Right now is the end of the school year for many schools in the USA. That makes it a time for final exams for many students. This week a student I know prepared for the Literature final by reading through the SparkNotes for the book they had read earlier. Then the student took some SparkNotes practice tests on the book. Then the student showed up to take the actual final exam.
The final exam was verbatim the SparksNotes practice test--uncredited.
In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide.
The only thing more disgraceful than plagiarism is the arms-race and racket around "preventing" it with tools like the dubious "Turnitin" - dubious in its effectiveness, treatment of students work, privacy implications and the fact that students are compelled to use it, in most cases without prior formal agreement [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier
[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/anti-turnitin-scho...
> In academia it's rife. I was alerted by students to a course at a prominent Russell Group London university where the entire course notes were copied verbatim from my website. The only edit was to deliberately remove my name from every page and slide.
Did you report it to the university? You should, the academics who do this, should be face consequences and in my experiences plagiarism is one of the few wrongdoings that gets relatively swift action, I suspect because it usually is very clearly unethical conduct.
Of course. But I have to tell you, they skilfully sidestepped it by blaming an firing a TA, who I happen to know was entirely innocent. The actual culprit is still a senior professor at that university. Things are always more complex in real life, as you know. The professor was also a PhD supervisor to a friend and we had to choose which battles to fight, rocking the boat would have had consequences far beyond my own vanity and sense of injustice.
Now I write regular pieces in the Times Higher Education. Having taught at dozens of universities as an international visiting professor I've got a wide and deep view of academia. In a nutshell it's run by gangsters and has a very, very high concentration of psychopaths (much higher than 'industry' I would say because there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from conseqences found in the world of real business)
Would you or your friend still need to fear reprisals if you're naming names now? If not, given that normal channels have failed that all sounds sufficiently bad that at least naming the university and department might be worth considering.
> there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from conseqences found in the world of real business
Given your experience, I'd be very curious to hear what the main mechanisms your witnessed for side-stepping consequences for psychopathic behavior actually were. Since academia only involves spending other people's money without any direct test against outside reality, it stands to reason that it would be much more vulnerable to capture by colluding bad actors than business, where beyond a certain point of organizational pathology the money stops flowing in. There's of course also at least one mechanism designed specifically to cocoon people, namely tenure. But my guess would be that the main way it encourages the psychopaths is not so much that tenure protects them, but that having veto power over other people's tenure is a very good tool to enforce compliance.
Not really. It is bad. But I've grown thick skinned to it now. It's water under the bridge, and in the scheme of things, small fry. But if I was feeling vindictive I'd get lawyered up with a great libel advisor and write a book about some of the nonsense I've seen, or personally been party to in "academia"; including extraordinary sexism and constructive dismissal of women lecturers, a university that conned people out of their property, lots of crooked real-estate deals (many UK universities are foremost property developers who happen to do some teaching and research on the side), obvious bribes from industry on ICT contracts, blatant fraud on QAA audits, students who were deliberately led to catch Covid during the pandemic to save a few quid on housing allocation... I could go on all day, that's just a few things off the top of my head.
And I can speak freely about stuff that is already public. Just take a look at London Middlesex University and their record for shutting down whole departments on ideological grounds and turfing students who are still midway through studies out the door. It's cheaper to pay the compensation to the students who are brave enough to go through the months and years of formal complaints procedure. Academia is a well protected business.
> > there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from consequences found in the world of real business
> Given your experience, I'd be very curious to hear what the main mechanisms your witnessed for side-stepping consequences for psychopathic behaviour actually were.
This isn't the forum for deep discussion, or too much acidic denouncing, but I do suggest reading Ginsberg's "Fall of the Faculty" and some of Henry Giroux's work. Both would be labelled "shrill leftists", in a domain that ironically is already considered "too left liberal". However, that consideration of orthodox political spectrum strikes me as irrelevant in this age. What is the problem is the terrifying rate at which good people are being ousted, or taking early retirement, or jumping ship from quite senior academic posts to modest industry roles just to get away from the bullshit. Also terrifying is the rate at which real teaching and research is being set aside for cookie-cutter subsidised training for Big-Tech entry - a general decline in the intellectual quality of everything we teach. Even in traditional strong holdouts like Cambridge and Oxford I hear the same. I think we're in real crisis in the universities now.
One of my favorite movies of all time, In The Loop [1] deals with exactly that. It's extremely funny, and dark.
My tutor then pointed me to a better maths textbook which was actually worth the money, shame I didn't know about that before!
I just don't understand today how anyone can think they could get away with plagiarism with computers and the internet etc.
Students are going to generate writing they didn't do with GPT-3
And teachers are going to use the discriminator part of a GAN to figure out if students did their own writing
But here is sort of the funny thing, as I have gotten older, I have grown to appreciate things like poetry a lot more and have even tried my hand at it a few times for fun.
I guess it just proves the old adage "retirement is wasted on the old and school is wasted on the young". Not sure who said that. I probably just committed plagiarism for not including an attribution. Sorry to whomever said it, wait, let me copy some Tracy Chapman Lyrics for the apology :)
Plagiarism is copying someone else's work; using AI (or an essay farm manned by humans) is outsourcing the creation of a new thing.
ADDED: There is a degree of I know cheating when I see it. But, absent specific instructions to the contrary, spell checkers and grammar checkers/recommenders seem to fall pretty clearly into the assistive tools category whereas GPT-3 does not.
Legalities do matter here. The definition is “taking someone else’s work.” AI (currently) has no rights and no ownership. It is an “it” and not a “someone.” You are using a tool, an advanced tool that should be dealt with on a case by case basis. IOW, “don’t bring a graphing calculator.”
But it appears we are on the same page. If it’s directly against the rules, that’s different (like bringing an advanced calculator to an elementary math exam). But it def isn’t plagiarism.
GPT-3 is constructing entire narratives from prompts. It operates at the level of multiple sentences and paragraphs, to the scope of an entire essay itself. Based on a provided prompt, it generates an essay.
By your same logic, an instructor assigning a class essay would be considered the author of those essays as that instructor had generated the prompt.
Moreover, as a matter of pedagogy, where a course either assigns group work (such that multiple students are contributing to an essay), or requires drafts and reviews with an instructor, TA, or other students as part of the overall essay-writing assignment, those become acknowledge parts of the process. In the case of the draft / review / revise cycle, it would seem that that is one way of putting a check on AI-generated essays, at least for now, as though generators can follow prompts, they're rather more limited in taking criticism well, and adapting to it.
Hol up, didn't you just describe academic research?! Sounds like we're on the right path here.
There was the famous example where Copilot regenerated some John Carmack code verbatim with cussing comments, presumably because that code had been copied many times already.
Somewhere I read about GPT-3 committing clear plagiarism in English text, too, i.e. drawing way too much from one source and reproducing it.
If it's somebody else's, give them credit.
If it's algorithm or automated output, say so.
Teachers sometimes become suspicious because the students’ submitted texts contain many fewer grammatical errors and nonidiomatic expressions than the students’ speech or in-class writing. But it is hard to prove plagiarism if the teachers cannot do web searches in the students’ first language.
I did hear once, though, of a cut-and-paste MT translation being caught by a teacher because it included some large unique numbers, which did appear in a Google search.
A related issue that writing teachers are struggling to come to terms with is whether second-language writers are cheating when they use MT to translate texts that they originally wrote in their first language. Some teachers, especially in language-focused classes, believe that the use of MT hurts the students’ language acquisition and thus defeats one purpose of the writing assignments; they also think it is unfair to other students who struggle to write in the second language without the help of MT. Other teachers believe that writers should be allowed to use whatever tools are available to them as long as their content is original.
After all, it's arguably only one step away from Grammarly correcting errors and otherwise fine-tuning your writing. I don't personally use it but I know people who swear by it. And presumably almost no one would consider that cheating.
Looking at the results of the final exam it should have been at most 20%.
To this day I wonder what kind of upbringing they had that they felt the need to cut corners like that at such an early age.
A middle school classmate once turned in an article from Encarta as their essay for Social Studies. They didn’t copy paste the text… they literally printed the article, crossed out “Microsoft Encarta” with a pencil and then wrote their name at the top.
I was impressed with how little effort they put in. Teacher gave them an F of course.
I haven't thought about that in about 15 years and just started laughing to myself about the time my English teacher was struggling to turn the volume off during study hall as Rick Astley sang almost the entire song at full volume.
I took a class on logistics as part of my major, and our course professor was rotating an exam he had given three years prior, with weirdly dated examples and all.