Tuesday, August 08, 2006
A Culture of Plagiarism?
This Chronicle article reports a disquieting and pervasive trend of plagiarism in the engineering department of one of my former alma maters. Fortunately it appears that no other departments are even close to being tainted, but this is a sordid story that only gets worse when it appeared that a large number of engineering faculty and administrators decided to smear the messenger.
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4 comments:
Should we even be mildly shocked anymore when the messenger gets smeared? It seems to me this is now an acceptable, and accepted, cultural condition--don't be a whistle blower; it's disloyal (or unpatriotic, or worse). I've never been at a school where the easy response to a charge of plagiarism was to "let it go," since pursuing it through the proper channels promises little more than beaurocracy and shoulder shrugs. When I was a boy, we walked 10 miles to school through snow, uphill, both ways, and we liked it...
I think you hit the nail right on the head. I think this sort of smearing has become a cultural phenomenon and that issues like peer pressure but also enormous cynicism play into this.
Trust me, I have stories of the path of least resistance when it comes to dealing with our customer . . . I mean students who have plagiarized.
I remember you taking those long walks to school. Of course when we crossed paths I looked enviously in your direction, because after all, you wore shoes, where we were stuck with wearing shoeboxes on our feet.
dcat
Abhinav --
Oh, God, every school in the country could do an expose on undergraduate plagiarism. It is rife and like any kind of cheating they will always be steps ahead of us. That's why outside of the survey I keep the exams to a minimum (harder to incorporate technology into it) and I make paper assignments very specific so that there is no way they can find something on the internet. I am not saying there are not kids out there who have not found a way to cheat in my classes, but I make it pretty damned hard.
We had a student here who went on MYSpace or Facebook (I forget which) and tried to sell copies of my exams and another prof's exams in my department because she said "students would get an easy A." Of course that was in my survey and I change my exams every semester, so good luck with that. And I wanted to arrange a meeting with that student and got no support from the point person for that sort of thing. What can a professor do when you have a clearcut case of a student publicly making an offer to seel exams and you can get no admin backing? I wanted to sue her for copyright violations just to make a statement, but I am far too lazy and poor for that.
dcat
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