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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

What stops me from renting the software and running my own paper through it to see what it says?

You can't just "rent" the software. They're going to try to verify that you work for an edu. That's way more hoops than even a semi-motivated plagiarizer is willing to jump through.

What stops me from buying acess via a sketchy edu?

It's work.

Now hold on a minute, this whole industry has developed around shirking work. So surely, i can automatize part of this with a webcrawler and sci-hub.

Eh, I'll just wait for someone else to automate it and use theirs.

Men, i would con some Venture Capital guy into building this, by giving the ilusion somebody else has already built a version, but im just too lazy. Would hire some students, but those would just copy paste it together from stack overflow.

    > That's way more hoops than even a semi-motivated plagiarizer is willing to jump through

If you're willing to go through this amount of work, why not just not plagiarize

They usually only grant licenses to certain organizations. Same reason you can't simply buy the solutions manual to any given textbook.

Well hey, there's a business opportunity!

Quite often you can buy the solutions manual to a given textbook. They are on half.com or available in pdf format, a lot of the time.

They won't show you the work, so copying the answer is not sufficient to get credit in practically any course.

"Academic integrity" has ridiculous rules (eg self-plagiarism is not really a thing that anyone should care about) and I'm sure some people would be pissed about that, but if you're doing the work I personally don't see anything wrong with getting immediate feedback on whether you've done it correctly or not. Particularly given that many textbooks do like one or two simple examples and then jump to complex problems in the assignments... being able to check a couple problems to be sure you understand the process is extremely helpful as a learning aid.)

If you want a real-world assessment of whether someone has mastered a concept, schedule an in-class quiz or a test.

> self-plagiarism is not really a thing that anyone should care about

Sure it is. The entire methodology of schooling is to learn through exercise; if you are asked to write a paper, it isn't because the teacher wants the information in the paper. They are wanting you to learn through the act of writing the paper.

If you just turn in a paper you have written for another class, you are not doing that exercise.

Turning in a paper that you wrote for a different class and getting upset that the school doesn't approve is like thinking that sending a picture of you lifting weights 3 years ago is going to make you stronger.

All of this nonsense comes one root evil: giving publicly viewable grades for fundamentally in original work. Grades and homework should be for the student's private benefit. The only public marks should be proctored exams for demonstrating skills, and whatever original work someone creates that has value that stands on its own outside he artificial school environment.

That all depends on what you think school is for. I subscribe to the idea that school is for preparing people for society and provides a "great filter".

Doing a task your superior asks of you and doing it well is arguably the most important thing school teaches you, with time and stress management being a close second. This is what grades at school measures.

People love to talk about the virtue of being "well rounded" but the truth is that knowing bits of Shakespeare or knowing different types of Greek collumns doesn't benefit you as a person. All that information leaves your head pretty much immediately anyway. This is all especially true of high school. "Exams demonstrating skill" are not what matters to the people who look at your grades.

A proctored exam can only really measure a few types of skills, and don't work very well for demonstrating skills learned in many classes.

Take, for example, a class that is about learning to write effectively, which is clearly a valuable skill that adults need no matter what they do in life.

Part of that skill is being able to construct, from scratch, an effective piece of writing in a length of time that is longer than a proctored exam session. You can only measure that skill by having them do that, and if they turn in work they have written prior, you aren't learning anything about their ability to write something effectively on demand.

Research classes are similar; you can't demonstrate that you know how to do research well in a 3 hour exam. Programming classes, too; you can't measure the ability to create a large project in a 3 hour exam.

I think a defense (oral examination) of the paper can cover that scenario.

"They are wanting you to learn through the act of writing the paper."

And you did, only earlier.

"is like thinking"

Funny. Do you also think that writing exactly the same paper many times is making you learn something each time?

Self-plagiarism can also be an issue in the real world. Sure, I've cut and pasted an explanation of something into a different white paper or other docs. But there have certainly been times (don't remember the details) where journalists being paid to write a new article have taken a hit because they copied from an earlier piece. It's very situational but self-plagiarism can absolutely be a thing.

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