Fine, but you do recognize that a lookup table is sometimes useful, right? The current standard on plagiarism is that it is never useful, and any use of it completely cancels out all other positive merits of a work.
All computer science courses are about writing code? No component of any course is about how to reuse code and practicing doing that?
Those two sentences seem contradictory to me. How can you check that code works and meets requirements if you don’t do anything with the code itself?
What about my example of a student that takes a bunch of ideas from multiple sources without attribution, and combines and rephrases them into a coherent, easily-understood and correct synthesis? They are plagiarizing and by current academic standards should be heavily penalized. But it’s not clear to me why plagiarism must necessarily discount all the positive merits of that student’s work. Especially when the student shows some understanding of the material by the way they’ve combined the ideas they’ve taken.
I think you may be misunderstanding what plagiarism is. Not all assignments and test are the same. In a Chem class, if I draw the exact same picture of an ammonium ion as the one in the book, I will get full credit. If I answer a history question “July 4, 1776” I am not plagiarizing just because I am using the exact same phrase that millions, if not billions, or students before me have used. There are many courses and situations where no originality is required. Most scientific knowledge courses give no points for originality until you get up into the higher levels and are actually supposed to find new information that has never been done before. Even in cases where an original paper is required, it is not a case that you need to come up with something that no one has ever thought of before. You can do a perfectly cromulent essay in which you agree with some other author’s premise. You just need to cite it appropriately and then explain why and how his arguments are valid, while those that disagree are wrong in a way that conveys to the grader the fact that you fully understand what you are agreeing with.
I also think you and others misunderstand the point of essays. Depending on the class, they are either to show that you know how to write (mostly English courses), or to show you thoroughly understand the topic. Through the undergraduate level, no instructor is going to require you to come up with some new world shattering revelation that no one has ever considered before. You provide enough of your own material to demonstrate that you understand your cites and are using them correctly to support your thesis, no matter what that thesis is.
Technically, you could turn in a paper that has no words you composed in it all, and as long as you cite every phrase correctly, it is not plagiarism. Most instructors would still fail you because you have not fulfilled the assignment by showing what you know, but it is not plagiarism.
Yes, but strictly speaking, it is plagiarism unless the source is cited. Unless the student came up with that model of the ion all by themself.
And the situation supports my point–being correct is sometimes more important that being original or citing a source.
Why is proper citation so important? I understand why it could be important (as a part of supporting the arguments), but not why it is so important that failure to do so results in such harsh penalties.
You can show your writing skills while completely plagiarizing by rephrasing everything into your own words and not citing the sources of the ideas. It may also be possible to show your understanding in the same way by how you combine the ideas (that you fail to cite the source of).
Plagiarism in school assignments is a bad thing because **knowledge **and **understanding **are not the same thing. (Although they are related to each other.)
If I memorize the wording of a passage in a textbook, that doesn’t mean that I grasp the significance of what that passage says. I can *know *the passage without *understanding *the passage. In fact, if I’m really good at memorizing I might be able to memorize passages in a language I don’t even speak.
When we force students to answer questions in their own words, we are testing to see if they actually understand the material well enough to compose an original answer from scratch. The fact that thousands of other students have written similar passages is immaterial. We’re not rewarding originality – we’re rewarding the understanding that the originality is evidence of.
Not really. Using your own words is not enough to avoid plagiarism. Simply repeating an idea (in your own words) that you did not invent yourself is plagiarism if you do not cite the source.
No it isn’t. Plagiarism is using someone else’s writing and passing it off as your own. If the question asked is to draw Neils Bohr’s atomic model, then you can’t be passing it off as your own. It would only be plagiarism if you where claiming it was your own idea.
And in those situations, charges of plagiarisms should not arise
There are two parts to plagiarism, one is using someone else’s material, the other is dishonestly claiming it as your own. In some cases, you could legitimately just rephrase a cite and be correct. In fact I have been asked to do exactly that as an assignment, something along the lines of: Explain in your own words what point the author is trying to make here. But that is not a research paper.
Just to clarify, do you think there is a problem with reusing a paper someone else wrote, or paying someone to write it for you?
In addition to the pedagogical reason for avoiding plagiarism, there are also scholarly considerations. Correctly citing the work of others makes it much easier for later scholars to retrace your steps. In addition, since advancement in academia is generally predicated on publishing, it’s to everyone’s benefit to clearly identify original work.
So, in addition to encouraging students to actually understand the material, teaching students not to plagiarize also prepares them for the challenges of doing more advanced scholarship.
My campus doesn’t subscribe to turnitin, but Google has been of great aid to me. And it’s not as if I’m trying really hard to catch people plagiarizing. They just make it so darned easy. Last semester, one guy turned in an essay that sounded rather familiar; as it turned out, the whole thing was an article written entirely by Paul Krugman. The student just copied and pasted it, then put his name at the top. Dumb.
I always point out, during the first week, that I use the same Internet that they use. And still I get at least half a dozen plagiarized essays by the middle of the term.
No - the current standard is that you can use somebody else’s lookup table to get answers, as long as you’re not claiming you figured it out yourself. If you use a lookup table on a test where you’re supposed to figure it out yourself, you fail.
I’ve taken a lot of CS courses but they never bothered with that. Especially since copy-pasting isn’t really a good way to reuse somebody else’s code anyway - it’s usually illegal. There are other, correct mechanisms for code reuse, which have nothing to do with mindless copying.
You run it, obviously. That’s easy to do; understanding code’s behavior by reading the code itself is usually really, really, really hard - people simply don’t do this unless they absolutely have to (usually, while debugging it).
You don’t know much about computer programming, do you?
Any student that does this is unlikely to get tagged for plagiarism, both becuase 1) it’s a lot harder to demonstrate that they even did this, and 2) because I’m not at all convinced this is actually plagiarism at all. “Read, Understand, and Restate” is pretty far removed from “Copy”.
I am a student at a major public university right now and I am just shocked by so many of the stories here. I cannot imagine trying to straightforwardly bullshit my professor.
University Book Store sells the Calculus textbooks and answer guides for half of the homework problems. In previous quarters of Calculus, I had assumed that they would not sell the answer books in the bookstore unless they intended for students to use them when answering homework problems. In other words, I assumed that it was fine to look up the answer to a homework problem in one of the books. So I would write some of the answers to homework problems out of the book, though I would rephrase them slightly (but not significantly). I never lost credit for doing so. I just assumed that was how it was.
This quarter, I attached a note to a homework assignment that said something to the effect of “I don’t know your homework policy exactly, but if it’s wrong for me to lift answers from the books, just give me a zero for this assignment.” I got a zero for the assignment. Presumably, if I had not left that note, I would have gotten full credit.
Sure if the question is “draw Neil Bohr’s atomic model” then doing exactly that is okay. But if the question is “draw an atomic model” and the student then draws Neil Bohr’s model, it’s plagiarism if they do not cite Neil Bohr, unless the student independently came up with it themself.
I have a problem with students breaking rules, so yes. As for whether I would change those rules, I probably would, and make the penalty less than what it is now. Maybe a two-letter-grade drop instead of a four.
I see the benefit of citations as a shortcut for support and explanation. But it could be omitted if it’s common knowledge or directly supported/explained within the paper.
This is a completely separate issue. While science itself values only what is correct, the scientists value who is correct. I could see an argument made that humans require recognition in order to do science. I would be interested to see a comparison of a scientific community that cites versus one that works anonymously. Probably not possible, though.
Only a small fraction go on to post-graduate work and only a fraction of those stay in academia.
What about a test where you’re simply supposed to get the right answer?
Mindless copying is not the only way to plagiarize.
I’d call running the code to check that it works and meets the requirements interacting with thecode.
And what test might that be? I can think of two kinds of “tests”:
school tests, where you’re supposed to be demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the material in question. Mindlessly copying somebody else’s material obviously doesn’t do this, and thus merits failure.
The real world, where you’re trying to find an answer. Here, you are not required to cite things…unless you’re worried about getting your butt sued off for stealing intellectual property. Or unless your company has such a worry. This is unlikely to happen if you’re copying numbers from that table on soil density, but if you’re publishing other people’s articles as your own, well, that’s begging for trouble, ain’t it?
What sort of test are you talking about?
Debatable, particularly in code. It’s my understanding that while it’s considered very unkosher to verbatim copy somebody’s sorting code, you can certainly learn how to write the sort, say in a college class, from a textbook, possibly as pseudocode, and then having learned the algorithm you may then write your own version from scratch without citing the original book you learned it from (if you can even remember which one it was).
Now, patents may be a whole 'nother thorny matter, but AFAIK you’re not breaking a code copyright just by using the same general algorithm.
For the purpose of plagiarism? Give me a break. So you’re saying that is somebody takes a compiled version of your program and sells it as their own, they have some sort of defence against intellectual property theft if they ran it themselves first?
Me too.
Universities have a vested interest in protecting intellectual property, including mere ideas. However I maintain a certain amount of doubt that their use of the term dictates the mainstream definition. And I doubt that any significant fraction of plagairism citations at such schools are due to restating an idea in your own words.
But most research doesn’t stand in isolation. It’s embedded within an ongoing community of discussion. Cites don’t just tell you facts, they connect the paper to a larger body of discourse that gives it meaning and context.
It would be a nightmare for a variety of reasons. It the first place, most academics don’t get directly paid for publishing. Instead their publishing record is reviewed as evidence of their worth as a scholar, which is tied to their professional advancement. If everything is done anonymously there would be no way to judge who was deserving of getting a raise, or more research funds.
In the second place, it would destroy the ability of other scholars to follow up on previous work. For example, right now I’m working on a book on aesthetics. This involves me reading a variety of other sources. Sometimes, when I’m reading a book or a paper I’ll come upon an interesting point or idea that I want to learn more about. By providing a cite, the author is telling me where he got this information from if I want to learn more or just verify his conclusions. They’re like hyperlinks for ideas. Without cites it would be much harder to track down resources for future scholarship.
For the typical undergrad the primary reason to discourage plagiarism is to encourage them to actually think about and understand their subject instead of just cutting and pasting.
It’s really no different than instructions to “show your work” in math class. It’s to demonstrate that not only was your answer correct, but your methodology for arriving at the answer was correct.
I’m not sure if you’re talking about the same thing everything else is, but I’m curious as to how you would define the scenario below.
You’re a college student asked to write a paper in which you compare and contrast how God is depicted in the Old and New Testament. You go to the library, find some books on this subject, pick out a few arguments from each, and you decide to use them in your paper, presenting the ideas as your own just with some rephrasing. With no cites named.
It so happens that the author of Book X that you’re using posits one particular idea about how God’s enabling of Job’s suffering contradicts the compassionate figure described in Romans I. Unbeknowst to you, the author’s particular interpretation of Romans is unique and a bit contested among his peers; and the author’s claim to the idea is known to anyone with a more than passing familiarity with the subject (as your professor has).
You take this author’s idea, paraphrase it into your own writing style, and present it as if you came up with this analysis on your own.
Q1. Is this plagiarism in your book?
Q2. Let’s pretend this is not just a routine assignment, but rather a doctoral thesis. Does this change your assessment of whether this is acceptable?
Q3. Let’s pretend that the example you use from Book X is NOT readily recognizable as someone else’s idea, but still is an idea synthesized by someone else. Does this change anything in relation to it being plagiarism or not? Or does it just make it harder to detect.
Dude, this happened one time during my college years, over twenty years ago. Annotating the paper wasn’t offered as an option (and I would need someone to have explained to me what the fuck is a printer’s mark).
True this. While my wife and a group of her friends were finishing up their degrees in English, they were required (naturally) to write a graduating thesis. I insisted my wife write her own but told her I’d help with it. I got all of her friends begging me to write theirs. I said no. Later on, they asked if I’d check over the papers they’d written themselves and I said no problem. I got five essays emailed to me and, after a single look, I knew they’d all been stolen straight from the Internet (I mean, these girls were English majors, but they couldn’t write at the level of these essays). I washed my hands of the situation after that…and then attended their graduation ceremony a few weeks later.
Similarly, the same girls (I see them alot) were telling me about a time in high school when they took a test, the teacher gave them the answer key, and they all just passed it around class and wrote down the correct answers. Wish my teacher had done that.
*I had an essay writing assignment here where I told my students outright “If you plagiarize, you will fail. If you write you own thing- anything no matter what it is, you will get full points” and fully half of them still plagiarized! *
You just spent several paragraphs above explaining how culturally ingrained copying someone else’s material is in the minds of Chinese students…then you express disbelief about Chinese students copying someone else’s material. I don’t get it. Did you think your admonition to not plagiarize was going to trump the ingrained habit you just got done explaining?
