BTW… misogynistic? So using the term “bitch” means one automatically hates women? Please…
Would you be happier if I called her a “Lying slimeball” instead? No gender implications there.
After all, she pretty much accused me of racism first (or countryism, or whatever -ism she thought might paint me with some sort of ulterior motive).
I’m sure you can find plenty more examples of this, but it’s beside the point - I’m not claiming that businesses are perfectly efficient. Is it really so hard to grasp the difference here?
You won’t find a business employing a thousand or more people to do nothing more than demonstrate their skills on made-up problems whose solutions are already known. You might write a report that ends up being ignored, or be assigned some other task that’s ultimately futile, but companies generally don’t intend to hire people to do nothing of value.
Apparently we have different definitions of useless. I consider a bit of work useless if it has no larger purpose besides proving I did it - if someone will just look at it, note that it’s done, and discard it. Luckily, I haven’t encountered anything like that since finishing school.
If a coworker asks me to write a simple motion control program to jog a stage around, with four directional buttons connected to a couple motors, that’s not useless. It’d take me 5 minutes, I wouldn’t learn anything from it, and it’d only require skills and knowledge I mastered years ago, but it would still solve a problem. That coworker would use it, and it’d allow him to do something he wouldn’t have been able to do if not for my 5 minutes of clicking and typing.
No doubt. I wouldn’t expect guys like that to cheat anyway, for exactly that reason.
Clarifying, since I don’t like how the bolded sentence reads.
I did NOT spend hours tracking this guy’s cheating down (searching the web, etc).
Another teacher e-mailed me to inform me of the rentacoder listing.
A few more comments:
People are amazingly good at rationalizing just about anything that they want to justify to themselves. Students who turn in copied work are good examples of this – they have usually justified their plagiarism to themselves already. I’ve heard most of the typical excuses:
"It’s just what everybody else is doing"
That’s just a piss-poor reason for doing anything. Have an actual reason. That’s just a cop-out, and an invalid one at that.
“But officer, I wasn’t speeding, and besides, everybody else on the road was speeding, too.”
Yup. You’re still getting that ticket.
"I’m never going to use this in the real world, anyways"
The OP made a few comments that relate to this:
“people my generation just see it as a means to an end”
“Most of what you learn in school has no bearing on what most people in their careers.”
And I would agree that both of these statements are generally true. (But they do not provide license to plagiarize).
First, the “end” that the students are looking for the “means” to – is generally just that diploma. The problem is that too many students seem to think that they already KNOW what their “real life” job will entail. In reality, most of the work done in school is practice at some skill or ability. In high school and lower, it’s learning to read, learning to do basic math, learning to think, learning to solve problems, learning to express oneself in writing. In college, it’s more focused on a discipline, but it’s not necessarily “what you will do on your job”.
Too many college students seem to have the attitude that if a course doesn’t relate directly to their future job, they shouldn’t have to take it (and if they are made to take it as a required course, then they feel justified in cheating). Flawed logic, yes. And short-sighted, especially since the student typically does not have the real world experience to be able to make such a claim with any credibility.
"But in the real world, I’ll be working with other people, and sharing work isn’t a problem"
Yes, but this is a learning environment. In the “real world”, you’ll be working on solving problems that do not yet have solutions. You’ll be working on meeting needs that have not yet been met. When working in teams, you will likely have a division of responsibilities that requires everybody to carry their own weight. Copying your friend’s program does not equate.
In a learning environment, you solve problems that have already been solved – it’s called “practice”. You’re learning the basics in the discipline. You’re learning HOW to learn in this area. You’re practicing the skills to become proficient, before being sent off to work on something “real world” level, because without the practice, you’ll never be competent at that higher level. And in a learning environment, I (as your teacher) am not required to simulate “the real world” for you.
Unfortunately, there may be injustices on the teaching side, too,
which can tend to lead towards such rationalizing on the student’s part (well, the class isn’t fair anyways, so I’ll just copy and get past it). This is somewhat of a trickier situation, because while plagiarism on the student’s part is still not appropriate, I do sympathize with the plight of a student in a situation where a teacher is grossly negligent in their job, or not abiding by the appropriate standards (set by the school, or even the teacher’s own syllabus).
An example would be the case cited by Nava on page 1 – the professor who didn’t want to graduate him (her?), so as to keep him in the research group. I’ve seen this happen before, and it’s an abuse of power on the professor’s part. They need to be reported to a higher authority.
I’ve also seen classes taught by research faculty that are more interested in their research and feel “put upon” by having to stoop to teach lower level classes – that they don’t put forth a true effort into such teaching. Another bad situation where I would sympathize with the student. Personally, I am 100% teaching faculty. It irritates me to see some research faculty not take their teaching duties seriously.
Do these things justify plagiarism? No. But I think they should be reported higher up, and as soon as such a problem is known.
The thing about plagerism is that it totally bypasses the need to learn, which is the whole point of education. Naturally educational establishments need to take this seriously. And why is it treated so harshly? Well, in part it is because it such an easy thing to do (and becoming easier) and you have a fair chance of getting away with it. In order to deter students from doing it there has to be a significant penalty waiting for you if you get caught. A penalty that says; you may not be running a great risk of getting caught, but if you do the consequences will be very serious. So don’t do it.
Plus what Monstre said. Those who cheat or bend the rules always have plenty of self-justifications. Common among these is the “It’s not as bad as… Jeeze, it’s not like I’m murdering anyone… there’s far more serious crimes in the world…” justification. It doesn’t wash.
Well then, please stop telling people that plagiarism isn’t a big deal.
I didn’t call you a misogynist, I said you used misogynistic language (which you did). Plus, I don’t know why you repsponded to each point I mad as if I was saying you did these things. This thread had nothing to do with you or your behavior. I wasn’t accusing you of paying websites personally. I was saying that there are teachers, in general, who do it.
I think when you (not you personally) allow the behavior of a few cheating students to dictate how you run your classroom, then I think everybody loses. Teachers who go out of their way to make cheating harder and spent time photocopying essays and the like are making a mountain out of a molehill.
How is trying to prevent plagiarism “dicating how you run your classroom”???
Or doing their job, depending on your viewpoint. :rolleyes:
It’s not fair! They’re actually applying the rules! They’re picking on cheaters! What’s their problem?! Why can’t they just let things slide?? Why does anyone have to “go out their way”?? Why can’t we all just stay home and be given certificates?? Awwww, studying and writing paper’s hard!! Why can’t we all just do things the easy way?!
First of all, I’m dying to know what University and wouldn’t I love it if you went to the media with that story about the athletic department.
But you raise an interesting question. What you describe is not plagiarism but is still cheating and fraudulent, as it is understood that a student is to be handing in their own work. I think you’re right about there being a technical difference, although morally those of us who find plagiarism repugnant also find this practice awful. To be honest, I find paying someone to write a paper marginally less offensive, but I think that’s the academic in me.
I too have written things that go out with someone else’s signature. I have always assumed there is an understanding that executives and other high-level people will not be doing all of their own writing–but that they have people whom they pay to be able to write the kinds of things they’d approve of. It would be interesting (to me) to probe people’s feelings on why this is more acceptable to them (if it, indeed, is).
It is about the worst thing one can do in the world of academia. Few exams or term papers kill their readers, so cheating and plagiarism are about as unethical as it gets.
*I have never heard of a student being expelled for cheating, and I am reasonably certain that it does not happen except in the most extreme cases.
*As Monstre’s story nicely illustrates, it’s almost impossible to prove cheating or plagiarism in the Honor Court. If the school punishes a student when there’s any room for doubt, they could be facing a lawsuit. Teachers usually have the authority to fail cheaters and plagiarizers, but even that authority could be challenged if the teacher cannot produce solid evidence of wrongdoing. Teachers unwilling to turn a blind eye to flagrant cheating often have no choice but to “set a trap”, although I don’t think that’s really a fair term for things like giving a student suspected of cheating an alternate version of the exam.
The only thing that depends on completing an assignment in school is your learning.
*Then they know wrong. A good amount of the work done in school is in and of itself educational, it is not purely evaluative in nature. Students aren’t asked to write papers (or computer code, as in the thread that sparked this one) just to show that they already know how to do it. They’re asked to do it so they can learn by doing it.
*What extenuating circumstances? “I want a good grade but I don’t feel like doing the work” is not an extenuating circumstance. Being forced to attend school isn’t either, because while kids are required to be physically present in school they are not actually required to do any work. If someone wants to show up, sit quietly, and accept a failing grade, the school system isn’t going to do much about it. They may have the student tested for learning disabilities, but I’ve never heard of any official punishment being imposed upon non-productive but non-disruptive students (and I grew up in the same home as one such student). Since no one is forcing students to work, there’s no moral justification for cheating on the work rather than honestly refusing to do it.
*The OP does mention high school students, but the inspiration for this thread was a discussion about cheating in college.
I thought you were claiming that everything one did in business was productive.There is a difference in that in business the important thing is to get the job done, not learn. Copying is okay, (assuming it is legal) which is a hard thing for grad students out of school to learn. But even apparently useless tasks need to get done well.
Lots of people are employed to enter data and do rote work. But all of education involves doing things where the answer is known! Should a kid who is learning to add just use a calculator, because the answer to 6 + 8 is known already? I think it is a rare high school st]udent (or even college student) who can’t benefit from doing more writing. Do you think the kid who bought the paper writes so well that he can’t benefit from correction or criticism? So I reject the premise that the assignment is worthless. And I futher reject the premise that cheating on a worthless assignment is okay.
But if a guy is not a genius, he can get better, and therefore shouldn’t cheat.
BTW, here is why we did our anti-cheating program. This was a while ago, and the students turned in their programs on punched cards, so the idea of copying programs was new. We did it as an intellectual challenge, out of curiousity, but also out of the desire to catch slackers. There were an awful lot of people in the computer center at 3 am working on their programs, and they deserved to get credit vs. someone who copied. I think we found a case of someone who copied without permission - who took someone’s card deck, ran it, then submitted it with variable names changed.
Mr. 2001’s comment that the only thing dependent on completing an assignment is a grade makes me want to ask those who think cheating is no big deal about what they think school is about. Is it about a grade, or about learning something? I think grades should be a measure of how well people learned, feedback in other words, not ends to themselves. So what would you rather get out of a class if you had to choose - an A or actually learning some material?
Is the point of this thread merely to find out whether employers consider cheating a big deal? Seems like that could’ve been quickly answered in GQ with examples of cheaters being turned down for jobs, or in IMHO with employers providing their own opinions. There’s no debate in that.
Surely you aren’t suggesting that one’s grade doesn’t depend on completing assignments.
You’re right, completing assignments can (not always does, but can) result in learning. But is that learning actually valuable[sup]*[/sup] to the student? Not always, especially not for someone who’s considering cheating anyway. If he doesn’t care about learning to write a paper, the only thing he’ll get out of it is a grade.
I see you didn’t go to my school. I don’t know anyone who was officially punished for that either, but it was because we all understood that when the teacher gives an assignment and stops talking, you start working on it, unless you want to be officially punished. If one person was reading or sitting with his head down while the rest of the class was working, the teacher noticed and confronted him about it.
Exactly - because the business depends on that data being entered and that rote work being done. Data entry is valuable even though it’s boring and presents no mental challenge. If there were a more efficient way to do it, the business would likely jump on it, because saving time saves money.
As a matter of fact, my first summer job as a teenager involved data entry for a county medical facility. We’d receive a printout, which included patients’ names, the dates they entered and left the hospital, and a few other details. We then had to create a record in the database (which we accessed through a terminal emulator) for each day in that time period - if someone was treated for a month, we had to create 30 separate records, typing the same name and details in each one, and only changing the date.
This process was as slow and boring as it sounds; we’d be lucky to get through a handful of patients in an hour. I came up with a better way to do it (a terminal emulator script that prompted for the starting and ending dates, and entered the records for each day at maximum speed), and instead of being punished for doing it the easy way as I might’ve been in school, I was rewarded for making everyone’s job easier.
Not a bad question. If he cares more about getting the right answer quickly than learning addition, then he probably should. Of course, it’s still dishonest if he uses a calculator during a test where he’s supposed to be proving his own ability to do mental math, but he’s only cheating himself - and probably not very much. Pretty soon, he’ll realize that the calculator always answers 14 when he presses 6 + 8 =, and he’ll learn it anyway. As long as he understands the concept of addition (count out a pile of 6 marbles and a pile of 8 marbles, put them together, and count again), memorizing the addition table isn’t so important.
Personally, I think everyone should learn to do arithmetic in their heads, but I realize not everyone has the same priorities. I think this issue in particular is one that deserves more thought than “of course they need to learn how to do it themselves before we let them use a machine!”
Another related anecdote: I took algebra in junior high, and for some reason I was absent from school on the days when the rest of the class was learning to factor polynomials. I struggled on the test because of that, but I wasn’t afraid to get a low score (thanks to a healthy lack of interest in my grades). After that, though, not knowing how to factor was never a problem for me, because any good calculator or math program can do it. And perhaps more importantly, getting the answers from a calculator eventually taught me to recognize the patterns I probably would’ve learned if I’d been in class that week.
I can imagine a kid never wanting to learn to add. But there are advantages to doing arithmetic in your head that he might not be aware of. For one thing, you can quickly calculate, without looking at the tags, which size of product is cheaper. In a more extreme case, I was thinking of buying a car at a place, and the sales manager starting spewing out leasing and financing options. It was very fast, and I bet only the most self-assured would be able to keep up with a calculator. I was able to calculate real costs in my head, and I could tell that he wasn’t expecting that.
The point of the business discussion, btw, is that someone who has grown up feeling that he does not have to do something that he thinks is pointless is more likely to carry that over to work. Sometimes pointless activities are not as pointless as one thinks. Cheating of doing something unethical to get out of one is a bad indicator of future ethics. Kind of like, “I’ll make up a number for this government report, because who cares,” or “I know this cure works, so I’ll invent numbers to demonstrate it. That the experiment failed was just from a mistake on my part, and I need to get that paper in.”
If we’re going to resort to picky literalism, then let me point out that I never said you were accusing me of doing these things personally. I simply responded to your comments with my opinions on those items, including discussion of how I prefer to handle said situations.
In fact, you’ll notice (or perhaps you didn’t) that I agreed with some of your statements. Including that the notion of expulsion for a first offense is overly harsh. I agree.
misogynistic: adjective : having or showing a hatred and distrust of women
So it’s the language then… the word “bitch” then always indicates or shows a hatred and mistrust of women?
Matter of opinion.
So can you clarify something for me? In your opinion, what do you consider “too much”?
i.e. are you saying that any attempt by teachers to make cheating more difficult, or less beneficial, or easier to catch, is making a mountain out of a molehill? Are you advocating just ignoring it and not worrying about it and if it happens, it happens, and maybe the student gets through on falsified work, but so be it?
Or are do you feel that there is a level of effort on teacher’s part (to prevent cheating, etc) that is acceptable, and that there is some threshhold that becomes “mountain out of a molehill” level?
(This is not an attempt to ask a combative question. I want to know at what point you are claiming that you feel it’s too much).
Let me throw out a related question.
(Because this is one of those common rationalizations I was talking about, that people frequently make to justify cheating. “Well, I don’t need to know this a
anyways”)
So… Is a student always qualified to determine whether that learning is (or will be) valuable to them?
I would answer – no. Not always.
Example: I taught a course on Object Oriented Design, and basic software engineering principles. It was for the Computer Science majors. These are students who are programmers, and many of whom intend to become software developers. They seriously disliked the material, and many didn’t feel it was useful to them.
The reason they didn’t like it was because they had no experience in the realm of large scale software, and they don’t yet understand or appreciate the kinds of things that entails – the whole process. Their programming world has so far consisted of small programming assignments that many can just figure out in their head and code without any planning or process. Nobody is going to write a real life large software system or title that way.
The problem was not that they don’t need that material. It was that they were not at the level of maturity in their discipline where they would appreciate that need, and the reality of how things would work in the “real world”.
Now… how much real world maturity or experience does the typical high-school student have? How do they know what skills will be useful to them? (Besides the fact that when a person is a teenager, they automatically know everything ;))
In the sense that I was using the word (note the asterisk), yes. In fact, the student is the only person who can make that determination, because he’s the only one who knows how he wants to spend his time.
They don’t. But then, how do any of us know what skills will be useful to us in the future?
Maybe quantum computing will rise up next year and make everything I know about programming obsolete, and I should study carpentry or medicine or basketball ASAP to get ready for finding a new career. That’s certainly an option. But instead, I’ve chosen to stick with what I know and enjoy for now, and if anything drastic happens that requires me to have a new set of skills, I can learn them when the need becomes apparent. That choice might end up hurting me in the future, since every month I have to spend learning new skills is a month I’m not employed at a job that needs those skills, but it’s my choice to make.
Then he should find a way to teach it to himself. When a student enrolls in a class, he implicitly (and explicitly in the classes I teach) agrees to do the work as assigned. If he feels his judgment as to the design of the course supercedes mine (as the designer of the course), he is free not to do the work I ask, and be penalized as I see fit. If he then disagrees with my penalities, he’s free to file a complaint with my department chairperson or the dean or the Justice Department, if he likes. What he is NOT free to do is to submit plagiarized work as his own. If he does that, and if I catch him, I will either beat his balls in with a mop handle or penalize him in a way that will make him wish I had chosen the mop handle solution.
It doesn’t if you’re cheating.
In an ideal situation the amount of effort and ability that goes into an assignment will be reflected in the grade, but there are plenty of situations in which this would not be the case. It’s possible to get a grade one doesn’t deserve. It is not possible to get learning you do not deserve.
*If he doesn’t care, he can just not do the work.
*But this official punishment for failure to complete work never actually happened, you say?
*“Confrontation” is not punishment. Teachers have ever right to tell students to work, and they can punish them if they’re distracting other students from their work. But while students are legally required to attend school until they reach a certain age, they are not legally required to do any schoolwork. They certainly are not required to make a good grade. That’s where your argument in support of cheating falls apart. A student who doesn’t care about their studies could escape even the horrors of “confrontation” by simply putting some token, minimal effort into the assignment. This is much less trouble than coming up with a scheme to cheat or bribing someone else into doing your work for you, and it isn’t dishonest.
I’m not sure if the above was as clear as possible, so I’ll bore you all with another post.
People who do not care about school or their performance in school do not have any reason to cheat or plagiarize. Arguments that cheating is justified because some kids don’t want to be in school anyway are nonsense. Cheating and plagiarizing won’t get them out of mandatory schooling any faster than just dropping out would, and if grades don’t matter to them then they should be happy making a big fat zero for doing no work or a poor grade for doing minimal work. (In many cases minimal work is actually enough to earn a high school diploma anyway.)
The only people with cause to cheat or plagiarize are those who do feel that grades are important and who do want that piece of paper that says they did well in a particular class. Instead of putting in the time and effort needed to earn good grades honestly, they have decided to do it the easy, dishonest way. This is wrong for the same reasons that other forms of cheating are wrong. Plagiarizers are people who have agreed to “play the game” of academia, but refuse to follow the rules. There is no moral justification for this.
Hence the argument for a “well-rounded” education, especially at the high school (and prior) level.
If you are talking about education at the college level, then by signing up for a degree program and enrolling in the courses for that program, you have essentially made that choice. See my example in my previous post regarding students who signed of for this specific degree (Computer Science in my example), but then think that their opinions on specific course material should weigh into what they are required to learn.
A college student seeking a degree takes required courses chosen by people who are much more well-versed and knowledgeable in the field. As it should be. If a student signs up for my course (or a degree that requires my course), then they HAVE, in fact, ‘chosen’ to learn this material. Nobody is forcing them to work on that degree.
Now, on the high school (and prior) level, you might argue that high school kids don’t have a choice – they have to go to school whether they like it or not (until they reach an age where they could legally drop out, or whatever). Well, tough. That’s the law – kids have to go to school. Once they are a legal adult, they can choose whatever education (or avoidance thereof) that they want.
So in that respect, sure, everybody of adult age can choose what they want to learn. How does any of this justify cheating?