In general, plagiarism without the original author’s permission is a big deal - claiming someone else’s work as your own is the closest thing to theft you can possibly do with a nonphysical object. But paying someone to do your work for you is merely another form of cheating, since you have their permission to take credit for writing it.
Gotta say I agree with brickbacon here, especially if we’re talking about mandatory schooling (e.g. high school) rather than a student who’s paying tuition and volunteering his own time to receive an education. The student presumably knows why he’s being asked to write the paper, and just doesn’t care to learn to do it himself.
If he cares more about getting a passing grade so he can get the hell out of school than about learning to write a paper and do research, and cheating helps him reach that goal, it’s hard to say he’s being harmed by making that choice.
Who’s talking about paying someone else to plagiarize for you? This is more like paying someone to give you his car, or build you a new car, so you can sell it to someone else and claim it was yours all along.
Education teaches you to think for yourself. If you’re a lazy thinker in school, you’ll be a lazy thinker afterward.
In my line of work, lazy thinking can result in injury or death of a patient while being treated for cancer.
My first manager at Intel sat next to the guy who caused the FDIV bug in the Pentium. A moment of carelessness cost the company $250M (yes folks, that’s Million).
Presenting work that you claim to be yours which is not is lying plain and simle. You don’t care about lying? Fine, but admit that you don’t have ethics and be done with it.
Whether you chalk it up to laziness or a form of protest against a stupid assignment, plagiarism ends up showing an appalling lack of integrity. Getting credit for work you didn’t do is like collecting a paycheck when you never showed up for the hours claimed. It’s falsifying someone else’s work to look like yours. It’s claiming credit for ideas you didn’t have, work you didn’t do. It’s slimy, and the fact that it doesn’t bother you is a red flag for some people. No matter what your reasons for doing it are, no matter how small the assignment.
I think plagiarism also really offends some academics and people who are invested in education because it sullies an activity that is at the heart of education. So much of the academic enterprise involves a person doing some original thinking and then committing it to paper to communicate it to others. It’s an essential part of knowledge-seeking in many fields, and it’s duplicated at nearly ever level of education, from the student turning in a five-paragraph essay on What I Did This Summer to the Nobel-laureate economist publishing a revolutionary journal article. It’s what people do to show what they’ve learned and what they’ve thought about. It’s an offense on two sides, then–an affront to the person who truly did the writing (and is being stripped of rightful credit for their ideas), and an affront to the time-honored tradition of demonstrating knowledge via putting one’s own thoughts and syntheses on paper.
I agree that it’s dishonest, but not all dishonesty is the same.
Suppose I live in a dictatorship where everyone is required to work for the state, on penalty of imprisonment. Police officers regularly go out during work hours to patrol libraries, movie theaters, and other places where folks like me like to spend our free time, to make sure we’re not hanging around there instead of working. The commissioner of my village has assigned me the task of digging a drainage ditch, but instead of doing it myself, I offer my neighbor a pair of Levi’s and he agrees to do it for me. When I’m standing in the bread line the next day, they ask whether I’ve completed my work, and I point to the ditch outside as evidence that I have. I collect my bread and go home.
In that scenario, have I done something dishonest? Sure, I lied about digging that ditch. Some might say that I’ve failed myself by paying someone else to do my work for me, because digging ditches is good exercise, and instead of building muscles, I was sitting at home.
But does that mean I lack integrity? I would argue that it doesn’t. I didn’t apply for that job; I was forced into it without any choice in the matter, and I was paid in bread instead of money. Staying out of prison and keeping food on my table were more important to me than building muscle, since I have no dreams of becoming a bodybuilder. The work got done in any case, and no one knows the difference besides me and my neighbor. Cheating an oppressive system may be dishonest, but it doesn’t make me a slimy or untrustworthy person - some might say that since I’m in no position to change the system, making my own life easier while staying out of trouble is the best I can do.
I trust the parallels to high school are clear. The analogy has flaws, like any other… in real life, you can drop out of school at a certain age, and you won’t literally starve if you don’t get a diploma, you’ll just be locked out of many jobs (whether or not you have the skills they require). On the other hand, a paper you have to write for school has no use to anyone but you and your teacher, unlike a ditch, so the only reason it matters whether you turn in the paper is that you get credit for doing so.
I suppose my biggest concern about cheaters is that I have to work alongside them. In my course, there are very compelling disincentives to cheating - nobody, after all, wants a forensic scientist who cheated through their degree to be working on their case, do they? However, there are several students in the course who do not cheat now, but cheated during secondary education, and their work ethics and capabilities are unsatisfactory.
These students don’t really know how to write a journal article-style lab report, because they didn’t bother to learn how to write well-researched papers in previous years. Yes, they intellectually understand the subjects, could explain the science behind it, but they don’t have the resourcefulness required to find cites for their work. This holds them back.
When I’m forced to work with these type of students in a group project (gah I hate group projects) it means I have two choices. One - I can let them do their share of the work, to a standard lower than I am willing to turn in, and turn it in anyway, and get a lower grade than I would otherwise deserve. Two - I can do most of the work myself, helping them to get a grade higher than they would otherwise deserve.
I always pick option two, because I have high standards about assignments that I put my name to. But I do feel it’s a very “legal” way for these students to ‘cheat’ through the subject without getting called on it. It makes more work for me (although, let’s be fair, I love writing assignments!) and it puts me in the uncomfortable situation of having to take charge of every group assignment I work on with these particular students. It’s unfair to me.
I think the idea that just being lazy is some sort of excuse for dishonesty is pretty pathetic.
The Koeble brothers decided that it was easier to fudge numbers on reports than do the work required of them while operating the water supply of Walkerton, ON resulted in 11 deaths. cite
This idea that somehow cheating is acceptable is ridiculous. Think of the proffessionals in daily life that you require for things such as clean water, uncontaminated food, health care, and utilities. How safe would you feel if say your doctor fudged some of his/her studies? How much would they know and, more importantly, how much would they keep up on their studies later if they were too lazy in the first place. The medical proffession like many others requires a life time of training and upgraded lessons. If this person couldn’t be bothered in the first place what are the chances, when they are busy with a practice, that they’ll bother to upgrade their studies?
What if the guy operating the water treatment center was too lazy to properly learn how to read the reports given to him on bacterial levels in your drinking water? Sure he has the job (the end) but so what if it results in the death of a child or eldrly person.
The only way we can judge a person’s competance is through testing and assignments. If that person uses someone elses work how do we know they are actually qualified?
If the person is too lazy to do the work for an assignment how can they be trusted to do real work? If they try to cheat to cruise they are likely to keep doing that throughout life.
Sure in some cases that means little, in others it literally can be life or death.
Besides what are the end’s these cheaters are looking for? What motivates them?? Grades, a diploma, a degree?
Better to have a person who wants to heal people than one who just wants to be a doctor.
Except in highschool you are to do the work to improve your skills and improve your knowledge. When you are digging a ditch you are just digging a ditch. Just because you didn’t choose to be taught doesn’t make it analogous to forced labour. Eductaion is for your benifit whereas the ditch in your story is for the govenrment.
I think there is a serious disconect going on when you think the goals of education are to get good grades. The goal of education is to teach you how to learn things think about them and view the world. You are being taught how to become a thinker. If you have someone do that paper for you, you have given up that oppurtunity to actually excersise the grey matter between your ears.
Besides how hard is it to annotate other peoples ideas if you incorporate them into your work?
I’m curious why you think they will shed their laziness and become industrious once they are out of school. I’ve worked with this sort of joker: they take credit for work that is not theirs (creating serious morale problems among the staff) and turn in poorly researched reports that are cobbled together from hearsay and earlier (faulty) efforts, leading management to make horribly bad decisions based on shoddy information. The clowns I have seen do this are nearly all “smart,” but “just” lazy. Had they been bounced out of their schools at a more malleable age, I would not have had to encounter their “smart but lazy” inferior work that made my life harder (and threatened the livelihood of the rest of the people in their departments as bad business decisions tore up the companies).
Will everyone who has ever plagiarized or cheated on a test do this? Probably not, but you described a couple of jerks who are making a career of this practice and I see no reason to believe that they will miraculously change once their “goal” is a raise or promotion instead of a grade or a degree. One way to stop this sort of thing is to treat plagiarists with the scorn they earn for themselves.
If someone is more concerned with making his life easier and staying out of trouble than learning particular skills and knowledge (much of which will be of questionable use once he gets out of school, if he even remembers it the week after he’s tested on it), I’d say that’s his choice to make. Saying “it’s for your benefit” or “you’ll thank me in a few years, just wait and see!” is no excuse for making him waste his time.
Not everyone thinks of it as an opportunity, though. Someone who’d rather cheat than do the work himself obviously considers it a chore.
And he can exercise that choice by dropping out of school, not by getting others to do his work for him so he can graduate. People are not required to stay in school until they earn a diploma. If they don’t want to learn the skills taught in high school, they can just sit around doing nothing in class until they’re old enough to drop out.
I venture to guess that you feel that the age for dropping out should be lowered. However, since students do not normally graduate at a younger age than they’d be allowed to drop out, plagiarism of work required to graduate wouldn’t help to free a student from mandatory education any sooner.
Yes, if someone doesn’t want to do the work in high school and thinks it’s pointless, there are plenty of options. Dropping out, getting a GED early, independent study, and homeschooling come to mind. Hey, get creative, apply for a charter school or a year abroad (though I hope no one would intentionally shirk their schoolwork in Russia as well as the US!).
But oh yes. Cheaters are lazy, not honest. So they cheat and lie, which is why they’re whinging about the pointlessness of it all, so they don’t have to face up to the fact that they have no integrity and aren’t willing to make the effort to find a better education. They want the rewards without the work, not an actual challenge.
I wonder if the OP is aware that lack of written communication skills is a very common complaint about new hires in the working world. Writing essays about Macbeth teaches you some very important skills. Skills that your future boss is going to need, demand, and depend on. Every student should work on them.
I suspect that you think writing essays in high school about uninteresting subjects does not teach you all that much. And you’d be possibly 1% right and 99% wrong. A few people are are natural writers (whose skills will improve even further with practice). A few will always struggle. Everybody else will learn by doing it.
Note that, incidentally, cheating by having somebody else write your essay is also a symptom of a significant (for us “old” generation) societal problem: lack of work ethic. Writing your own essay, even if you think you have better things to do, teaches you something about work ethic!
It is unclear what your wider experience is (you sound like a college student; sorry if I’m wrong) but I think you’re missing the point (of having to cite dead white men).
Writing an essay is not about you, your thoughts, your ideas. It is about your audience’s thoughts. To communicate your ideas, you need to identify with your audience. Especially if your ideas differ markedly from “expected wisdom”. You need reference the mainstream and formulate the contrast in terms that your audience can relate to. If nobody understands what you’re thinking you haven’t achieved anything. I don’t see how considering dead white ideas while pondering your own is limiting; it’s something important to learn and should in fact expand your horizons.
(It is certainly true that there exist small-minded educators who will think your ideas “wrong” if they differ from the great dead white men. That will limit you, but still teach you something else that’s important about the world.)
Once you get out of college, you’ll probably find that the “older generation’s” attitude is actually the attitude of most professionals, including those well under the age of 35; people in college/=people in their twenties in general.
Because we’re working with writing done by children (1st-12th grade) plagiarism is something that crops up now and again at my workplace. The employees range in age from people in their early twenties to people in their early seventies. Who do you think makes a biggest fuss when they discover something plagerized?
Former teachers and people who have been out of school for less than 10 years.
Why? That’s easy. The former teachers hate plagiarism as a general principle. As for people in their twenties and early thirties, it’s because education is still a fairly fresh memory. They readily remember putting effort into their own assignments, so it really pisses them off when a kid tries to pass off someone else’s work as their own.
There are some middle age people at work who get upset at plagerism too, but not nearly as many. Part of this is because the kids think they’re being clever by plagerizing things they don’t think people would be “hip” enough to recognize, so younger people are far more likely to recognize plagiarism when they see it. I instantly recognized someone using Nirvana’s “Serve the Servants” lyrics as their work but things like that generally aren’t going to be caught by someone who doesn’t have a lot of the same media knowledge as the kids do.
He cheated too, so he was hardly in a place to complain. I don’t mean to make it seem like they cheated all the time. The valedictorian got really got test and SAT scores, so he knew what what he needed to know. I understand your point. But, I think you would only have a right to be mad if you could reasonably expect a different result if he had done all the work himself. I’m not so sure that is true. I’m sure he could have gotten an “A” on every paper he stole. The end result would have been the same. The only difference is he may have had less free time. If the salutorian was just made cause the other kid didn’t have to work as hard (because he was cheating) then he is a hater.
Life is not fair. Is it fair that some less intelligent people have to work twice as hard to get the same grade? I don’t worry to much about everyone getting a fair shot, because it doesn’t happen, and if you had built-in advantages, you would use them.
All that might be true if any idiot with access to the internet could cheat their way through Harvard. It doesn’t usually work like that. Once again, most cheaters are able, but not willing. The value of your diploma is based on the quality of students that possess it. If someone who cheated turns out to be a brilliant doctor, I doubt it would lessen the value of your diploma. That’s because people wouldn’t care that he cheated because he is a brilliant doctor.
It’s that attitude which makes me think that most of these people don’t have a problem with cheating alone. It’s when they think the results don’t match the opinion they have of the person. They may convince themselves that it’s the cheating, but it is not. Think about a person you have a lot of respect for. Would you really feel they have less integrity if you found out they cheated on a test in college? Would you consider them liars, and question their honesty in other parts of their life?
Plus, if you graduate and a cheating scandal breaks out 5 years later, anyone who assumes that you must have cheated cause you went there isn’t a logical person. My point being that cheating should in no way, effect people who went to the school years earlier.
When did I say cheating was justified? All I said was that it not the big deal most people made it out to be (in the vast majority of cases). Let’s say we both did well on the test, but the boss thinks you are more friendly/better looking/etc., and gives you the job. Is that justified? I think a lot of the anger you guys are expressing comes from the expectation that things should be fair. They are not, and they never will be. Sure we can work toward that goal, but I don’t get all pissed off when someone works the system. To me it’s like the people who hate Bush cause they think his daddy got him everything, and that he isn’t qualified to be president. As much as I think he’s doing a piss poor job, I don’t get mad by the fact that I would have to work 10x as hard as he did to get half as far.
For other people, it’s extolling the virtues of the business magnates who lobby for as much corporate welfare as possible, while castigating “welfare queens” who are bringing down the system. These people have no problem with welfare in general, just that it’s going to people they feel aren’t deserving.
Both, (minus the chump part). It was his right to name it after whomever he wants. That’s what happens when a college whores themselves for a few million dollars. You might get something you don’t like. Besides, having the arena named after a cheater isn’t as bad as the Jefferson Davis highway, or a number of other things that are named after scumbags.
But you don’t know that. Perhaps by having to actually put in the time and effort like everyone else, he would have found that he had less time to do other assignments, and his overall score would have dropped.
I’ve never understood what a “hater” is supposed to be, or why it’s a bad thing. But I can’t imagine that anyone would be mad just because someone didn’t have to work as hard. I can, however, understand how someone would be mad at a cheater for the sole reason that they were cheating. Cheating is equivalent to lying (and sometimes stealing, as well). It’s saying “I did this work”, when you really didn’t. Or, in worse cases, it’s taking someone else’s work, without their permission, and saying “This is mine”.
I have no sympathy at all for liars or thieves.
Yes. The whole purpose of getting a grade is to show how well you understand the material. If someone doesn’t have as high an aptitude in a subject, then they have to put in more effort before they have the same understanding as someone with a higher aptitude. It’s not unfair that people have varying levels of ability. What’s unfair is for someone to cheat and try to justify it by saying that they just don’t understand the material as well, so they needed the extra help.
Look, I suck at chess. Would that make it fair for me to have Deep Blue feeding me my next move over a hidden earpiece?
Actually, if someone who cheated his way through medical school were my doctor, and if I found out about it, I’d probably find another doctor. no matter how brilliant he is.
One test? Probably not, although it really depends on the circumstances. If they recently had a death in the family, and couldn’t study because they were taking care of the final arrangements, then I’d excuse them. If they just wanted to party instead of studying, though, then I would consider that their integrity was diminished (and rightfully so).
But it does (in the opposite way in which you think). Someone who went to a school with rampant cheating, and who didn’t cheat himself, probably ended up with a lower GPA than he deserved.
Hang on, wasn’t that what writing the paper in the first place was supposed to do? The one they plagiarised? I guess we’ll just have to take their word for it; They’re able cos they say so, but lazy. Wouldn’t the world be a happier place if everything and everyone worked like this?? :rolleyes:
Unfortunately, in my experience, employers dislike the lazy even more than the unqualified.
Actually, I specified that you were the salutatorian, and that you didn’t cheat. All that’s happened by the real salutatorian’s cheating is that the honest #3 in the class should have been the valedictorian, or whoever is next in line. Don’t you think that somewhere in the world, a cheater is stepping on honest students to get to be the top in the class undeservedly?
Perhaps your friend could have gotten an A, but he’ll never know. If he was too lazy to do the work, then he couldn’t have gotten A’s on everything honestly, because he would have been too busy procrastinating the work. And at some point, the lack of practice will catch up with him. If he doesn’t write half his papers, then he will have only half the practice everyone else got, and it will eventually show. His lack of work ethic will show too. By now, he (or someone just like him–doesn’t matter much) might be afraid that he really can’t do the work, and afraid to find out. It’s sad to live your life in fear of being found out as incompetent.
I, too, would find another doctor if mine had cheated in school. Also, I’m the “younger generation” you spoke of.
