I knew a guy in Beirut who made his living that way - his main clients were spoiled-rich American University in Beirut students, but he also picked up a lot of work from random guys on the Internet.
Re-read the above part of your post and say with a straight face that you honestly thought that’s actually how it was supposed to work.
Seriously. You’ve never had an answer key before? In the engineering courses I took, we had all the answers to our assignments. It was very helpful. I had to derive equations to get from A to Z. A through Y was really freaking complicated and I could get lost somewhere along the line, so knowing the answer, Z, was helpful for students. If I did all my work and my answer didn’t match, it meant I’d screwed up somewhere and I could go back and review my work line by line until, over and over I worked out the correct solution and understood the process that got me there. The answer wasn’t as important as the work that demonstrated how you got it.
Jeebus, I weep for our future when I hear shit like that. “I just copied the answer from the back of the book. Was that wrong?” :smack:
I know, right? We had answer keys for high school algebra. How can you not know what they’re for?
Ideas, sure. Works built around those ideas? That’s trickier.
I don’t begrudge James Cameron the use of the particular plot he used for Avatar, even though it’s been done to death. People may look down on him for not innovating story-wise very much, but that’s pure opinion. But if it turned out that Avatar was just a reshowing of Disney’s Pocahontas with the title redone as James Cameron’s Avatar, Cameron wouldn’t have a job any more and he’d rightly lose all credibility.
The only university math course I took was statistics, and although it had an answer key at the back, the key was only for half of the questions. The key had the answers, and methods to get the answer, for all the even-numbered questions, and the assignments were only ever for the odd-numbered questions. Very helpful, as you could look at the answers from the key to work out how to do different types of problems, but for assignments you had to apply it to a question where you weren’t given the answer.
I was never in any math class where the answer key would have gotten you credit on the homework anyway. “x=1” is not the droid they’re looking for - is “show your work” not an issue in math anymore?
Yeah, I confess I’m kinda feeling this one to. Bith Shuffle, your post really got a 
:dubious: out of me.
Here’s why originality counts, Pleonast. The kind of rote memorization and regurgitation that even sven described (quoted below for reference) would have been a valuable skill in the old days, before the internet and computers and libraries and printing presses. It will be a valuable skill again if we ever live in the world of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. But in today’s world, persons who can memorize and accurately reproduce chunks of text are of no value to the world if that’s the only thing they can do, because anyone with access to the original source can just look it up. They’re like an “artist” who can produce a photographically realistic painting of any scene but can’t do anything else, or a person who can perform accurate numerical calculations if you tell them exactly what calculations to perform.
There is definite value to memorizing things, but only if you’re going to do something with them: think about them, apply them, do things with them. Otherwise, you’re just a human computer.
In this famous on YouTube response to an arrogant “Glenn Beck Jr.” kid’s anti formal education rant, the YouTuber known as ThunderFoot, the section (beginning around 5:45) on “just owning a physics textbook doesn’t make you a physicist” is I think applicable here.
Late to the party, and not even sure if this is in the spirit of the thread, but I might just have some of you beat.
Many years ago, first grade class, assigned essay on…can’t even remember now, perhaps favorite vacation? What I received was a page, written entirely in the mom’s handwriting. Pretty bad, but the essay looked so familiar…
Turns out it was copied word for word from a teacher’s website on “typical essay that should be written by a first grader”.
:smack:
In a similar vein there’s the tale of the professor who puts the following comment on an essay a Frat student had pulled from his fraternity’s essay library:
“I’m pleased to give this essay the Grade A it deserved when I wrote it 30 years ago.”
When I was in HS I was annoyed by how much better I was at writing than everyone. In my senior year I was in a class called “College Writing,” which was (besides AP classes) the highest-level writing class.
One kid in that class turned around and asked me how to spell ‘teached’ – I replied, “You don’t.”
Anyway, at the end of the year I had to miss a week of school to go to a video gaming industry event in LA called E3. While there I wrote probably 400 news articles and game previews for the site I worked for. Because of this, the fact that I had to have a 3- or 4-page paper turned in for the writing class on the day I returned. It was something like the final paper of the class, probably one of four “portfolio pieces.” I’d chosen to do mine on video game violence and, after staring at MS Word for an hour an a half with my brain a hot soup – having just written about video games for a whole week of 7am-3am days – I realized I just didn’t care at all, so I found one of those “buy a term paper” websites and bought one for $3, spent half an hour cleaning up the language and trying to inject some of my “voice,” and turned it in.
I don’t remember what I got, but it wasn’t an expulsion for plagiarism.
What I hate is that I don’t feel bad about that at all. I hated writing assignments so much, considered myself so superior to them, my teachers, and my peers, that if I were sent back in time I’d probably do it again. If it were college or something, I’d probably not risk that.
Not to trying to hijack, but I am curious. Does reusing substantial portions of work (the research and writing of a paper) constitute cheating? When I was an undergraduate, I always tried to line up courses where the subject matter of papers could overlap, so I had to do less work. There was even one miracle paper that was usable for three different courses.
Reusing your own work is fine.
Wow.
Well, the student I mentioned in the OP redid the paper and squeaked by on the skin of his teeth. We’ve found a new one whose “paper” is composed entirely, and I mean entirely of comments off of book sales websites. Fortunately that looks like the last of it.
Someone way back in the forest of posts above mentioned a brief rush of euphoria on nabbing someone, but with us it comes with a bad aftertaste of depression. Guess I’d better get used to it.
Well, kinda sorta. Personally, I don’t really see the problem with it. But there’s a school of thought that says that a paper shouldn’t be reused because the purpose of the class is to learn and expand your area of knowledge and just submitting the same paper again cheats yourself and cheats the purpose of the class. You can, however, use a similar paper modified with additional new research to conform to the class and/or with the professor’s permission to do so.
Again, I don’t really see the problem with using your own work a second time.
It may not be ideal, but it’s not cheating, or at least not according to the language in any syllabus I’ve ever read.
I did this, although I did specifically ask my professors. I believe there were even guidelines in our syllabus for doing so. I did a presentation on bilingualism in the U.S. for a linguistics class, and then translated it for my oral presentation in Spanish. My Spanish prof’s stance was that as long as I did the research, writing, and translation myself, she didn’t care whether that knowledge could also be applied elsewhere.
My school of thought was that in terms of the actual learning acquired one A level research paper was worth more than 3 C level research papers.