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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

When are the stakes low vs. high when it comes to academic plagiarism? I would think that the stakes are always quite low, at least until you get to post-graduate academic work where plagiarism can have legal or serious ethical (e.g. medical research) problems.

You seem to be claiming that at some point the stakes become "truly" high, and thus we ought to artificially punish plagiarism so that people learn that there are consequences.

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I'm claiming that encouraging plagiarism artificially punishes the "I can do the work but I freeze up in a high-pressure/high-stakes do-or-die situation like an interview" crowd - because it means that that's the only tool I can trust to weed out the people who've just coasted on bullshit their whole lives.

The high-ness of the stakes at the college level seems to depend on if you have scholarships or similar - I've seen those be pulled, but haven't seen people I've known personally be actually expelled. So if you're fully dependent on them, it's bad, otherwise, it's no big deal. After college it depends on the type of job - some bigco or government orgs seem perfectly happy to carry a bunch of dead weight around.

Pre-college is mostly a super-low-stakes area for kids these days, but complicated by something 'tcfunk points out in a sibling comment, where authority figures lie about that - claiming everything is dire - but the kids also know their teachers/administrators are full of shit. My friends and I were very good at finding out which rules we could break with impunity - having too many rules, if anything, watered down the seriousness of the important ones.

So where you see problems are e.g. kids who could get away with anything suddenly running afoul of drug laws, or losing their scholarship over rules that didn't have teeth in high school, etc. Of course, the better off you are, the more easily you can weather that stuff - but to me, the root is that we're very opaque with our kids about what you'll get into real trouble over or not, and it changes in a very lumpy manner.

I don't know, I don't really see a parallel between a writing assignment and a high-pressure situation like an interview. The latter is essentially impossible to cheat on with anything resembling plagiarism.

What the parent means is that when cheating isn't accorded a serious enough response, the signaling value of a degree is watered down, so parent must rely more heavily on the interview, which is unfair to those who perform poorly in interview enviornments but are otherwise good at their job.

A recent TIFU (Today I Fucked Up) on Reddit, depending if you believe it - I'm inclined not to, described such a situation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8g33nv/tifu_by_plagia...

They were allegedly expelled for plagiarising a 500 word essay.

> She sent me to the dean with the recommendation that I be expelled. Now the dean told me I can't graduate. I spent 4 years working on an engineering degree. I have over $100,000 in loans, and I can't be hired without my degree. My life literally vanished in the matter of 20 minutes.

The irony is they could have literally scrawled anything on the paper and flunked, but passed the year.

Whether or not this story is true, universities certainly have grounds to expel you immediately if you're caught cheating. And if you've spent $100k on a degree that you need because of professional accreditation... those are quite high stakes.

Agreed. But nothing special about it. People's lives are ruined for stupid mistakes all the time. Some of those mistakes cost a hell of a lot more too. I'm talking of course about encounters with the criminal justice system

Aren't those the artificial high stakes we're talking about? I'm asking what inherently high-stakes situation that is preparing you for.

Well, how about getting blackballed professionally?

After all, surely the main upside of acing university is to get into a high-stakes position.

For a real world situation? Just look at the Google vs Uber trial. IP theft and corporate espionage is incredibly high stakes. You can presumably make a lot of money selling secrets, but if you're rumbled, that's your career over.

I had a classmate like this. My high school has a graduation requirement where each senior delivers a speech to the student body on a topic of their choice. At the time of his speech, it was spring and my classmate had been accepted to Princeton on a tennis scholarship--all he had to do was sit back and coast into the Ivy League. Despite this, he plagiarized his speech. The administration found out and notified Princeton, which rescinded his acceptance. (He ended up attending the local state university.)

At the University of Arizona, there was a strict expulsion and forfiture of earned credits policy for plagarism amongst undergrads. I'd say having wasted $20k is pretty high stakes, though I suppose not as high as jail time.

But that's the artificial stakes we're talking about, right? The school chose to make and enforce that rule. What inherently high-stakes situation is that preparing them for?

You can’t cheat without rules; all rules are socially constructed. Does that make them artificial as opposed to inherent?

Or have I missed your point?

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