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Getting Through College, Thanks To Plagiarism
from the punishment-takes-care-of-itself dept
There have been plenty of stories about college kids cheating by buying or just cutting and pasting complete assignments for their classes, but this BBC piece includes a quote from someone claiming that she basically did that on every paper she's turned in throughout college, and is now using the same cut-and-paste method to finish up her dissertation. Clearly, that's an outlier example, but it does show how far people will go. The article includes lots of quotes from people who complain about the dumbing down of our education system that has allowed this to happen, but I'm not sure that's the case. Kids have always cheated in school. This just makes the process easier. Of course, what they don't mention is that the real punishment is already being handed out to these kids. They're attending (and in many cases paying quite a bit) four years of college and not learning a damn thing, because all they're doing is cutting and pasting.
Reader Comments
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No Subject Given
I dunno - all that reuse of other people's work should make them excellent candidates for rewriting microsoft's tcpip stack...
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No Subject Given
You'd think that blatant plagarism like this would be even easier to spot than it was thirty years ago when students had to go to term paper mills to get the goods and back then they either had to rewrite them longhand or retype them.
Of course that shit only works for a liberal arts degree. My physics professor told us prophetically "you can cheat all you want in my class, but if you don't understand the physics it won't do you a damn bit of good." He was right.
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Re: No Subject Given
Yep. It doesn't work in Calculus either :)
We have weekly assignments and the teacher put it to us in almost exactly the same way.
"The homework assignments are worth 10% of the final grade. Feel free to cheat and copy others if you wish, I'll never know...but I guarantee that you won't know what hit you when the exam comes"
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Catching plagiarism
IMO it is easier now - there are paid tools like turnitin and free tools like search engines.
I turned in over a quarter of the first class I taught that had a paper assignment. Took a little work but was extremely satisfying to package up incontrovertible evidence for the honor committee. I won every case, leading to reduced grades for all since they were first-time (reported) offenders. Some failed the course since it was a significant part of the grade. Now I have a reputation that I only have to maintain every semester with some vigorous checking.
The tools for plagiarism work both ways.
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Back in the day ...
Picture it ... 1983 ... TRS-80's (Trash80's) in the classroom ... best friend takes the " computer " class the first semester ... I take it the second semester and pass it with 100% ... Why you ask ? ... because my best friend proceeds to hand me a disk with all the assignments on them. I go through the assignments and replace her name with my name ( back before cut & paste ) and proceed to turn the disk into the teacher at the end of the first week. Thats what happens when the school district chooses to use the 60+ year old home economics teacher who didn't have a clue as to how to even turn on a computer to babysit us for a semester instead of actually hiring a teacher.
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Re: Back in the day ...
AMetamorphosis,
Do you work for me? Cause I've got a lot of people working for me, and I *swear* that's the only way they made it through computer class...
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Re: Back in the day ...
LOL ... No, since High school I've developed morals and wouldn't do as I did in the past ... I think some of the people that work for you must be the ones that call me here @ the help desk I work for though ( grin ) 'cause I *swear* the only reason they were hired is because they fullfill the minority requirements !
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Re: Back in the day ...
Ouch! That hurts.
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It's possible to cheat in Engineering/Physics etc
People are simply creative about copying off other people's papers. When you get thousands of students writing an exam in the gym, the number of proctors are simply never enough to prevent the determined cheaters. The students involved are usually "good" students in that they go to class, ask a lot of questions (usually irrelevant ones) and get on good terms with every professor. While not all professors are fooled, a certain number are. I would compare the process to the New York Times writer who made up all his stories without getting caught.
While you can argue that they are wasting their education, cheaters may also be endangering the public - if they go on to do something like building bridges or designing medical software.
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So, when will our fossil schools wake up?
There are many things wrong here, but the most obvious one is the ridiculous reliance by teachers on papers that can be cut and pasted. Schools should move with the times. Students should have to prepare a topic and then write a paper on the spot, on an aspect of their topic assigned at the test. There are many creative ways to make this work, even without penalizing students who work slowly but well. Wake up, schools and teachers!
I have no patience with the idea that we really need to improve society's morals to fix this problem. The current situation penalizes the honest students! They deserve a break.
- The Precision Blogger
http://precision-blogging.blogspot.com
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Actually, it's....
COPY and paste, not cut and paste. When you cut, you taketh away.
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Actually, it's Back in the day to cheat in No Sub
People are simply creative about copying off other people's papers.
There are many things wrong here, but the most obvious one is the ridiculous reliance by teachers on papers that can be cut and pasted. Thats what happens when the school district chooses to use the 60+ year old home economics teacher who didn't have a clue as to how to even turn on a computer to babysit us for a semester instead of actually hiring a teacher.
You'd think that blatant plagarism like this would be even easier to spot than it was thirty years ago when students had to go to term paper mills to get the goods and back then they either had to rewrite them longhand or retype them.
The tools for plagiarism work both ways.
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It can't be that easy....
...What idiot puts past term papers on the internet?
I expect a lot of this is people selling papers to people who need to get a degree quickly for immigration/visa reasons (so they can become Java programmers).
Don't these cheaters come unstuck when they are working in a job that requires degree-level knowledge, and they don't have a clue? Mind you, these days even secretaries have to have a degree!
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Punishment?
They're getting a degree out of that four years. That degree actually goes a long way. For example, there are plenty of companies who won't consider hiring a competent employee without a degree but they're plenty willing to hire a complete BS artist with a degree. What's more, some even have GPA requirements. (Yeah, because GPA at J. Random State and at Top-Tier Tech are entirely comparable...)
That's the big incentive to cheat. As long as incompetent HR departments use unrealistic standards when judging prospective employees, that incentive will be there. There are other incentives, of course, but I think this is the big one in today's market.
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Re: Punishment?
You are exactly right. Companies screen applicants based on their credentials before they can even get in the door for an interview.
The same applies for certifications. I have seen several cases where a company will only look at people who have a certification in a specific area. Given a choice if you needed to hire a programmer, would you rather hire someone who is not certified but has several years of quality real-world experience, or someone with no experience but who has managed to pass a test?
I have seen several people with certifications who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag, but their company is proud to employ them.
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money issues
Money is an issue too. A degreed programmer starts at nearly twice what a non-degreed programmer will, and the salary difference will remain through all levels of experience. Companies want to see pretty bits of paper because they figure if you were smart enough to finish college you should be smart enough to learn a job.
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Getting Through College, Thanks To Plagiarism
I pity this generation. Copy/paste has produced the largest and most amoral bunch of slackers to date. And it will cost them later, if not now.
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No Subject Given
Here is a an interesting site where people can get math, stat, science, and other types of homework done for them, not just papers written: Homeworkster
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Math4Money
I used both service and http://www.math4money.com much more proffessional
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No Subject Given
OK "Director Mitch", I got the my biggest laugh of the week as I read your post - and realized it was copy/pasted from prior posts.
Bravo!
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