Apparently I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to end this phrase with “not find personally interesting” or “not be personally interested in” and just split the difference. This is not because I did not master basic writing in high school, but because I have a wretched headache this morning. 
Uh… hmm. That’s not what I said at all. Are you sure you didn’t mean to address someone else?
No one made you apply for that job; you’re free to find somewhere else to work, or even to become your own boss. I have a lot more sympathy for blowing off rules you’re forced into against your will than rules you choose to be bound by.
A wise employer would realize that students aren’t in the same situation as employees, and judge their actions accordingly.
I’ll see if I can find some examples.
Not to mention those classmates of his who DID work hard to complete their own work.
It’s especially bad when the class is graded on a curve, as many of them are. The hardworking individuals suffer because some louts choose to take the dishonest way out.
I’m surprised that this is even a matter of debate.
Not really. A lot of people tend to follow the same patterns when they become employed that they did when they were students. Besides, what else would an employer have to judge them on-their good looks?
Well true, the student can be aggressively unwilling to learn. You know, the kind of person who asks the professor up front what the minimum amount of work he has to do to get a C.
Mandatory classes are there for a reason. They are either to provide a basis for future classes, or to provide an approximation of a well-rounded education that anyone graduating from a college (as opposed to a trade school) should have. Just about anyone with real brains can get something out of just about any class, if they try. College is like a sewer, after all, what you get out of it depends on what you put in.
You are young, aren’t you? Lots of people have families to support, and have to go with the best, or often the first, job that gets offered. Lots of work is boring but it still needs to get done. Lucky people like me have interesting and fun jobs, partially from paying their dues (in school also.) Even so, that’s not an excuse for goofing off. If you want to blow off rules because you think you can do a better job without them, or because they violate laws or imperil safety that’s one thing. You’d better be willing to take the consequences though. Blowing them off because you are too good for the job though will just get you fired, and for good reason.
I wouldn’t be surpised if this is true. In a tight job market an employer wants the best people he can get (as long as they won’t leave the second things improve) and if you can fill just about any job with high school grads instead of dropouts, they’ll do it. That’s the free market at work.
And why not? Perhaps the employer would prefer to hire people who go beyond the bare minimum requirements for a job.
Besides, even if your claim were true, that still would not justify plagiarism. Don’t want to put in the work required for a high school diploma? Then be prepared to quit or to flunk out.
Right. Even if the system is unfair, that does not justify cheating, lying, and passing other people’s work off as your own. That kind of behavior is just petty and selfish.
Oh, someone presented a hypothetical above about “What if you graduated #3 in your class, but the valedictorian and salutatorian both cheated?” That is exactly what happened to my mother back in the day. She wound up having to clean bedpans in a nursing home to get the money to pay for college while the val and sal got cushy in-state scholarships.
Gosh… I think this is the first time that one of my posts has inspired a GD thread.
I feel… honored.
Or maybe what I feel is… dirty. 
Well, since I was the OP of the thread cited here, I feel like I should weigh in on this OP with my comments. I haven’t read this entire thread yet, but I’ll get there.
First, I believe that the folks who jumped in and asked “why not expelled?” had thought that this guy (in my post) was a repeat offender. One of the lines in my story could have been read as applying specifically to him (about having to deal with another case of cheating). I was actually speaking in general terms. For this guy, it was the first time I’ve caught him cheating.
Do I advocate expulsion for cheating cases? Typically, no. Are there some cases in which I think expulsion is too good for the student? Yes – Try this one on for size. Sadly, she’s probably out there swindling money in the real world by now.
So what implication of “accept” are you saying here? Are you arguing that:
- We need to just “understand that it’s happening” – “be aware of”, etc…
or
- We need to give up trying to combat it and simply allow it to happen with no penalties for the cheater?
As I said, I don’t advocate automatic expulsion when I catch a student turning in plagiarized code. However, that doesn’t mean I intend to turn a blind eye and allow it to happen, either.
“Who does it hurt?”
-
First and foremost, the student is hurting him/herself. It seems you are arguing, “fine. let them”. I’ll be glad to let them deny themselves a decent education, but why should I award a passing grade to that person? When I mark a grade down at the end of the term, I am essentially certifying that they achieved a certain level of understanding and proficiency with the course topics. I’m not going to lie about it.
-
Is it fair to the other students who are doing the work, and sometimes struggling to achieve? Not if the cheater ends up getting the higher GPA, the better standing, the better job offers, undeservedly.
-
Is it fair to the teacher? (or possibly in a college course, the TAs, who have to grade). Why should I waste time grading work that a student didn’t actually do? For that matter, when two students turn in identical code, why should I or my TA have to grade that same submission twice?
Can you clarify your position of “just accept it” for me? Because I don’t know whether you’re arguing just that the suggested punishment by some (i.e. expulsion for cheating) is too harsh. Or whether you are saying that cheating should just be allowed to occur because it’s inevitable anyways.
Sure, but there are a couple problems with assuming that someone who cheated in high school will be a bad employee.
First, in school, you are given tasks to do not because the tasks themselves are important, but to prove you know how to do them. Knowing that the fruit of your effort will merely be looked over and thrown away doesn’t give you the same motivation to put forth that effort as knowing someone actually depends on it.
At work, the tasks themselves are important. This gives you more motivation to get them done, and it means “cheating” might not be looked at as such - if you’re assigned a task, and it gets done, that’s the most important thing, not whether you did it yourself or delegated it to someone else. A cheating student wouldn’t dare tell his teacher that he paid a friend to write the term paper for him, but an employee might not be so hesitant to say that he enlisted help on a project.
Second, people act differently in different circumstances. If you’re starving and unemployed, you might steal a loaf of bread to feed your family, but that doesn’t make you likely to embezzle from work five years later when you can afford to buy food. IMO being forced into school is a tough situation, perhaps not as severe as being penniless and hungry, but enough to cause people to act differently than they would otherwise. Apparently you don’t think so, so I guess we’re stuck on this issue.
:dubious:
That’s unfortunate, but IMO there’s still a difference between taking the first job that comes along because you don’t think you can afford to wait for the next one, and literally being made to attend school under penalty of law.
Absolutely. I’m not advocating blowing off rules at work, or in courses you choose to take. (Not that I’m advocating doing it in high school either; I’m just saying cheating a system that you’re forced into against your will doesn’t make you a bad person.)
This is the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
Most of my work experience has involved tasks of minimal significance, tasks so dull, repetitive, and mindless that they made virtually everything I was ever assigned to do in school seem like a non-stop thrill-ride in comparison. If high school taught nothing but how to force yourself to perform tasks that you care nothing about, it would still be pretty good preparation for the working world.
The only job I’ve yet held where I felt my work was at all important was a teaching position. And it was only important because I was helping people to learn things. If they’d been cheating their way through the material, my efforts would have been meaningless.
*Yes, it does. Engaging in petty, selfish dishonesty makes you a bad person. This does not suddenly become ethical behavior just because students are required to attend school. That would be like saying that counterfeiting money is perfectly acceptable from a moral standpoint because you never wanted to pay taxes or live in a capitalist society in the first place.
People don’t plagiarise papers to benefit humanity. They don’t do it to save themselves from some horrible fate. They don’t even do it to stick it to “The Man”. They do it because they want to get a reward they haven’t earned and don’t deserve. I realize that this “youth rights” thing is your pet issue, and it surprises me not a bit that you’ve decided to use this thread as yet another platform for your views on the subject. However, I do admit to being a little surprised that you’re attempting to use concern for the rights of children as a justification for cheating on schoolwork.
Sorry you feel that way. I didn’t mean to drag you into something you didn’t want to be involved in.
In short, here is my point. Cheating is wrong, dishonest, etc. But people seem to be treating it like it’s the worse thing ever. Expulsion seems crazy to me (except in extreme cases). It aslo seems crazy to me that all these teachers go out of thier way to set up traps to get cheaters. Whether its creating programs or paying a website to check for plagiarism, it seems like too much work for a typically minor infraction. Certainly stealing an exam is worse than typical plagiarism (which this thread was directed toward), but to call the student a 'bitch" for doing so seems as if you are taking this too personally. I’m sure you didn’t actually call her that, but it certainly seems as though you feel she is. Why lower yourself by using misogynistic language. I’m sure some of that was for comic effect, but I know many teachers who really get as mad as you seemed.
That’s what it boils down to. Many teachers take it personally, and launch a crusade against anyone they suspect of cheating. They act like these lazy slugs killed their dog. Then, they make up all of the reasons why doing so is justified. All fo these people saying it devalues thier diplomas and makes it so nobody will ever have an incentive to do anywork are fooling themselves. Most are just mad cause they see it as something that is unfair because someone else didn’t put in the work they had to. It’s essentailly a matter of arrogance to them. That some people feel they are “above” the work. They would feel the same way about a guy who does the same work in half the time they did and was an ass about it. Of course not everyone that hates cheating is like that, but I think many are.
It’s simple, as has been said before. Cheating and plagiarism are NOT ethical conduct even in the wider world. In the academic world, they’re almost capital crimes, because the purpose of the academic world is to discover and impart information. Cheating and plagiarism short-circuit that purpose. If you cheat or plagiarize, the only thing you’ve learned is how to cheat or plagiarize, yet you receive credit (if you’re not caught) for doing the work that others have actually done, because they recognize that they need to do it to become educated.
A person with a degree he or she “earned” by cheating is a person with a piece of fancy paper and nothing more, and can’t be trusted to actually do their work in the wider world, either. And don’t bullshit me with the “academic cheating doesn’t say ANYTHING about someone’s real character!” It does.
You’re right. I should’ve phrased it differently. I’ll be charitable and suppose you weren’t being deliberately obtuse, you just didn’t understand that I meant getting the tasks done is important to something other than your own evaluation as an employee.
And yet, those tasks had to be done. No matter how boring or mindless they may have been, some part of the business’s operation depended on those tasks being done.
On the other hand, the only thing that depends on completing an assignment in school is your grade. The principal doesn’t need your report on A Separate Peace so he can present it to investors. If your math teacher tells you a train leaves from Chicago at 10:00 AM traveling at 100 MPH and wants to know what time it’ll reach Atlanta, it’s not because she’s planning a trip. If you think the capital of Germany is Frankfurt, your school isn’t going to print up 100,000 inaccurate maps and be laughed out of business. None of the work kids are asked to do in school has any real point besides testing their knowledge, and they all know it; IME, that affects their motivation to complete the work.
shrug I make allowances for extenuating circumstances; you don’t. I doubt either of us will be convinced otherwise.
No, because you have some control over the laws of your country (assuming you’re allowed to vote), and you’re free to move somewhere else. Do you not understand the difference?
Nor should it, considering how relevant youth rights are to the question of how high school students should be treated.
That might be true-but how do I KNOW that? Honestly-do you expect employers to overlook the person’s record, because they just MIGHT be a good person at heart?
Sorry, no.
Honestly? No, not really. I think they should, but I doubt they would. I don’t expect employers to overlook the fact that someone stole a loaf of bread to feed his family during hard times, either. If I were interviewing someone, and he told me he cheated on a paper in high school, I wouldn’t let that stop me from hiring him, but I can’t control what anyone else would do.
And there are alternatives to going to the local highschool. Some of them are even likely to result in a better choice of colleges and later employment.
That’s true. Avoiding school entirely (e.g. homeschooling) is rarely an option, though, and in any case, deciding where to attend school isn’t really a choice the student can make, but a choice that someone else can make for him.
Hoo boy, are you going to be in for a shock. You must never have had to attend a meeting at 7 am as the sacrificial lamb for your department, a meeting which makes KP (do they still have KP?) look like a rewarding and productive experience. I once spent a good bit of a summer proving to my boss that a $35 component was actually broken. Doing a paper, which is limited in time and can actually get you further in life, is much more rewarding than that. A lot of people in a company I used to work for spent months drawing transistors for logic that was sure to be changed or removed. A lot of business is inefficient, and a lot of work doesn’t need to be done.
Useless assignments are doing something over which you have already mastered - but while useless, they should be quick. A guy who is such a genius that writing a 3 page paper does him no good should be able to knock it off in less time than it takes for him to find someone (dumber than him, no doubt) to write it.
If that’s the primary point, then I agree to an extent. I never was advocating expulsion for the case that I wrote in the OP, and the start of that thread was intended not just to tell the story, but to illustrate how stupid some students can be when they think they are being clever and getting away with something.
So should cheating on an exam or homework be seen as an “unforgiveable sin”? No
If I see it happening, should I just let it slide and allow the student to get credit for work they didn’t do? No
Do I go out of my way to trap cheaters and throw it in their face? No
Do I try to write tests and assignments in such a way that I can most accurately judge their actual learning in the course? YES
And part of this means that I’m going to end up spotting such cases. The incident I referred to in the other thread (the OP, not the later story) – I did not identify this because I spent hours searching web sites, or paying any web sites to track things down. Another teacher from another university e-mailed me and said, “Hey, one of your students has listed an assignment on rentacoder.com and is trying to buy a solution”. I checked it out and figured out the student’s identity in less than 60 seconds. Now that I know, should I just turn a blind eye?
No. Because that would amount to not doing my job. If he breaks the rules of the university and the course, and I catch him doing it, there will be a penalty.
Here’s an analogy. You might similarly argue that speeding, for instance, is not that big a deal. And most people probably go at least a little over the speed limit often, or have at some point in time. But if a cop catches you doing it, especially if it’s over a certain threshhold, you’re going to get a ticket, and deservedly so. That’s his job, to enforce the law.
My job is to teach the material, assess students’ learning (on an individual basis), and to do so within the university and department policies. I take my job seriously, and I will do it to the best of my ability.
I have a few tricks that I use to prevent cheating, but these are typically things that don’t require too much effort – mainly this involves prevention of copying on tests.
From a teacher viewpoint, much of the process of “going after” the cheaters IS too much work. And I have no interest in taking any more cases to the Honor Court, except perhaps in the most extreme of cases – primarily because previous experience showed that this was a big waste of time and the university wasn’t going to enforce it’s own policy.
This is why my syllabus and course grading policy has evolved over the years to where it is now – which is to say, cheating on assignments will net the students very little, even if they “get away” with it. Because they still have to prove themselves on tests, and there is a minimum test average requirement in my classes. I find this to be a very effective solution, and so I don’t waste much time looking for cheating. But I will deal with it when it falls in my lap (like in this case from my thread).
Actually, that was a story later in the thread, not the original intent of the thread. And yes, part of that was comic effect – it was the Pit, after all, so the stories there were intended to have some of the tone of a Pit Rant.
And no, I didn’t take it personally when I got her test back to find it was a copy of the stolen one. But yes, I did take it personally when, at the Honor Court hearing, she attempted (in one of her many defense attempts) to accuse me of discriminating against her for her nationality – because that was a personal attack on her part. That, among other things, truly showed me what type of person she was. That was a case that merited expulsion, IMHO, because she was not only cheating in a big way, but she was abusing the Disability Center services in the process. And there’s no doubt in my mind that she pulled this scam in other classes.
No – no crusades for me, but I will do my job, which includes upholding the university’s policies, like the Academic Honor Code. And if I catch a student handing in work that isn’t theirs, I will not turn a blind eye and give them credit for work they didn’t do. Nothing vengeful about that. That is simply called “my job”.
Not for me. I’ve had some students who felt that way – upset at the idea that somebody else was getting by without doing the work, but despite their feeling “cheated” themselves, they have done themselves a much better service by doing their own work and learning the material – they will be better off in the long run for it.
Personally, I always learned things very quickly and didn’t spend that much time studying in school. Most of it came pretty naturally to me. When I was learning programming myself and doing my CS masters, it never even occurred to me to attempt to find other people’s code, when I was doing assignments. Two main reasons.
- I was there because I wanted to learn.
- I don’t trust other people’s coding. (I still don’t)
For me, it boils down to this:
If I mark down a passing grade for a student, I am certifying that the student has actually achieved a certain level of understanding of the material. I don’t care if they spent 20 hours a week getting to that level of understanding, or 1 hour a week getting there. Some people learn things quicker than others. That’s fine. But the point is… did they LEARN? If a student proves to me that they learned the material and have shown a certain level of proficiency, they will pass.
When a student hands in work that they copied from somebody else, that does not show me that they have learned anything. And I will not lie when I’m assessing grades – if a student hasn’t earned a passing grade on their own merit, I won’t be assigning them one.