A Positive Solution for Plagiarism | Hacker News Reader

A Positive Solution for Plagiarism

chronicle.com

41 pointsjazzdev25 comments

I will be honest (full disclosure: I work in an academic institution). This obsessions with plaigarism is utter crap.

I know this is an opinion, but I have built a philosophy through years of failing at tasks. If you do not do your work, who cares? Time and time again, I see kids that cheat and they never tread water. Even if they graduate, they have problems. Because the final product is irrelevant in the education process, it is the developmental process you are paying for. The real world is dissimilar of course, but without skills and reasoning skills it is harder and harder beat competitors when making a superior product, whatever it is. Therein lies the rub.

I was a language major, intentionally or not, because I wanted to study in speciliazations where there is a binary choice: you know or you do not, you are fluent or you are not. Now there are tests that "prove" that, but only by application and communicating in a native way you can advance and miscommunication with a native speaker reminds you which side of the spectrum you are on. It took me longer to appreciate it, but computer science, as an extension of the language of mathematics, is something you apply and grasp, or you do not. You cannot fool a computer into a sorting algorithm without grasping and explaining the requisite steps (unless you end in system administration and the continued absence of 4th generation languages, haha).

No academic institution will espouse this view, as credentials cost money, and cheating devalues the brand when moronic indivdiuals with said credentials showed they have no skills in applying skills or analyzing info.

Just my thoughts. Seen it so many times as a student and an employee, I lost count.

You said it yourself. Academic institutions need to maintain their integrity and high standards. If the students all cheat and then later aren't able to write papers, who gets blamed? If a kid grows up to be a criminal, are the parents blamed?

I think, however, that threatening expulsion is extreme, like a parent vowing to throw their kid out of the house forever if they steal a candy bar.

> Time and time again, I see kids that cheat and they never tread water. Even if they graduate, they have problems.

Graduating these students is bad for them and bad for the institution. I've always wished that more students could be made to see that the goal of assignments is not to produce something (a paper, code, proofs) but rather to get the experience working through producing the thing. All too often they seem to think of the situation as like a job where the instructor (boss) tells the student (worker) to do something and then they do it because that's what the instructor wants. With that mindset, it's easy to see why they think they're getting away with something when they plagiarize, when in fact they're mostly cheating themselves.

What universities should be doing is communicating more clearly to students about the nature of the activity that they're paying four years of their lives and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in.

Another point: especially in courses where the grades are magically adjusted to fit some curve, allowing cheating is extremely unfair to honest students. Even if there's no official curving going on, it's hard for the instructor to accurately gauge what students in the course should be capable of when a bunch of them are cheating. I've seen the effects of this firsthand as a student: one result is inflation in the difficulty of assignments. Finally, even when neither of those two concerns apply, it can be demoralizing for students who work hard and have a fair grasp of the material to get Cs or Bs when their know-nothing classmates seem to be breezing through, snapping up As.

You could also not count homework towards the GPA.

I studied in France where the system is a bit different. We had homework, and they were graded so we could get feedback, but the idea that a homework grade would count towards your GPA would have seemed utterly absurd. Homework was meant to help you master the material and figure out if you understood it, not evaluate you!

Exams were taken in a large hall, with many supervisors. We also had graded projects to complete during the semesters, but no two students (or group of students for group projects) were assigned the same project.

Doing my graduate studies in the US came as a shock. There was a ton of homework, and the grade mattered! This meant that if you already knew or understood the material, you couldn't just skip the homework: you had to do the whole stupid thing.

I went to school in Canada; all of the classes had homework, but in some classes homework counted for GPA and in some it didn't. A good chunk of the students would do the homework that counted and skip all the homework that didn't, whether they needed it or not. The end result being less learning and lower grades in the classes where homework didn't count. To be fair most of those students weren't exactly on the high end of the grade scale to begin with and it's their own fault if they chose not to do the homework. But from the prof's POV, if they wanted people to succeed in their classes, it was better to have the homework count. There is probably some cultural reason why French students can be relied on to do their homework more than US/Canadians.

There are few original thoughts ever. Plagiarism and the ownership of thoughts are so misplaced, particularly in modern society. Think of your writings as your gift to society for its betterment and not something you've done for the advancement of your personal brand and the idea of owning a thought seems silly.

Having to rephrase something because someone already said it that way is an insane waste of time from a bygone era. Open source thought already.

Also, after having taught this class to 20 students for 5 years, I guess every possible angle of the subject has been studied, so the next one to write an essay on the subject is sure to be committing plagiarism :)

Plagiarism is not copying what someone else said, it's copying what someone else said without attribution. As long as you attribute correctly there is no need to rephrase anything.

To use your Open Source analogy, plagiarism is taking some GPL'd software, renaming it and selling it as software you claimed you wrote entirely yourself.

> Having to rephrase something because someone already said it that way is an insane waste of time from a bygone era.

Which is precisely why you are not required to do it (and never were), as long as you properly quote and attribute it :).

>Which is precisely why you are not required to do it

Right or wrong (I know, it's wrong), this silly 'phrase it in your own words' idea is taught to many students as the way to avoid plagiarizing others' works.

It's taught as the way to avoid plagiarism because, for students, the rate of "accidental" plagiarism is extremely high: they tend to unintentionally repeat an author's affirmation simply because it is so well formulated that it "sticks" to their mind. It also helps them avoid "newspaper clipping" articles, where they write a ten-page paper full of "X's view on the matter is that... whereas Y disagrees because...", which is considered a form of plagiarism.

>It's taught as the way to avoid plagiarism because, for students, the rate of "accidental" plagiarism is extremely high

Well it's wrong because it is teaching students to avoid detection, not to avoid plagiarizing.

Which is it? Can you "properly quote and attribute" or not? Your post seems to be in conflict with what you said two posts ago.

Yeah, I agree, I read so much stuff, that sometimes I "have" ideas that are not mine (or sometimes, I remember an idea I read, but I can't find the source on google). Sometimes it's just that we have integrated some stuff in our brain, which would be a compliment to the author of the original text, but is actually a minefield.

I don't really care because I'm in real life, but in an academic environment I would be trashed. I'm so glad that I'm not a student or academic in the US right now.

Writing is already open source. You just have to give attribution. You don't have to rephrase something. That's what quotes are for.

The problem with plagiarism isn't really students not citing where a statistic comes from (which is a problem. I always tell students that no one ever got in trouble for citing too much...) but is when they take whole papers or paragraphs from someone else and present it as their own.

Students aren't necessarily supposed to have original thoughts -- but they're supposed to have their own thoughts. It's part of engaging with the material and learning.

> Having to rephrase something because someone already said it that way is an insane waste of time from a bygone era.

Or, a great way to learn and internalize a concept rather than just regurgitating it.

It is true that few students have thoughts that have not already occurred to others. This is not the important part of honest research. The important part is that the student actually HAVE these thoughts, and actually EXPRESS them, rather than just copy/pasting someone else's expression of the idea without ever thinking about it themselves. It is the process that matters, not the outcome.

In other words, buckle down and do the damn work. Laziness is not a virtue when it comes to thinking.

We could start by ceasing to teach students to technically avoid "plagiarism!" accusations with the simple-minded application of a thesaurus. "Write it in your own words." Which often becomes s/word/similar word/. This was never a good idea. There may have been some tiny amount of value in this approach[1] when it was required to actually find a thesaurus and a dictionary and learn new words, but that is certainly lost today when there are myriad tools which will automatically do this for you. I'd still argue that it does more harm than good since it teaches students how to use others' ideas without attribution.

[1] Not as an exercise to instil honesty or principle, but as a simple vocabulary and grammar teaching activity.

It strikes me that perhaps the simplest way to kill plagiarism is to simply require a handwritten rough draft. Take the copy/paste convenience out of cheating, and far fewer students will cheat: writing your own thoughts is a lot less tedious than hand-copying someone else's. It also has the bonus of ensuring that at least some minimal editing has taken place, over the course of writing the paper a second time.

Students with disabilities that prevent writing a draft by hand -actually missing the dominant hand or not having use of it, or arthritis in the wrists, or carpal tunnel syndrome, or whatever- will need accommodations, of course. No solution will catch everyone. But it should still radically shrink the pool of copied (and copyable) papers.

I'd wager that most people here would go ahead and write their paper on their computers, then recreate a plausible handwritten rough draft afterwards.

And that seems about as difficult as recreating one for an essay you didn't write.

A reasonable alternative to this would be to require a hardcopy draft with visible editing marks as a draft. Going to paper at least once helps alot in the editing process.

Hardcopy or not, making students iterate over their work with feedback at each step, is the right way to do this. Make submitting drafts and responding to feedback part of the grade. The only problem that this is a lot of work for the instructor, who increasingly is an adjunct with little experience running all over town to teach six courses just to make ends meet.

I write about 50 times faster on keyboard than in handwriting. Why should I be penalized in this fashion?

low tech is sometimes the best tech ;)

Perhaps a good approach would be to assume a format is compromised as it is, but still focus on doing the best possible job of testing students. It should be possible to gear things such that plagiarism does not really do enough to be worth it (e.g. you would still do poorly on oral presentations / interviews, exam essay questions, etc.).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com