
A Positive Solution for Plagiarism - jazzdev
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Positive-Solution-for/134498/
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616c
I will be honest (full disclosure: I work in an academic institution). This
obsessions with plaigarism is utter crap.

I know this is an opinion, but I have built a philosophy through years of
failing at tasks. If you do not do your work, who cares? Time and time again,
I see kids that cheat and they never tread water. Even if they graduate, they
have problems. Because the final product is irrelevant in the education
process, it is the developmental process you are paying for. The real world is
dissimilar of course, but without skills and reasoning skills it is harder and
harder beat competitors when making a superior product, whatever it is.
Therein lies the rub.

I was a language major, intentionally or not, because I wanted to study in
speciliazations where there is a binary choice: you know or you do not, you
are fluent or you are not. Now there are tests that "prove" that, but only by
application and communicating in a native way you can advance and
miscommunication with a native speaker reminds you which side of the spectrum
you are on. It took me longer to appreciate it, but computer science, as an
extension of the language of mathematics, is something you apply and grasp, or
you do not. You cannot fool a computer into a sorting algorithm without
grasping and explaining the requisite steps (unless you end in system
administration and the continued absence of 4th generation languages, haha).

No academic institution will espouse this view, as credentials cost money, and
cheating devalues the brand when moronic indivdiuals with said credentials
showed they have no skills in applying skills or analyzing info.

Just my thoughts. Seen it so many times as a student and an employee, I lost
count.

~~~
iak8god
> Time and time again, I see kids that cheat and they never tread water. Even
> if they graduate, they have problems.

Graduating these students is bad for them and bad for the institution. I've
always wished that more students could be made to see that the goal of
assignments is not to produce something (a paper, code, proofs) but rather to
get _the experience working through producing the thing_. All too often they
seem to think of the situation as like a job where the instructor (boss) tells
the student (worker) to do something and then they do it because that's what
the instructor wants. With that mindset, it's easy to see why they think
they're getting away with something when they plagiarize, when in fact they're
mostly cheating themselves.

What universities _should_ be doing is communicating more clearly to students
about the nature of the activity that they're paying four years of their lives
and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in.

Another point: especially in courses where the grades are magically adjusted
to fit some curve, allowing cheating is extremely unfair to honest students.
Even if there's no official curving going on, it's hard for the instructor to
accurately gauge what students in the course should be capable of when a bunch
of them are cheating. I've seen the effects of this firsthand as a student:
one result is inflation in the difficulty of assignments. Finally, even when
neither of those two concerns apply, it can be demoralizing for students who
work hard and have a fair grasp of the material to get Cs or Bs when their
know-nothing classmates seem to be breezing through, snapping up As.

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murbard2
You could also not count homework towards the GPA.

I studied in France where the system is a bit different. We had homework, and
they were graded so we could get feedback, but the idea that a homework grade
would count towards your GPA would have seemed utterly absurd. Homework was
meant to help you master the material and figure out if you understood it, not
evaluate you!

Exams were taken in a large hall, with many supervisors. We also had graded
projects to complete during the semesters, but no two students (or group of
students for group projects) were assigned the same project.

Doing my graduate studies in the US came as a shock. There was a ton of
homework, and the grade mattered! This meant that if you already knew or
understood the material, you couldn't just skip the homework: you had to do
the whole stupid thing.

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itsybitsycoder
I went to school in Canada; all of the classes had homework, but in some
classes homework counted for GPA and in some it didn't. A good chunk of the
students would do the homework that counted and skip all the homework that
didn't, whether they needed it or not. The end result being less learning and
lower grades in the classes where homework didn't count. To be fair most of
those students weren't exactly on the high end of the grade scale to begin
with and it's their own fault if they chose not to do the homework. But from
the prof's POV, if they wanted people to succeed in their classes, it was
better to have the homework count. There is probably some cultural reason why
French students can be relied on to do their homework more than US/Canadians.

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donatj
There are few original thoughts ever. Plagiarism and the ownership of thoughts
are so misplaced, particularly in modern society. Think of your writings as
your gift to society for its betterment and not something you've done for the
advancement of your personal brand and the idea of owning a thought seems
silly.

Having to rephrase something because someone already said it that way is an
insane waste of time from a bygone era. Open source thought already.

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weland
> Having to rephrase something because someone already said it that way is an
> insane waste of time from a bygone era.

Which is precisely why you are not required to do it (and never were), as long
as you properly quote and attribute it :).

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fnordfnordfnord
>Which is precisely why you are not required to do it

Right or wrong (I know, it's wrong), this silly 'phrase it in your own words'
idea is taught to many students as the way to avoid plagiarizing others'
works.

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weland
It's taught as the way to avoid plagiarism because, for students, the rate of
"accidental" plagiarism is extremely high: they tend to unintentionally repeat
an author's affirmation simply because it is so well formulated that it
"sticks" to their mind. It also helps them avoid "newspaper clipping"
articles, where they write a ten-page paper full of "X's view on the matter is
that... whereas Y disagrees because...", which _is_ considered a form of
plagiarism.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>It's taught as the way to avoid plagiarism because, for students, the rate of
"accidental" plagiarism is extremely high

Well it's wrong because it is teaching students to avoid detection, not to
avoid plagiarizing.

Which is it? Can you "properly quote and attribute" or not? Your post seems to
be in conflict with what you said two posts ago.

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fnordfnordfnord
We could start by ceasing to teach students to technically avoid "plagiarism!"
accusations with the simple-minded application of a thesaurus. "Write it in
your own words." Which often becomes s/word/similar word/. This was never a
good idea. There may have been some tiny amount of value in this approach[1]
when it was required to actually find a thesaurus and a dictionary and learn
new words, but that is certainly lost today when there are myriad tools which
will automatically do this for you. I'd still argue that it does more harm
than good since it teaches students how to use others' ideas without
attribution.

[1] Not as an exercise to instil honesty or principle, but as a simple
vocabulary and grammar teaching activity.

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Millennium
It strikes me that perhaps the simplest way to kill plagiarism is to simply
require a handwritten rough draft. Take the copy/paste convenience out of
cheating, and far fewer students will cheat: writing your own thoughts is a
lot less tedious than hand-copying someone else's. It also has the bonus of
ensuring that at least some minimal editing has taken place, over the course
of writing the paper a second time.

Students with disabilities that prevent writing a draft by hand -actually
missing the dominant hand or not having use of it, or arthritis in the wrists,
or carpal tunnel syndrome, or whatever- will need accommodations, of course.
No solution will catch everyone. But it should still radically shrink the pool
of copied (and copyable) papers.

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emeraldd
A reasonable alternative to this would be to require a hardcopy draft with
visible editing marks as a draft. Going to paper at least once helps alot in
the editing process.

~~~
iak8god
Hardcopy or not, making students iterate over their work with feedback at each
step, is the right way to do this. Make submitting drafts and responding to
feedback part of the grade. The only problem that this is a lot of work for
the instructor, who increasingly is an adjunct with little experience running
all over town to teach six courses just to make ends meet.

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rbrogan
Perhaps a good approach would be to assume a format is compromised as it is,
but still focus on doing the best possible job of testing students. It should
be possible to gear things such that plagiarism does not really do enough to
be worth it (e.g. you would still do poorly on oral presentations /
interviews, exam essay questions, etc.).

