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Comment by SamAtt | Hacker News Reader

This is a little off topic but I was a little taken aback at the elitist attitude regarding University graduates. Look at these quotes:

"Rather shocked that someone who had, in fact, gone to university and was working for a major corporation, considered it okay to blatantly copy someone else’s article"

"I don’t know which I found more appalling: that someone had made it through university and into a major corporation believing it was acceptable to plagiarize"

What about "going to University" imbues someone with automatic moral virtue? Does this person believe the unwashed masses think it's absolutely acceptable to plagiarize? While the elite University students are somehow above that?

Maybe I'm just over sensitive as someone who didn't go to college but it really bugged me.

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It's not that non-university students are immoral or stupid. The article says nothing of the sort. Plagiarism is a basic lesson of university students on day one. You're being too sensitive.

The unsaid connection the author is making is that universities have honor codes that get drilled into you from freshman year. Those honor codes have very specific definitions of plagiarism, usually with examples. Only an idiot, lazy, or jackoff university student would plagiarize word-for-word thinking that a font change is good enough. That makes the university student 100x "stupid-er" than a non-university student that figured out what plagiarism is through intuition. :)

edit: slight wording changes.

The idea is not that those who haven't gone to university don't know better, but that going through university (which is assumed to have and take seriously an academic integrity policy) would teach them (even though many would already know better). To say that something is typically true of members of a group does not mean that it is typically not true of non-members.

Yes, this. There isn't really a single avenue of study at University you can choose where you shouldn't encounter this. Unless you can make it through a degree without writing a single paper. The idea that you can plagiarize anything in any context at all is basically anathema in almost all academic circles. Not that it doesn't happen, but most people that even attempt it are smart enough to do more than change the font size to hide it.

I did a BSC in Computer Science at University. About half my class failed our first ever programming assignment because of plagiarism. Loads of people had just shared the code between them, character for character. There were a few cases where they even left the original authors name in the comments at the top of the code.

Instances of plagiarism dropped after that. At least they learned how to change variables, function names, comments and whitespace enough to get around the automated plagiarism detection tool.

Does this person believe the unwashed masses think it's absolutely acceptable to plagiarize?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition

when someone claims "if A then B", they don't necessarily mean "if not A, then not B" :)

As someone who did go to college, every class in which we had to write papers stressed strongly the concept of academic integrity, and that plagiarism was unacceptable. I've seen people fail classes because they didn't properly cite their sources, etc.

Nothing to do with morals, so relax. It's just the fact that you cannot make it through college without hearing at least once that you cannot copy other people's work.

Where I went to university, plagiarism would result in suspension or expelling, not just failing the class. There were always a few cases a year, and that info was always published so everyone at the university got to know when it happened. I went to an engineering university so the amount of papers to write was pretty light, but even if you managed to avoid courses with it, you couldn't avoid the news about it. It was just very strongly drilled into everyone that plagiarising is something you Do Not Do.

Summary and analysis of a topic based on reference materials is a prerequisite for any academic research, hence University students are given this kind of exercise all the time.

Any University graduate should have learned that cut+paste = failing grade.

As others have noted, the point was not that university graduates are, by definition, smart or morally virtuous - merely that university courses require you to submit papers, do written exams, etc where it's made very clear that copying someone else's work is not acceptable.

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