Is The Term Paper Dead? 444
Reader gyges writes in to tell us that the Washington Post has picked up a piece he wrote about cut-and-paste plagiarism: "Plagiarism today is heavily invested with morality surrounding intellectual honesty. That is laudable. But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent. Did I mean to copy, was it accidental (a trick of memory), was it polygenesis[?] ... Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers." The author argues that in the era we're entering, schools need to rely far less on term papers in assessing students.
I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it leads to lax standards as to where the answer came from when the point is to find the answer. Term papers and those efforts required of students that require actual personal thought and effort are not dead, they simply need to be pressed with more effort. Finding information is no longer the problem that it used to be. Expressing your own thoughts on the question at hand is a skill that many people never learn, never mind figure out how to express when they are 18-ish.
It is problematic to discuss things in a black and white manner as this story seems to. The issue is not plagiarism or term papers, it is expression of thought, and that is what is endangered most by the 'ocean of information' that is now available to us all.
Countermeasures (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, students have ways to cheat on term papers. Professors have ways to catch cheaters though. If you assign lots of small writing assignments along with a term paper, for instance, you can pick up on your students' writing styles enough to catch a term paper that was clearly not written by them. This of course assumes your TAs can spare the time to analyze writing styles, or are capable of easily recognizing a writing style...
By the way, are the bottom-of-page MOTD's getting most and more surreal or what? Right now I'm getting "Did YOU find a DIGITAL WATCH in YOUR box of VELVEETA?". Didn't Slashdot use to have Knuth quotes and shit down there?
I find opinions like this sad (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone plagiarizing should not be in class anyway.
What's with cheating anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who cheats to get good grades is being very inefficient. It is far easier to just use Photoshop/Gimp to make yourself a diploma.
Re:One possible idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
When we turned in our final, we also had to submit the drafts with the markups. This was ostensibly to see our progress in editing and revising our papers, but I imagine it also served as a good foil against plagiarism.
The role of universities is changing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Less Papers more projects (Score:2, Insightful)
What you say is highly subject-sensitive though. For instance, I had to write a paper (a literature survey) in my computer architecture course on superpipelining. Others in that class did superscalar processors, VLIW/EPIC, etc. Each of these papers went much more in depth in the given topic than anything we did in class. So if not the paper, what should we have done? In any of these cases anything demonstration-line I can think of would have been well beyond the scope of what you can do in a semester, especially in an undergrad class.
Re:Less Papers more projects (Score:5, Insightful)
What!?!? No reading and composition classes? No literature, history or philosophy? No humanity courses at all? No science classes where you have to write reports? What a shallow education you are getting.
Abolish Grades (Score:3, Insightful)
Get rid of grading altogether. Education shouldn't be some stupid game where students quite legitimately ask, 'Is this going to be on the exam?', because if you're going for high score you don't want to waste a lot of time on stuff that won't score you points. The only exams should be at the start of term to determine if a student possesses the prerequisite knowledge to handle the course material. Fail prereq exams, don't get necessary courses, don't graduate. Anyone who graduates has to have known enough to do so. Beyond that, place emphasis on the aquisition of knowledge -- wouldn't that be revolutionary? Education that emphasized the aquisition of knowledge? What a concept.
As long as it's just a game I really can't get that upset about students gaming the game. As is, it's just bullshit anyway. Get through it any way you can.
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:3, Insightful)
(That's the problem with the mod system here; the topics I read enough to moderate I also want to post on. I think I've only used up all my points once...)
Garbage in...garbage out. (Score:5, Insightful)
All that needs to be done to address this is for the teachers to create new unique questions. Students will have pleasure of answering questions not solved by anyone before and also need to adapt all the content they have access to towards a term paper.
Bingo. The only way that students can really plagiarize their term paper is if the question being asked is so banal that thousands of other students have already beaten it to death.
If you make the question unique, then there's really not much of a way to rip off a paper that you find on the internet. At best, all students will be able to do are copy introductory paragraphs, but the critical stuff will all have to be recreated (making the lifted text stand out against the other writing, but more importantly, retaining the more important parts of the exercise).
Ask dried-up, tired questions, and you'll probably get dried-up, tired term papers. Who'da thunk it?
would hate to take a class with that guy (Score:5, Insightful)
>if we ever have to write a term paper for our job in the real world (i.e., not academia), he'll donate $25 to
>the charity of our choice. He's been teaching since the 1970s and has >never had to pay up.
Of course he never has to pay up. But the underlying point he's trying to make is idiotic. There's no such thing as a term paper in business or government. But there are tons of important tasks that draw on exactly that skill set. Should we hire a team of people to redesign our packaging; does the potential added sales justify the expense? What mistakes did we make in our last government bid, and how can they be avoided next time? Why does Sally deserve to get the ax for her abrasive attitude towards people who report to her?
These are all things often handled with the very same writing structure that you learn writing term papers. Much of your potential to reach leadership positions within industry depends on how effectively you can explain, and how persuasively you can argue. Nothing in academia develops these skills like a good, old fashioned, term paper. It's really galling to see somebody within academia who is seemingly oblivious to how important these skills are. The fact is most college students can't write for shit, and if they could, they would be better decision-makers, they would carry greater influence at work, and they would go further in life.
Plus, being able to express yourself clearly is just cool regardless of how it affects your career potential.
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the article concerns itself with the writing itself, and not so much the information per se, which, admittedly, is somewhat akin to flotsam and jetsam.
On the one hand, he writes:
All well and good, right? You take information, construct a thesis, then fashion it into a coherent form. But then he goes on to dismiss the above by saying:
and cites rampant plagiarism as his rationale. Frankly, I don't get it. I'm not sure it even makes sense.
His other argument about students not being able to write another original statement on the subject of Jane Eyre because so many have already done so is somehow supposed to support the assertion that the problem of plagiarism is unsurmountable and we should declare defeat and run away, but I see it as misleading. People write new melodies for pop songs every day. Are we supposed to believe that someday soon we'll be out of new melodies and that pop music as we know it is really dead?
Anyone who has stood in front of a classroom knows that students often surprise you with their ideas and can offer up new ways of looking at things. Some of those same students grow up and write books or do research on subjects that have may already been written about or researched to death, the Brontes or [insert favourite dead person] included.
Plagiarism is a problem. And originality is hard, and possibly increasingly rare. Declaring the term paper "dead" is a solution in search of some other problem.
very true, but besides the question (Score:1, Insightful)
At some point, the term essay is gonna have to become a 3 hour essay behind closed doors, with no electronic equipment. Probably then, the copiers will plagirize someone else's valid excuses as to why that's no good...
Re:I See This Already (Score:3, Insightful)
My own experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose you're thinking that the children would have been suspended, or failed for the whole term? Unfortunately, they were all given a slap on the wrist, and my mom was only allowed to give them F's for that single paper. There were no write ups, no detention, no community service, nothing. The schools just refused to buckle down on it, which sickened me. Now, anytime my mother has papers to grade, I make sure she sends me a fax of any suspicious writing, and I do research on it.
More often than not, I catch five percent of her class plagiarizing per paper. This is after she extensively tells them that she had caught her countless before. Some children even have the gall to copy and paste Wikipedia articles word for word. It's sad times that we live in, and the United States government simply isn't proving a means to deal with it.
Re:The role of universities is changing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Less Papers more projects (Score:3, Insightful)
However, my writing skills have been invaluable to me since. Thanks to those endless term papers that I wrote back in high school I can:
Write a technical specification
Write a manual
Write a business plan
Put together a presentation that explains a concept or a product and explain it to another group of engineers or a group of customers or investors.
As a result (and along with my technical abilities) I've been a tech lead, a manager, a vice president and now the CEO of a company (small but growing rapidly). I've worked with a number of engineers along the way who were technically competent but unable to communicate what they were doing to anyone else which is just not useful in a team engineering environment and makes them much less valuable.
Also, when I was in college I remember in my compiler construction class at least one student had someone's compiler from the year before and was passing it off as their own. It's no harder to plagarize code than it is to plagarize a paper. You're only cheating yourself though.
Really, the right way to handle these things would be to have you write the code, then write a paper explaining how it works and the design decisions you made and then have you defend that in front of the class and take questions. That'll separate those who actually did the work from those who did not pretty quickly but it takes a lot of time to do that (which is why it's usually only done for graduate theses)
You misunderstand universities (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's not misrepresent what papers are either. Term papers are not tests in disguise; they are exercises that hone and shape a mind much as lifting weights tones and strengthens muscles. If a university has any greater purpose than the knowledge or information that is churned out, it is the task of producing fine human minds. The kind that direct the course of our civilization. The internet won't do that for us.
Same difference (Score:5, Insightful)
The only real change I see your system adding is a free-ride for the last year of your education, since you won't be graded for doing any work. Unless your statement that "anyone who graduates has to have known enough to do so" means final exams in your last year. Which is still flawed, because someone might drop out without passing, but still have the "1 year university experience" on their resume.
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Papers are supposed to test the research and argumentation skills of the students. What better way to do this than make them write ten pages on some obscure argument from Aristotle or some random lines from Milton? If I, as an expert in the field, know that it is something obscure, the students aren't going to be able to find anything to copy on the internet.
The problem here is often lazy professors who set the same paper topics every year. Then again, universities are currently set up to pass as many students as possible, rather than work them hard so that their future employers benefit.
Re:What's with cheating anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, no offense, but that's bloody stupid. The student who thinks that art history and physics don't have any relation to one another, and that there's nothing to be learned outside the immediate confines of one's field of study... well, suffice it to say that they need to adjust their logic.
I have a fairly good reason for saying this, as someone who did a double degree in Theatre and English Lit, but ended up working as an application developer and systems integrator. If it weren't for the fact that I'm omnivorous when it comes to learning, I'd have never made the leap. And don't for a second think that there's no application for what I learned in Theatre in the world of computers, or vice versa.
Incidentally, one of my Theatre term papers was a study of the interaction of Ernst Mach and his contemporary scientists with the Dadaist art movement. And for those of you who don't see the point of such a study, consider that Einstein, Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara (who founded the Dada movement) all lived within spitting distance of one another at one point in time.
Summary: The greatest cost of cheating is borne by the cheater.
Re:Abolish Grades (Score:5, Insightful)
While these are all laudable goals, it is so far from the truth about what higher education is all about that if you really believe any of these points above... see a local psychiatrist, or at least a competent educational counselor.
The real truth of the matter is that a college degree (particularly the B.S., but the grad degrees as well) are really a form of the classic "guild certification" or "union card", but applied to professional occupations. Some professions require things like a Juris Doctorate or some other specialized degree, but a bachelor's degree is pretty typical... especially for things like engineers.
And of course you need the PhD if you want to be involved with teaching at a university.
While it is a good idea to try and pick up some knowledge while you are going through the meat grinder of a college education, you should keep foremost that the knowledge is not the point. The real point is to "punch the ticket", build up credits in required courses, and get the best grades you can. How you can talk the instructors into getting those grades is of course a matter of style and attitude, with demonstration of knowledge being but one of the ways you can do that.
And keep in mind that most university programs are not designed to give you knowledge either. If they were, they wouldn't be having Computer Science instructors with accents so thick that they might as well be speaking a foreign language. Or in some cases they are, but somehow got past the dean of the college and got hired anyway and speak a dialect of Klingon, with Esperanto as their second language.
The purpose of most university programs is to control the rate of entry for people entering a given profession. The American Medical Association is very blunt and obvious about this, by only certifying select schools and controlling the number of graduates that are produced. If one million students with the same skills (or better!) as the last recipient of the Nobel prize in Medicine applied to med school, the number of students actually graduating would still be largely the same. The standards for graduation would merely be raised to nearly impossible standards to control the rate of graduation. And if there is a shortfall in the number of doctors, those standards will be lowered to permit more to graduate. There may be problems with specific specialities, but the over all number of medical doctors will be maintained.
The same could be said about lawyers (and the bar exam) as well as other professions. Many of the classes are designed explicitly to scare the heck out of you to ever enter into a given profession and consider an alternative path in life, and certainly act as a way to "weed" students out who don't have views of society that meshes with those of the faculty. If you stick up like a rusty nail in a board, prepare to get wacked and beaten down. And never, ever, try to show that you know more about the subject than your instructor. While it is fun to be cocky and show off that you've been a Linux hacker since you were 12 and have contributed over 40,000 lines into the Linux kernel by the time you graduated from High School, don't you ever dare let your professor know that was the case. You will be surely marked for heresy and doomed to drop out of college. They will make it a point to see you get flushed out in one way or another.
Oh, there are some professors and a few (very few) college/universty environments that actually do care about their students and go against this orthodoxy, but I am telling you and anybody else reading this that this is a rare exception and not the general rule. Some colleges even brag about a 30% graduation rate.... to show just how successful they are at telling students where to go and scare them out of trying to finish the programs.
Of cour
Re:What's with cheating anyway? (Score:2, Insightful)
And I would certainly argue that an art history class generally pertains less to physics than a physics class does. And even if we grant them equality, there are certainly some basket-weaving classes that would pertain less.
Re:Countermeasures (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly! I was just about to say almost the same thing...
My aunt teaches geology and last year was telling me about an experience she had with a couple of students in her class. She gave an extra credit paper assignment and of course a number of students took her up on it. One was a Japanese student with fairly poor English skills, but who otherwise understood the point of the assignment. The paper was not the best gramatically, but it covered all of the points very thoroughly - she gave him a 10/10. Another was a sorority girl who was one of the worst students she had - all of her previous papers/midterm essays were barely comprehensible. She turned in something way beyond anything she had written before and received a 0/10 because it was completely obvious someone else wrote her paper.
Moral to the story? Basically what you said - have professors (yeah right)/lecturers/TAs who actually pay enough attention to know their students and what they are capable of (ouch, dangle that preposition, MY English teacher would not be pleased!)
Society's requirements vs. proper education (Score:2, Insightful)
In general, I could not agree more.
Unfortunately, society's expectations towards its members do not care about such notions. Society expects its members to efficiently adjust to their tasks of getting jobs, lest their chances of earning their living will be diminished. It's not simply laziness or some blameworthy inclination to take the path of least resistance, it's also society's vital requirements which coerce competing students to resort to methods which are bound to contradict what we might wish to be the essence of education.
To improve the foundation for "real education", society would have to get rid of quite a lot of adverse competitiveness. As things are now, and I think the tendency is that it's continually getting worse, people are more and more obliged to learn what pays, and to learn in a way that pays, not to really learn what would be interesting or valuable to know from an intellectual or even cultural point of view.
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Students who drop out don't tend to contribute much to the university's coffers.
Re:I find opinions like this sad (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it doesn't, and that is the point. With professors reusing and borrowing term paper topic, how many ways are there for students to word a thesis statement? In high school and college English 101, the textbooks had guidelines and suggestions for turning a topic into a thesis statement that would frame the rest of the paper. These rules were drilled into my head in high school. Ask 100 students who were taught from the same book, or even just the same guidelines, to write just an introduction to a report on any one topic and I suspect you would have more then a few that over lap. In a final report, these sentences might not even show up in the same order making them much harder for a human to look at and spot the 'copying,' but a machine could spot the shared lines easily.
That's the problem. Even if a human grader noticed the same sentence in two reports they are more likely to recognize it as a statement of topic and not as potential plagiarism. With professors now having to resort to computerized means to catch plagiarism, how are they going to determine what is actually plagiarized and what just happens to be worded the same? Will the professors set an arbitrary point scale, that if a scanner reports more then 5 incidents of 'potential plagiarism' then the paper is failed? Simply by using this automated scanning the professors have admitted to needing help, so at what point is the software trusted to be right, and how easy is it for an innocent student and paper to some how end up with a failing grade or worse?
Re:My own experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is generally considered to be plagiarism. It's not just words but ideas that can be plagiarized. If you didn't cite the source of the ideas (the document you paraphrased), then you are effectively claiming its ideas and information as your original work.
Re:Countermeasures (Score:3, Insightful)
Which, in another light, could mean you're punishing her for doing too well. I understand it probably seemed obvious, and you're probably right, but it might've been a good idea to pull her in and see if she knows what she's talking about.
One trick: Get them to read their own paper. If they are tripping over spelling and pronunciation -- and indeed, don't actually know what half of the words are -- then it's probably not their work. But again, be thorough -- maybe it's a stuttering problem?
Plagiarism is usually pretty blatant -- the more work the student spends polishing the plagiarized work, the more likely it is that going legit would be easier. So, I think you should be very careful not to have any false positives.
Re:My own experience. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why a good cheater knows to STFU in class. Might as well sleep through class.
Re:Also in the UK (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't algebra seem a great deal more interesting if it was taught in a basic electronics class? Ohms law is a great way to demonstrate applied algebra. At the very least it shows how math can be useful. Later portions of the class could be taught using computer programming. Fractals could show how imaginary numbers are useful and graphic demos could show how to use trig functions to create cool patterns. This would be something ANYONE could get into, not just geeks. The knowledge must seem useful in order for someone to want to study it.
Which brings us to the fundamental problem; the subject matter is critical but students don't take it seriously. As citizens of a modern world we must exercise a wide variety of skills in order to be successful. Yet, most students don't realize this or make any effort. If students did consider writing important to their success in life then they would write their own research papers. This problem is an exponent of educational culture and I'm not really sure what we can do about it.
Re:My own experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you know someone is acting against the interests of the group in order to gain an unfair advantage and you do nothing about it, you shouldn't complain about the results.
You know the line about evil needing nothing to succeed but that good men do nothing? It applies to people like you in situations like this.
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that in many cases it's true that the professors are lazy, but sometimes the problem is much worse than that. The problem sometimes is that the professors or teachers simply don't have the internet searching skills that the students have. Also most undergraduate level knowledge is already widely available on the web. So what can a professor assign you that it is within the scope of the course and is not available a click away? I think that many schools and colleges are simply not challenging the creativity of the students.
Re:Garbage in...garbage out. (Score:3, Insightful)
As a HS teacher, my response to this sort of problem is "show me that you can". I've moved a bit away from "tell me what you know", precisely because of how easy it is now to find information. Having or finding knowledge is trivial these days. Actually being able to make use of it, and applying it to different situations is really what it's all about anyway.
What I run into is that students panic and freeze up, because the vast bulk of their schooling career was all about "spit out the right answer", and that's all they know how to do. I spend the first 3/4 of the year breaking them of the "is this the right answer" habit. I want to see the process, not the final result. It frustrates the hell out of them when I respond to "is this right" with "show me how you did it". If there's one thing I've learned in teaching, it's that kids can get the right answer with the wrong method, and they can get the wrong answer with the right method. Really, the only thing worth looking at at the HS level is the process.
When it comes to papers, I generally follow the same thought process. Research some information, and then SHOW me that you can do something new with it. Use it as a basis for estimation. Prove that it is currently infeasible technology based on energy requirements or current manufacturing abilities. Actually make something new with it. Sure, you could pay someone to do it for you, but at least at the HS level, I can be a part of the process, and I'll know if either A) 6 pages magically show up overnight, or B) the final paper is substantially different than the versions I've been seeing. If you're teaching hands-on, interacting with your students, it's harder to cheat. If you're teaching by "go do this all by yourself", it's far easier to cheat. My preference is to teach by being a part of the process, because to me, the process is the most important part.
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:3, Insightful)
I will admit that particularly in terms of biology, that there have been huge gains and leaps of knowledge. In the past, biology was largely an empirical science, with an attempt to build up knowledge through examples. That is why many biology research libraries have (especially older ones) huge catalogs of specimens of creatures, especially things like insects or stuffed animals, and have often turned these collections into museums. For this field there really is an "ocean of information" that has taken quite a bit of time to try and grasp to really find out what is going on.
Of course you have people like Gregor Mendel [wikipedia.org] who have been working toward trying to turn Biology into a real science, and in the past couple of decades Biology has been turning more and more into something akin to a "hard science" similar to astronomy, chemistry, and physics. We understand DNA now far better than we did right after it was discovered, and the basic mechanisms of how living things work is understood at a much deeper level than was understood in the past. When I compare what was talked about in my textbook to the college biology textbook my mother had from the late 1950's, the science was so different that it is hard to believe that it was the same field. Computational power has also significantly improved to the point that problems which were previously unsolvable (at least within the modest budget of an assistant professor at a small college), can now routinely be done on equipment that is now headed to the city dump. Certainly Biology has benefited from technological developments in the 20th Century. Discussions that there may be construction of a completely artificial eukaryote, while technically beyond current biological sciences, is not nearly as far fetched as once thought possible, and a complete mapping of the human genome was throught to be impossible (or many decades into the future) but is now an accomplished fact.
Getting back to the plagiarism:.... I think the problem is not so much the students and their academic environment, other than the fact that the professors have gone through a cycle of knowledge where even their own relevance in the field is being questioned, particularly if they have been lazy and not really tried to keep up with the field. And if these professors are close to retirement, why should they bother to keep up.... other than the fact that some of their students may know more about the subject than they do, even as undergrads.
I will also say that you can find quite a bit of information "on line" about any given topic, but that information is at best a general overview and can't really be considered in depth... unless you are good at accessing original research papers on-line. Certainly stopping at Wikipedia as the final and best source of information (a common mistake for many undergrads) is not only bad but intellectually dishonest. And many web pages don't even have this degree of peer review but are random musings of one individual or another. More like a blog than anything else. To get real information, you have to dust off your skills in a university library and be able to go after other sources of information that simply can't be "googled".
If a student is lazy and tries to "cheat" on getting this basic knowledge, they are really cheating themselves. Of course somebody with a basic knowledge about a topic has often been capable of writing term papers that were filled with B.S. and made up references in the past. Today is no different.
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Plagiarism, of course, is a matter of degree. A quote or a few quotes is not plagiarism. Properly credited quotes can be supporting evidence for a position, although it's often better to write one's own explanation of something with a footnote (or endnote, internal reference, etc) to where the fact was found. It shows much better understanding, and makes a piece of prose flow better since it's written by one author and not assembled like Frankenstein's monster. Quotes should be left to actual speech, firsthand witness reporting, or examples reinforcing a point made in the author's own words as well.
One good way to mitigate the problems of term papers is to require fewer multiple choice and more essay answer tests throughout the term, so the students have a sample of their writing on record already.
A good way to measure student ability without a term paper at all is to have academic projects instead. Students learn much more about a topic from interviewing people on camera or on audio recorder than by searching the web or reading an encyclopedia entry. Interviewing scientific researchers makes science seem much more interesting than reading science-for-laypeople magazines. Interviewing military vets is a very educational experience, too. Science projects are a good idea. Civics projects, in which students for example write letters to government officials or help (maybe even start) nonprofit groups and document their unique experience, are very educational too. History projects for periods with no living survivors are a bit more difficult, as having a whole class approach a handful of historians at the local universities and museums could be overwhelming, especially if the same topic is required of all students. Projects in lieu of papers altogether may not be a solution, but they'd make a nice addition for the students and for those concerned about plagiarism.
Plagiarism is much like any other negative activity, or indeed any activity at all (leaving morality ad ethics out of it for now). If the rewards outweigh the risks, many people are going to choose the rewards. Rewards for plagiarizing a term paper are high: good grade, less time invested, and the paper often makes up an inordinate amount of the grade. The risks are pretty low if there's no time to evaluate someone's writing. Despite what many people think, it's very difficult to determine a person's writing style from his or her speaking style, too. Only a sample of earlier writings really makes it difficult to rip off another's writing. Sifting through millions or billions of other written works to find a match is much less likely to work than to simply find a mismatch between that student's earlier writing and the current project. Making the term paper less important in the overall grade structure creates a smaller incentive to cheat. Evaluating students in a balanced way across papers, projects, quizzes, and large tests make it much more difficult to game the system, and less rewarding to do so.
When I mod, I purposely look for topics interesting enough to read but about which I can resist commenting. That way, not only do i use all my mod points (most times), but I find I'm much more objective. When your first instinct is to rip into some idiot with a post, it's hard not to find a virtual "-1, pinhead" in the moderations list. Likewise, it's far too easy to up-mod a post with which I just want to agree.
I find that with this method, I sometimes mod a post up because the author really did make an insightful post with a good point even if I disagree with their conclusion. I also sometimes mod posts down when I agree with the conclusion but find the argument faulty or trolling. If I'm overwhelmingly drawn to post, I don't think I can be so impartial in my moderation.
Re:My own experience. (Score:2, Insightful)
One could try to argue "they're only hurting themselves" but the fact is, they're hurting anyone who applies for the same program(s) as them but didn't score as high as they did -- if they get in by cheating, then *someone* get's knocked-out who presumably didn't cheat. If they enroll and continue to cheat, they continue to take advantage of the others in the program(s).
Despite there being three teachers overseeing the test, none noticed the cheating. So, I brought it to their attention.
Later that week I was in a work-group-session discussing ethics. I mentioned parts of this experience (up to, but excluding getting personally involved) and sought feedback from the other people at the meeting -- they were unanimous in feeling that it was wrong for the cheaters to do what they did -- *and* they were unanimous that they'd not get personally involved.
Only then did I "fess-up" to taking action. I'm left to wonder, however, just what do these other people think of me now? Snitch? Hero? Indiffernt? Honestly, I don't really care all that much -- certainly if I find myself in the same situation again, I will get involved, again.
Quotes are not plagiarism (Score:4, Insightful)
A properly credited quote is never plagiarism. The essence of plagiarism is fraud; misrepresenting somebody else's work or ideas as your own. It is not not a matter of degree, but of intent. But the more you do it, the more likely it is that you will be caught. It tends to be a slippery slope--the more you rely upon other people's words, the less practice you get at saying things in your own words, and the more you feel the need to steal.
Overuse of quotations may be lazy writing or bad writing, and will not necessarily net you a good grade on an essay, but it is never plagiarism.