massively offended and confused when we tell them that their piece of work, carefully constructed over the course of twenty minutes or so by cutting/pasting together content from a range of sources is likely to see them with their student visa cancelled and on an early flight home to explain to Mum and Dad what they got for their tuition money.
Originality isn't a universially desired thing.
It's complex. We still need to find ways to convince students to deliver their own work. I take the slightly panoptic option of requiring that my students submit assignments to me by email, and using a lot of heavy hints and indications to the effect that I might submit their work to turnitin or something like that.
(Of course, I consider the use of so-called 'plagiarism detection' services like turnitin to be *fundamentally* unethical, and I'd never actually use it)
It seems to work. I don't have any problems (that I can see!) with plagiarism in my class. - Toast1185, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4who are these people going on to higher education that do know how to properly credit sources? It's either lazyness or stupidity, either one is not an admirable quality in a graduate. Think of it is a signal
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Plagiarism: It's worth it.
- stalefries, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I see where this article is coming from, although I have a little to add that they seem to have skipped over. Despite being in several schools where "DO NOT PLAGIARIZE" and "CITE YOUR SOURCES" have been drilled into us, students around me are still lazy and stupid. I blame the students.
- stanleyfresh, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7If teachers wanna bitch about plagiarism via the web so much, they should make students go old school and WRITE their papers. Sure, it won't stop em from plagiarizing, but it'll make em work for it, at least. Besides, some people actually learn by copying notes and whatnot.
- dextrocardia, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6The one example cited in the article had nothing to do with the web at all. Student A plagiarized from a fellow student.
There's nothing in the article noting any kind of factual basis for the claims that plagiarism is increasing, let alone that the web is responsible. The whole thing is a stretch. - Jagdhund, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7I love this "Blame everyone but the perpetrator" idea in our society. No one should be held accountable for their actions, from plagiarism to murder.
/sarcasm - nypix, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Easily circumvented via oral reports.
- tdhurst, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Oh god no. PLEASE no.
It would take me upwards of ten times longer to handwrite ANYTHING. - HP844182, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5So people will download copyrighted music but they care enough to cite their sources?
If your information gets out, it's not yours anymore...it's everyone's. - manicdvln, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's a lot of bull. The only reason I plagiarise is not because I can't do the work, it's because I have no respect for the institution and faculty. Most professors are pompous ***** who just want their self-righteous opinions regurgitated on paper. If that is what they want, they should read their own work. Better yet, most of them don't even read or correct them, they have TAs for that. If they have no respect for students, and think the classroom is simply a place to ego trip, I have no reason to write a sincere paper.
I have learned much more outside of schools than inside. And for what? A piece of paper that says I passed my dog training. Besides, people like George Bush are proof enough that learning or should I say training institutions are another kind of corporation that exists only to make money. Highest regarded diplomas are valued by price, not discipline, dedication or intelligence. Furthermore, if you have the smarts to plagiarise and deceive the system your entire life, you have the skills to survive in corporate America. - Nougat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Is the gun responsible for the murder? The car for the accident? The nuclear bomb for the radiation?
No.
Things which have no morality or conscience of their own cannot be responsible for anything. I'm marking this inaccurate. - rkenward, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3well somebody has to be!
it certainly isn't the student. (sarcasm) - useful, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3The only solution is oral.
I can say this though, my teachers rip off questions from other teachers at different schools. When I can take an online quiz on webCT and google the answers off some other teachers answer key that was made before our book was even published, something is fishy.
IMO the teachers are worse than the students in this area. They make money selling their materials, students make money off what they learned. - Kaglan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@mathmanjeffy,
It sounds like you're saying, albeit more judiciously, is that
1. Not everyone can learn everything.
2. This in itself is not a problem, but it is particularly noticeable because there is so much today's students are expected to know.
3. Unfortunately, student, teacher, and school performance are all tied to how many students end up knowing everything.
As a graduate student from a family of teachers, I'd say #1 is almost definitely true, a big frustration when dealing with school rating via standardized testing. The important (and difficult) thing when you're teaching is to assess the student's situation and capability well enough to effectively teach them but not to make prejudicial judgments about what they can and can't learn.
...
I don't know what the answer to this is. We could limit information load by moving to a more career-training model of schooling, but part of me feel likes this would be the end of the more abstract idea of education. - Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3The taboo of plagiarism comes from the academic neurotic drive to lock in attribution so professors can keep their grants or tenure. As a grad student, I found that I didn't give a flying ***** who came up with an idea first, I just wanted to move forward. That's one reason I'm no longer a grad student.
The simple solution to the problem of students not doing the work is to make them do it in class. You can figure out pretty quick who knows how to string a sentence together. Another way is to have students discuss/defend their work. I guess improving the actual teaching process is beyond the capability of most teachers. - TimDigg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3what worries me is that teachers nowadays simply pop papers into a plagiarism scanner instead of like....I dunno...reading papers and checking the sources...as soon as these scanners find their way into "the usual places" ....students will basically scan their papers through all of them before turning them in....
these days teachers are JUST as lazy as the students....
someone tell me how my grad school teacher managed to grade 19....50+ page papers(for the capstone) in 24 hours.....
ya I don't know either - Tritis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Are you saying that teachers have no morals or conscience?
- mathmanjeffy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Do you know anything about teacher assessment or are you just talking out your ass? I'm assuming the latter, but I suppose you could have learned in some backwards system.
- yaosio, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2After reading the summary I can assure all of you that whatever this is linked to was written by an idiot.
- cavemanf16, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5OK, so first off, both lazy students and lazy professors are to blame I suppose, but the other *major* problem here is profit motive. In the US, professors get paid to teach. School teachers get paid to teach. But professors and school teachers RARELY have their superiors looking in on them and their students to see how things are going. So when end of the year comes around and decisions are being made about salaries, which teachers to cut, which ones to keep, guess what many people would intuitively look to for guidance on the teacher's abilities (and the student's abilities to pass them on to the next grade)? That's right, the student's grades.
So, if both the students AND the teachers are motivated by a profit incentive to have the highest grades possible, then yes, it only makes sense that both will want to do whatever they can to make those grades high. Yes, I admit, there are lots of rules in place to limit corner cutting by both teachers and students... but rules are meant to be broken. And break them the students and teachers will do!
Add in the fact that my own business case writing is frequently (nay, almost procedurally) plagiarized for other's works around my office because that's how our process is BUILT to work, and it's no wonder that plagiarism is rampant in today's society. Honestly, the only thing that surprises me any more is how incredibly retarded most college attendees are when it comes to plagiarizing - no inventiveness or concern for getting caught whatsoever!! - stalefries, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I find it really funny whenever I'm given a worksheet to fill out at school, and then do a google search for select phrases and find the worksheet, with the answer key, online at some random .edu my teacher probably googled.
- Ninjab3ar, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5http://www.turnitin.com
- DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2My money is on him talking out his arse. That's a load of crap. Another digger that doesn't understand "tenure".
- DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2> The taboo of plagiarism comes from the academic neurotic drive to lock in attribution
> so professors can keep their grants or tenure.
Frankly, that's a load of *****. Yes, academics are undoubtedly neurotic. You seem to have issues with understanding what "tenure" means though.
The issue of attribution is about scientific proof, validity, legitimacy. By building on the work of others (and demonstrating where those ideas came from) then you're adding legitimacy to your own work, and demonstrating a strong scientific basis for the new ideas that you're presenting.
> As a grad student, I found that I
> didn't give a flying ***** who came up with an idea first, I just wanted to
> move forward. That's one reason I'm no longer a grad student.
Society, and science in particular, recognises new ideas that are carefully constructed with a clear trail of evidence to the development of the idea over time as meritous and worthy of consideration. Even if a particular new idea sounds a bit non-intuitive or outlandish, it will be regarded in the scientific community as being prima facie valid if it can demonstrate a good line of source, and proper scientific method.
On the other hand, people who come up with quationable ideas out of the blue with no "standing on the shoulders of giants", no scientific rigour, and just insisting over and over again that they're right (take this guy for example: http://www.geminielectricmotor.com/ ) will be very quickly written off as nutbags, and ignored.
*That* is, I suggest, closer to the reason why you're no longer a grad student. You didn't grok scientific process, you didn't grok academic rigour. Did you think google scholar uses the Isaac Newton quote 'cos it sounded cute? Sheesh! - pak314, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1In college we had a engineering class where we would team up and write about four papers over the term. We divided out the workload that each person would focus on one paper while the others assisted. One teammate emailed me his paper and it sounded so good given that he was a non-native english speaker. I though he perhaps had some hidden talent but didn't see any references for any quotes he cited. I did a quick Google query on some sentences and found out the first 2 pages were directly copied from an article online. Did some more checks and found most of the other pages are directly copied online. I later confronted him about this and he felt he did nothing wrong. I did eventually get him to rewrite the paper in his own words because there was no way I would jointly submit a paper with that amount of plagerism.
- ollj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is a retarded title.
Plagiarism is older than computers and teachers, thus its the other way around; plagiarism causes teachers and comuters, if there is any causality involved at all. - mathmanjeffy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Which other profession is expected to reinvent the wheel every time?
- DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Agreed. It amazes me how people still run the "intellectual property" idea in the sense of "I wrote it, it's mine, I can control it!". You're right: if it's out, it's everyones.
Having said that, the plagiarism thing is a bit different. Academia works on the principle that authenticity, reliability, and legitimacy of ideas are maintained by a strict process of peer review and by building on the work of others.
A random new idea will have trouble finding acceptance until it has been reviewed and tested by other academics and granted legitimacy.
Sir Isaac Newton said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". A little self-deprecating there, he's saying that all the wonderful ideas that he is credited with are just improvements upon and derivations of other people's hard work.
By taking other people's work (and crediting their contributions in the process) and building on it, then you're demonstrating that your work is built on strict scientific principles, and it inherently has more legitimacy than it would if you'd just written it out of the blue.
In other societies, crediting people with their contributions is important too. In F/OSS for eg, the unwritten rule that you *never* remove someone else's name from the comments in the code is a feature of the strict meritocracies that F/OSS projects tend to be (Raymond, 2001). Much has been made of Torvald's propensity for attributing pretty much *everything* to other people - he has famously claimed that he's a "basically a very lazy person". As (in part) a result, people think the guy is a god. - stanleyfresh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@mathmanjeffy
I see your point, and I do understand where you come from. I have two sisters that are both teachers. I fully understand the plight of bumping up students via "social promotion" (is what I think it's called, don't hold me to that term). However, the issue I'm looking at here is not how the teachers are teaching. There's nothin' wrong with a spreadsheet gradebook or using word processor software to type up and print handouts for students. The issue here is how the students learn, or -- in this case -- how they're cheating themselves outta learning by means of the extreme ease of digital plagiarism. Though your point is valid, I still think my argument holds its own validity (is that a word, lol) as well. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Copywhat?
On a serious note, Copyright is necessariy and should be respected. However, its scope and longevity should be reduced severely. Here is how I, and many others think it should be (No, I'm not saying I'm in the Pirate Party. I'm not even in Sweden):
http://www2.piratpartiet.se/international/english - asdf25, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Agreed. I'm not even gonna click the link, because that paragraph was so stupid it almost made my head explode. If you think there's a legitimate connection between copyright infringement and high school students cheating on papers, please get off the internet and stop cluttering it up for those of us who aren't morons.
- maldrax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I am so glad I'm done school.
All of this bull crap and hoop jumping just to get a rubber stamp, that as it turns out is of little use. - gtiness, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1plagarism has become en epidemic on campus...not because of computers and the internet but, because of students and teachers/administrations.
students who don't understand what they are doing or why it is wrong or how to do their work the right way
teachers who can't/won't enforce academic policy.
administrations who can't/won't enforce academic policy. - asdf25, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1High school plagiarism and copyright infringement are completely different. It's not even worth comparing them. The problem with plagiarism, in the context of high school classes, isn't that the rights of the original author are being violated; it's that the plagiarist is deceiving the instructor and receiving credit for work he didn't actually do. Really, there's absolutely no reason copyright infringement should even be mentioned in regards to this topic.
- Ascendant, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3As long as we're pushing the blame away from the person committing the act, I'll go out on a limb and claim that it's all the fault of the author of this piece. I hope his next article will be a thorough and sincere apology for being responsible for plagiarism..
- dancpsu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1No, the solution is to not give out busywork fill-in-the-blank worksheets for homework. Restructure the school day so that any practice work is done in school where the student can get help. Use technology where appropriate, like with the clickers. Don't just hand out laptops to every student. And a computer in the back of the classroom is practically worthless.
We're almost to the point where computers will mask plagiarism automatically through rewording and restructuring sentences. You might see a future word processor tool that will put any writing in your "own words" by taking in some text you have written and restructuring/rewording the downloaded document to match. - nalf38, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0the two are not the same thing. you might download Michael Jackson's "Thriller," but you're not going to turn it in to music professor and tell him that you wrote it.
- shosterman, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5Soon to follow...
"Are NRA officials and pistols responsible for murder?" - gygyes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Plagiarism is not illegal (no criminal penalties). Violating copyright is. Plagiarism does not always violate copyright (e.g. if you plagiarize a government report which has no copyright restrictions but do not cite it) and you can meet all the needs of copyright but still plagiarize. The fact that there are two different systems and sets of standards continues to breed confusion. Example: A friend of mine was failed for plagiarizing himself (he turned in the same paper for two different classes). Self-plagiarism is a staple of success in business as you reuse content and ideas but death in academics. The concept of plagiarism only exists to make it easier for teachers to evaluate a student’s true performance. More than anything this signals the death of the long paper as the primary method for assessing student achievement.
- asdf25, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"If teachers wanna bitch about plagiarism via the web so much, they should make students go old school and WRITE their papers."
Uh, no, they absolutely should not. That's completely unnecessary, it adds pointless additional work, and it's only tangentially related to the problem of plagiarism. If teachers are concerned about plagiarism, they should find a way to check for plagiarism and punish it severely, not throw out new and useful technology in an attempt to make plagiarism mildly less convenient.
And everyone who upvoted the parent is an idiot. -
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