The Magna Carta Essay

Unbelievable. HN is inundated with threads talking about how useless a college degree is. And now we have people trying to defend what appears to be an incredibly pathetic act of plagiarism.

This isn't a case of someone copying and pasting and forgetting to put in quotes. This is an act of apparent extreme brain atrophy...he had to WORK to copy this moronic essay and to alter it in a superficial way from the original, all the while having no ability to tell parody from truth.

And you want to give this person a mulligan, as if this kind of act has no bearing on ehat you would consider his puported "real" work? Jesus, our society really is heading towards Idiocracy?

In an ideal world plagiarists would always be caught and always be failed. No need for dire consequences. Just no rewards. In the real world, most plagiarists are never punished even if they are caught. If you're a TA or prof and you think you've been given plagiarized work, you need to have iron-clad proof before you can even think about breathing the 'P' word. You can easily wind up in as much trouble as the student if your proof isn't solid! You have very little to go on if the student is at least smart enough to paraphrase and avoid copy/pasting complete sentences. I've been given work I was 99% sure was plagiarized but, since I couldn't prove it, I couldn't do anything more than give it a low grade. Even when you can prove plagiarism has occurred, you're in for a lot of extra work. Usually it's easier to just talk to the student and tell them to withdraw from your class.

Since plagiarists are so hard to catch and punish, it's important to make examples of the ones who are caught. You can argue that this was "just class homework", but students who plagiarize homework are the same ones who hire ghost-writers to do a one-off term paper or thesis for them. If they can get by without doing the unimportant work, odds are they won't learn how to do the important work.

In this case, absolutely make this kid's life hell. It doesn't matter if he only cheated that one time or if that's how he got his entire degree. What's important is that other students see that plagiarism can come back to haunt them long after they've gotten their degrees. The student's profs ought to be made to sweat a little too. Missing or failing to punish plagiarism is entirely forgivable for the reasons I have stated above. Giving a passing grade to an obvious joke paper shows that they were negligent, and that's another matter entirely.

Edit: totally out of line, my apologies. I'll just stick with saying that it's absurd to say (as implied above) that "class homework" isn't _really_ plagiarism.

Witch hunts are characterized by the indiscriminate targeting of mass amounts of people who may not be guilty of anything wrong. This is a well deserved public shaming of named individuals.

maybe announcing it to the rest of his class would be a justified "public outting." or announcing it in a campus publication. but this goes way, way beyond that.

i think it's kind of scary how quick people are nowadays to froth at the mouth and go crazy with the big-scale internet public shaming. one of the downsides of the rise of social-media, i guess

Ever heard of benefit of the doubt, or extenuating circumstances?

Ok, we know the guy cheated on this paper.

There's a whole lot we don't know though: who is this guy? what led to the cheating? was it his first offense? is this paper really relevant to his professional career? was he looking to profit from it?

Many more things we don't know and for which it's usually better to handle such things away from the Internet.

Paul Christophoro is bipolar, and currently undergoing a manic episode. He needs medical attention.

See this reddit comment [1] by his sucessor as PR guy for the maker of the Avenger Controller.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/nw1vm/ama_the_guy_who_...

Many records can be expunged after a while. There are recourses for offenders to make amend and with time, find the straight path.

The Internet is like a bell, you can't just unring it.

There is a difference between:

1. This alleged plagiarist’s college convicting him and publicizing the fact that he has been judged a plagiarist by due process, and: 2. A public accusation of plagiarism without process of any kind.

Public attention to a conviction is entirely different from public attention to an accusation. I’m with you if you want convictions by due process of plagiarism in college to be worthy of public attention. I am not in favour of accusations like this to be brandished so enthusiastically.

As programmers who have college degrees and have to pass FizzBuzz at job interviews, I think we all have a low opinion of how good college degrees are. As such, I think cheating on a college degree is similar to cheating on an exam when you're 13. C'mon, it's not that important that you got it fraudulently.

If the teacher didn't bother enough to read the paper and fail him, maybe he deserves the degree that he got.

Though someone stated that (not sure if this is fact) there is no statute of limitations on plagiarism, I feel like when it comes to college papers there should be.

Regardless of the fact that legally, college students are adults, they are still very prone to making mistakes. I see no reason to punish this one simply because he had the misfortune of copying a paper from an internet blogger.

No need to apologize. Trail and conviction by mob is odious whether the mob is a collection of allegedly intelligent and educated hackers or whether it’s beer-guzzling trailer-trash.

The bottom line is, you have an accusation on the Internet without the benefit of an accused person facing their accusers, without a process for presenting and evaluating evidence in context, and without any kind of judge or referee in place to rule on any issues of admissibility or propriety.

We get together and lament how places like Fox news can distort the truth and present biased cases against people. And then when something comes along and plays to our prejudices, we whip out the torches and pitchforks, planning to ruin the accused plagiarizer and whatever professor may or may not have accepted this ridiculous essay.

Quite honestly, I find the thought of this person suffering in the future when they apply for a job somewhere entirely repugnant. Now, if there is some process and he is expelled from school or censured on his academic record, let him explain that to whomever asks. But the idea of having to defend himself against mob sentiment is a giant step backwards to frontier justice.

People fuss and fret over surrendering their liberties to the TSA. We should think about what part of civilized behaviour we voluntarily surrender when we act like this.

One might think that just b/c entrapment is forbidden by US law that honepots are not used. All the law means is that the evidence directly gathered via entrapment can't be used.

Unregulated things like Craigslist and Tor likely offer law enforcement and intelligence agencies more "honeypot value" than they "cost" in terms of petty illegal behavior.

Pssshh. The real money was in manure.

You must understand that half of the students in an intro level class are there because a) They don't know what the hell they want to do so they picked a class. b) They have to fulfill some requirement.

In the case of a), this happens because colleges are idiots and think that taking whole classes are a good way of going about figuring out what you want to do with your college education. What actually happens is the student takes the class, notices that they don't like the subject, and is disinterested for the rest of a whole term, even though they are still graded and can not switch.

In the case of b), some bigwig university rector decided that x courses in subject y must be taken by students of major z. Z students of course blow the class off because they don't want to take it. Professors know this, and don't care much if Z students learn anything anyway. They want to focus on the students that are actually going to major in the subject of y. No one stands up to the rector and everyone takes the path of least friction.

Solution: Have some goddamn flexibility. Don't enforce a strict ordering when taking classes. Don't force students into a single required class as much as possible. Instead say "must take two of these 5 classes". Have your majors defined this way also: Eg. Computer Science is 1 intro, 3 theory, 2 low level, 2 software engineering and design, 1 social issues class and 2 major projects. You can spell out specific classes that MUST be taken afterwards. Have quarters instead of semesters so that classes "die fast" and students can focus more on fewer subjects. This ends up being very intensive but there are more breaks. Allow students to fail 3 times without penalty, so they can experiment with classes out of their comfort zone, like grad classes or classes from a different major altogether. Have freshman year multidisciplinary problem solving seminars so that students have some idea of how project work an research happens, and what subjects they are interested in.

My school did most of this for a very long time and the students loved it. They almost rioted when there was talk of changing this system.

It turns out actually reading is surprisingly going out of fashion. Perhaps not so surprisingly for grad students tasked with grading these by the hundred.

Ironically, the class is taught by Professor Mulligan. Heh.

Oh, there's certainly junk that should alert someone to its comedic nature, but there's also content isn't entirely fabricated.

Any assignment that expects footnotes probably ought to have graders who scan the footnotes, and I find it particularly funny, in a grim and ghastly way, that no one tripped over the jests concentrated there. Bollock & Maidenhead _The Interminable History of English Law_ was mentioned in the original post. And _From Magna Carta ..._ (i.e., 1215) _... to Domesday Book_ (i.e., 1085)? Or D. Rumsfeld _Killing Will Make You Free_?