21 ms·

Hi. I attended this school and then got accepted to another more standard institution, which I applied at the same time to. The new institution, learning I had

Hi. I attended this school and then got accepted to another more standard institution, which I applied at the same time to. The new institution, learning I had been attending U of the P, promptly told me that U of the P credits would not transfer. Universal transferability in question, I opted out. I did enjoy meeting people from all walks of life, all over the world. However, I also saw a grossly wide range of educational professionalism in the students. In the introductory mandatory writing course, for example,there were a number of classmates whom could not grasp the idea of plagiarism being unethical. With a plagiarism assignment graded by those peers, it was difficult to not feel like higher educational learning was moving along for oneself at a progressively intellectually challenging pace.

uopeoplestudent 6y ago
> The new institution, learning I had been attending U of the P, promptly told me that U of the P credits would not transfer. Universal transferability in question, I opted out. Yes, many schools will not accept coursework from nationally accredited universities. This includes coursework from UoPeople. You will not be able to apply for many graduate schools as well. A degree from UoPeople definitely comes with limits, and I wish the school was a little more forward about that. (There are lots of discussions about this on the internal social network.)
- dart600 6y ago
  Yes I was slightly piffed. Yet, the professor was notably intelligent and very professional. My comment was for others wondering if it was a scam. Its not a scam, it's real, but preferably for people seeking a multicultural experience along with their general educational knowledge, irregardless of the loss of highly guaranteed nontransferrability. Perhaps if one is retired, for example, it would simply be an amazing choice. :)
  - uopeoplestudent 6y ago
    Speaking on your comment about plagiarism, my second term there was a student who submitted their Java homework in a Word document. It contained two screenshots. The first was of the NetBeans IDE. The second was of their browser opened to a Github page that contained the answer to the assignment. They'd un-destructively cropped the second using Word. They made it look like it was typed into NetBeans. I was able to track down the original source.
    - orzig 6y ago
      Sometimes laziness shoots the moon and becomes artistic genius
- eikenberry 6y ago
  This isn't restricted to untraditional schools. At least one of our local state universities have stopped accepting credits from the community colleges due to the practice of transferring for the final couple years. Might be something similar going on here. It might be that they want the degree to represent the full 4 year experience at the school or it might just be the money. The cynic in me prefers the latter.
  - topkai22 6y ago
    If that was happening in my state I’d definitely be writing my representatives to take action and change that- transferability to a university while being able to live at home and pay less was quite explicitly one of the points of having a community college system when I was growing up.
    - throwawaygh 6y ago
      Many state universities changed those transfer policies when states made deep higher ed budget cuts during the great recession. The alternative in our state was closing branch campuses (thereby making college even less accessible for most of the state). Lots of universities in the US are lavish and expensive. Our state's branch campuses are the definition of utilitarian. Tuition is some of the lowest in the country. Salaries for professors at the branch campuses are lower than what we pay our high school teachers. Very little admin overhead. There's simply not much to cut. Anyways, not saying it's right. But if you cut higher ed budgets, higher ed will get more expensive to the end user. Especially if the system was already hyper-efficient. Limiting transfer credits is pretty much the only way to make things more expensive to the end user without increasing tuition.
      - topkai22 6y ago
        Sounds like the set up in your state is to have branch campuses try to serve many of the needs that community colleges serve (or used to serve) in my state. Whatever the setup, I think it is access to higher education at as local level is important.
    - 6y ago
themodelplumber 6y ago
> could not grasp the idea of plagiarism being unethical I remember experiencing this at a private religious university. At the time, my hyper-religious mind was blown to see students outright cheating in the Testing Center. Since then I've been exposed to additional perspectives on plagiarism. It is an extremely deep and nuanced topic. A few years out of school, I ended up mentoring and then teaching college students who seem to match the sort of person you describe. This was a huge shock at first. The more I learned about these students, the more I learned about the sheer variety of perceptions involved: One person's fairness concept is, to another person or group, a latent power dynamic which ought to be questioned. Or, this person's concern for the big-picture ethical questions is this other person's small-picture roadblock in an economic problem which seems more urgent with each passing moment. You want a big picture? Can you justify it in seconds, with something that's not simply a subjective perception or largely-covert moral construct of your own? Yet another person's assumption of perpetually commonly-understood contract is another's baroque exercise in cleverness and flexibility. It's the sneaky laser dance from _Ocean's Twelve_, and _that_ kind of challenge is, psychologically speaking, extremely energizing for them. Don't think they didn't notice how things work in the "real" world! (When these two see each other face to face--so to speak--there are harsh outcomes) Anyway--sorry to hear about your experience & thank you for sharing so that others can be more educated about their choice of institution.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  The problem is that these people will plagiarize their previous employers' code when working on your codebase and your code when they move on to their next employer or will also plagiarize FOSS code without worrying about the niceties of licensing. Their perceptions are one thing but the legal reality makes these sort of people hazardous to employ.
  - themodelplumber 6y ago
    Except when their boss hired them because they're clever and can solve extant work problems (huge workload) via a happily-localized scope of concern. I've seen this easily placed back on the employer. Non-FOSS versions happen in various industries all the time. You can make the argument that legal teams exist to relieve the very potent pressure of this uncomfortable situation for those on both ends. There are truths here that flow right up to the top and all the way to the bottom. Attacking those perspectives is too hard. Better in some ways to set up social norms around it. Thus, lawyers, the concept of win-win negotiation, etc. Just when your anger is boiling over you learn that the C-levels want you to drop the moral crusade.
coderintherye 6y ago
Not to invalidate your observation, but plagiarism is a hot topic at any college or university. I attended 6 different ones and in all of them it was top or near the top of concerns.
vegai_ 6y ago
>there were a number of classmates whom could not grasp Sorry, pet peeve. It's "who". "Classmates" are the ones doing "could not grasp" instead of "could not grasp" being done to them.
- UncleSam 6y ago
  Any easy trick I use to help remember which to use is to replace who/whom with he/him to see which makes more sense in the context. "He" could not grasp. => "Who" could not grasp. I should vote for "him" => "Whom" should I vote for?
territop 6y ago
plagiarism was how the germans caught up on the industrial revolution. plagiarism is how china cought up to the western world. the strict argument on this is that ideas cannot be owned. no one owns an idea. ideas just float around and can be left aside or captured. that's how i think about it anyways.
- wrkronmiller 6y ago
  There's a moral argument w/r/t the concept of stealing IP, but in the context of education there is arguably more damage being done. If you steal a design for a jet turbine, you still have to learn how it works and you add that understanding to your personal/corporate skillset. Basically you have learned a secret. If you have someone write your college essay for you, then you probably do so in order to avoid putting in the work to write the essay yourself. Basically, you have learned nothing. I know there's nuance to both but I think your argument is overly-reductive.
  - territop 6y ago
    Oh yeah you're right let's not mix that both. I thought he strictly meant the first.
stormdennis 6y ago
The saying goes: copying from one person is plagiarism, copying from many is research.
- leethargo 6y ago
  But in the latter case, sources are properly referenced?
GordonS 6y ago
> However, I also saw a grossly wide range of educational professionalism in the students Your specific example of plagiarism is odd; I'm not sure what's difficult to grasp there. But wide ranging dedication (or professionalism if you prefer to call it that) is pretty standard at brick and mortar universities - it's pretty standard for a subset of people to prefer the partying and socialising aspects, and also pretty standard for quite a lot of people to drop out altogether.
TrackerFF 6y ago
I mean, that's probably true, but even students at the absolute top universities are capable of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal
- cancerSpreads 6y ago
  The more students you meet at "top Universities" the more the illusion of superiority disappears. The students are mind numbingly average. (But don't worry they will let you know what college they went to 12 years ago) Heck if the job requires any communication, you might be better off finding someone humble or someone who needs to prove themselves. Or maybe the best of these students go on to work at companies that pay 250k/yr and I just don't meet them.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    I attended a no-name college and went to a top-tier university for my phd (think mit/stanford/cmu/berkeley). I also taught at a different top-tier university. Everything below is specific to CS. I think that top-tier universities are different in the top 20% and bottom 20% of students. The top 20% because you won't find those types of people at no-name. The bottom 20% because they're at least not completely incompetent (unlike the bottom 20% at no-name). Here's how I break it down: Top 20% of students at top universities: They really are that good. Also, they are the ones who benefit most from the intense curriculum at top universities. So they start off really good and actually do get a force multiplier effect from the comparatively very rigorous course-work. Most of these students end up on rapid trajectories in industry or with NSF fellowships. Average students at top universities: Most of these students would be in the top 10% of the class at a no-name college. Still quite good, but nothing special. Bottom 20% of students at top tier universities: Really nothing special. Comparable to the average student at no-name. Contrast with the bottom 20% at no-name, many of whom couldn't fizzbuzz on their first attempt in our senior interview prep course. So, top tier places are really characterized by their top 20% and bottom 20%. The top 20% really are quite amazing to work with. The bottom 20% are at least not incompetent. One last note: > Or maybe the best of these students go on to work at companies that pay 250k/yr and I just don't meet them. Most of my students at top-tier had offers in the $150K - $250K range. So if your sample of top-tier university CS students is sampled exclusively from non-entry-level engineers who did not receive offers in the $250K range, you're almost certainly sampling from the bottom 20% of top-tier graduates.
SkyBelow 6y ago
>there were a number of classmates whom could not grasp the idea of plagiarism being unethical It might help to define what form of plagiarism you encountered as there are some behaviors that count as plagiarism (at least were counted as such back in my college ethics class) which I never found any valid reasoning for. I have no difficulty understanding the ethical issues of passing off someone else's work as your own, but you can also plagiarize by passing off your own work as your own.
S111663 6y ago
I am sorry to hear that your transfer of credit was not possible between UoPeople and the more standard institution. But I think that you should not feel bad or think that because the transfer was not possible implies that UoPeople standard is low or questionable. I say so because transfer of credit depends on the university in question, University A may refuse but University B may accepts and both universities are of high standard. For example, there are universities of higher standards out there that accepts transfer of credit from UoPeople, all you need do is to first of all carry out a research to know such universities before you apply rather than applying before requesting for transfer of credit which might not be possible. As for the aspect of plagiarism, I must say that it is a serious offense and at UoPeople, many students have not grasp the idea because they did not take their orientation classes and foundation courses seriously else they will not be ignorant or be victims. So putting all these together truly makes one feels that studies at UoPeople is not like higher education, but on the other hand, everything being equal,if you are a student at UoPeople, then it means that you should be responsible to follow all the instructions and rules governing the platform right to the end of your study then you will feel that UoPeople is more than a higher education center. NB: There is no institution in the world without a downside that affects the student as well.
Illesam 6y ago
I've just completed my first term with UoPeople. I agree that I learned a lot about plagiarism and even had the opportunity to report some! For me UoPeople is a blessing. I'm able to pursue a higher education all while working and supporting my family. This will give me so many new opportunities for better careers when I eventually move back to the states. The educational method is challenging. I do like peer assessment, but I feel that some peers don't really try when grading. I like to give grades that are warranted, good or bad. Being told my work is not good with no correction is highly vexing. I hope to continue to grow as a student with UoPeople and see others do the same.

uopeoplestudent 6y ago

> The new institution, learning I had been attending U of the P, promptly told me that U of the P credits would not transfer. Universal transferability in question, I opted out. Yes, many schools will not accept coursework from nationally accredited universities. This includes coursework from UoPeople. You will not be able to apply for many graduate schools as well. A degree from UoPeople definitely comes with limits, and I wish the school was a little more forward about that. (There are lots of discussions about this on the internal social network.)

dart600 6y ago
Yes I was slightly piffed. Yet, the professor was notably intelligent and very professional. My comment was for others wondering if it was a scam. Its not a scam, it's real, but preferably for people seeking a multicultural experience along with their general educational knowledge, irregardless of the loss of highly guaranteed nontransferrability. Perhaps if one is retired, for example, it would simply be an amazing choice. :)
- uopeoplestudent 6y ago
  Speaking on your comment about plagiarism, my second term there was a student who submitted their Java homework in a Word document. It contained two screenshots. The first was of the NetBeans IDE. The second was of their browser opened to a Github page that contained the answer to the assignment. They'd un-destructively cropped the second using Word. They made it look like it was typed into NetBeans. I was able to track down the original source.
  - orzig 6y ago
    Sometimes laziness shoots the moon and becomes artistic genius
eikenberry 6y ago
This isn't restricted to untraditional schools. At least one of our local state universities have stopped accepting credits from the community colleges due to the practice of transferring for the final couple years. Might be something similar going on here. It might be that they want the degree to represent the full 4 year experience at the school or it might just be the money. The cynic in me prefers the latter.
- topkai22 6y ago
  If that was happening in my state I’d definitely be writing my representatives to take action and change that- transferability to a university while being able to live at home and pay less was quite explicitly one of the points of having a community college system when I was growing up.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Many state universities changed those transfer policies when states made deep higher ed budget cuts during the great recession. The alternative in our state was closing branch campuses (thereby making college even less accessible for most of the state). Lots of universities in the US are lavish and expensive. Our state's branch campuses are the definition of utilitarian. Tuition is some of the lowest in the country. Salaries for professors at the branch campuses are lower than what we pay our high school teachers. Very little admin overhead. There's simply not much to cut. Anyways, not saying it's right. But if you cut higher ed budgets, higher ed will get more expensive to the end user. Especially if the system was already hyper-efficient. Limiting transfer credits is pretty much the only way to make things more expensive to the end user without increasing tuition.
    - topkai22 6y ago
      Sounds like the set up in your state is to have branch campuses try to serve many of the needs that community colleges serve (or used to serve) in my state. Whatever the setup, I think it is access to higher education at as local level is important.
  - 6y ago

themodelplumber 6y ago

> could not grasp the idea of plagiarism being unethical I remember experiencing this at a private religious university. At the time, my hyper-religious mind was blown to see students outright cheating in the Testing Center. Since then I've been exposed to additional perspectives on plagiarism. It is an extremely deep and nuanced topic. A few years out of school, I ended up mentoring and then teaching college students who seem to match the sort of person you describe. This was a huge shock at first. The more I learned about these students, the more I learned about the sheer variety of perceptions involved: One person's fairness concept is, to another person or group, a latent power dynamic which ought to be questioned. Or, this person's concern for the big-picture ethical questions is this other person's small-picture roadblock in an economic problem which seems more urgent with each passing moment. You want a big picture? Can you justify it in seconds, with something that's not simply a subjective perception or largely-covert moral construct of your own? Yet another person's assumption of perpetually commonly-understood contract is another's baroque exercise in cleverness and flexibility. It's the sneaky laser dance from _Ocean's Twelve_, and _that_ kind of challenge is, psychologically speaking, extremely energizing for them. Don't think they didn't notice how things work in the "real" world! (When these two see each other face to face--so to speak--there are harsh outcomes) Anyway--sorry to hear about your experience & thank you for sharing so that others can be more educated about their choice of institution.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
The problem is that these people will plagiarize their previous employers' code when working on your codebase and your code when they move on to their next employer or will also plagiarize FOSS code without worrying about the niceties of licensing. Their perceptions are one thing but the legal reality makes these sort of people hazardous to employ.
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  Except when their boss hired them because they're clever and can solve extant work problems (huge workload) via a happily-localized scope of concern. I've seen this easily placed back on the employer. Non-FOSS versions happen in various industries all the time. You can make the argument that legal teams exist to relieve the very potent pressure of this uncomfortable situation for those on both ends. There are truths here that flow right up to the top and all the way to the bottom. Attacking those perspectives is too hard. Better in some ways to set up social norms around it. Thus, lawyers, the concept of win-win negotiation, etc. Just when your anger is boiling over you learn that the C-levels want you to drop the moral crusade.

coderintherye 6y ago

Not to invalidate your observation, but plagiarism is a hot topic at any college or university. I attended 6 different ones and in all of them it was top or near the top of concerns.

vegai_ 6y ago

>there were a number of classmates whom could not grasp Sorry, pet peeve. It's "who". "Classmates" are the ones doing "could not grasp" instead of "could not grasp" being done to them.

UncleSam 6y ago
Any easy trick I use to help remember which to use is to replace who/whom with he/him to see which makes more sense in the context. "He" could not grasp. => "Who" could not grasp. I should vote for "him" => "Whom" should I vote for?

territop 6y ago

plagiarism was how the germans caught up on the industrial revolution. plagiarism is how china cought up to the western world. the strict argument on this is that ideas cannot be owned. no one owns an idea. ideas just float around and can be left aside or captured. that's how i think about it anyways.

wrkronmiller 6y ago
There's a moral argument w/r/t the concept of stealing IP, but in the context of education there is arguably more damage being done. If you steal a design for a jet turbine, you still have to learn how it works and you add that understanding to your personal/corporate skillset. Basically you have learned a secret. If you have someone write your college essay for you, then you probably do so in order to avoid putting in the work to write the essay yourself. Basically, you have learned nothing. I know there's nuance to both but I think your argument is overly-reductive.
- territop 6y ago
  Oh yeah you're right let's not mix that both. I thought he strictly meant the first.

stormdennis 6y ago

The saying goes: copying from one person is plagiarism, copying from many is research.

leethargo 6y ago
But in the latter case, sources are properly referenced?

GordonS 6y ago

> However, I also saw a grossly wide range of educational professionalism in the students Your specific example of plagiarism is odd; I'm not sure what's difficult to grasp there. But wide ranging dedication (or professionalism if you prefer to call it that) is pretty standard at brick and mortar universities - it's pretty standard for a subset of people to prefer the partying and socialising aspects, and also pretty standard for quite a lot of people to drop out altogether.

TrackerFF 6y ago

I mean, that's probably true, but even students at the absolute top universities are capable of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal

cancerSpreads 6y ago
The more students you meet at "top Universities" the more the illusion of superiority disappears. The students are mind numbingly average. (But don't worry they will let you know what college they went to 12 years ago) Heck if the job requires any communication, you might be better off finding someone humble or someone who needs to prove themselves. Or maybe the best of these students go on to work at companies that pay 250k/yr and I just don't meet them.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  I attended a no-name college and went to a top-tier university for my phd (think mit/stanford/cmu/berkeley). I also taught at a different top-tier university. Everything below is specific to CS. I think that top-tier universities are different in the top 20% and bottom 20% of students. The top 20% because you won't find those types of people at no-name. The bottom 20% because they're at least not completely incompetent (unlike the bottom 20% at no-name). Here's how I break it down: Top 20% of students at top universities: They really are that good. Also, they are the ones who benefit most from the intense curriculum at top universities. So they start off really good and actually do get a force multiplier effect from the comparatively very rigorous course-work. Most of these students end up on rapid trajectories in industry or with NSF fellowships. Average students at top universities: Most of these students would be in the top 10% of the class at a no-name college. Still quite good, but nothing special. Bottom 20% of students at top tier universities: Really nothing special. Comparable to the average student at no-name. Contrast with the bottom 20% at no-name, many of whom couldn't fizzbuzz on their first attempt in our senior interview prep course. So, top tier places are really characterized by their top 20% and bottom 20%. The top 20% really are quite amazing to work with. The bottom 20% are at least not incompetent. One last note: > Or maybe the best of these students go on to work at companies that pay 250k/yr and I just don't meet them. Most of my students at top-tier had offers in the $150K - $250K range. So if your sample of top-tier university CS students is sampled exclusively from non-entry-level engineers who did not receive offers in the $250K range, you're almost certainly sampling from the bottom 20% of top-tier graduates.

SkyBelow 6y ago

>there were a number of classmates whom could not grasp the idea of plagiarism being unethical It might help to define what form of plagiarism you encountered as there are some behaviors that count as plagiarism (at least were counted as such back in my college ethics class) which I never found any valid reasoning for. I have no difficulty understanding the ethical issues of passing off someone else's work as your own, but you can also plagiarize by passing off your own work as your own.

S111663 6y ago

I am sorry to hear that your transfer of credit was not possible between UoPeople and the more standard institution. But I think that you should not feel bad or think that because the transfer was not possible implies that UoPeople standard is low or questionable. I say so because transfer of credit depends on the university in question, University A may refuse but University B may accepts and both universities are of high standard. For example, there are universities of higher standards out there that accepts transfer of credit from UoPeople, all you need do is to first of all carry out a research to know such universities before you apply rather than applying before requesting for transfer of credit which might not be possible. As for the aspect of plagiarism, I must say that it is a serious offense and at UoPeople, many students have not grasp the idea because they did not take their orientation classes and foundation courses seriously else they will not be ignorant or be victims. So putting all these together truly makes one feels that studies at UoPeople is not like higher education, but on the other hand, everything being equal,if you are a student at UoPeople, then it means that you should be responsible to follow all the instructions and rules governing the platform right to the end of your study then you will feel that UoPeople is more than a higher education center. NB: There is no institution in the world without a downside that affects the student as well.

Illesam 6y ago

I've just completed my first term with UoPeople. I agree that I learned a lot about plagiarism and even had the opportunity to report some! For me UoPeople is a blessing. I'm able to pursue a higher education all while working and supporting my family. This will give me so many new opportunities for better careers when I eventually move back to the states. The educational method is challenging. I do like peer assessment, but I feel that some peers don't really try when grading. I like to give grades that are warranted, good or bad. Being told my work is not good with no correction is highly vexing. I hope to continue to grow as a student with UoPeople and see others do the same.