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> 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 w

> 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.
dart600 6y ago
This detailed reply is fantastic. I want to paint a narrative in acrylic. (Perhaps just my mood today). It will have a plummer modeling on a catwalk as a moral war rages of cool fashion balconies meet the vision of the dog fights in a proverbial rotation of another fresh coat to the red carpet. See u in the concrete warehouse just short of arms reach, but certainly out of the limelight. Or in. Or out. Or in. Which is real? You're welcome!
infogulch 6y ago
The problem with plagiarism isn't best characterized as some sort of power struggle between teachers and students via bullshit assignments. The purpose of learning to write is to make yourself a formidable communicator. If you can independently analyze a new topic to learn something new and apply the results of those learnings towards a particular goal, you can be amazingly effective in everything you aim for. But if you plagiarize every assignment you rob yourself of your own training of this critically important competency. Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you.
- throwgeorge 6y ago
  >Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you. and a job well done is its own reward right? i think it's very pretentious to say that to a person who's attending school in order to improve their lot in life (because credentials count for so much); that what's more important than the credential is some abstract notion of improvement. you might as well cast it in terms of sin and salvation.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    > in order to improve their lot in life (because credentials count for so much); Those credentials only matter insofar as they describe the likely caliber of the alumni that come from that particular school. Being a terrible student isn't going to help the value of your degree a whole lot...
    - throwgeorge 6y ago
      truly all of the people that receive college degrees and out earn their high school analogues bring so much value to their degrees... i think you have the causality backwards.
  - infogulch 6y ago
    > and a job well done is its own reward right? Sure, if the life you want is to be at a desk for 8 hours a day regurgitating your superior's existing biases back at them, go ahead. I find employers much prefer someone that can attack a real problem and think critically about potential solutions from multiple levels of analysis. If all you're good at is chewing someone else's cud and spitting it out with a slightly different word order then you're useless to people that actually want to solve problems. And, sorry to say, credentials are counting for less and less every year. If employers have to take a year to train you to think critically, then what use does a credential serve as a filter? I wonder why that's happening...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
noetic_techy 6y ago
I've seen this myself, and I think this sort of moral relativism is pretty bad for society in general. You can spin a story of victim hood or power dynamic to justify anything unethical. What should be a fair transaction becomes a game of who can backstab first and who is left holding the bag. This I think leads to a breakdown in the fabric that keep things stable eventually.
javert 6y ago
> Can you justify it in seconds, with something that's not simply a subjective perception or largely-covert moral construct of your own You are making this way too complicated. It's honesty vs. dishonesty. Those of us playing on team honesty are right to view the dishonest as playing on the opposite team. Which team is actually morally right, is the complex issue.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > You are making this way too complicated. > It's honesty vs. dishonesty. Kind of like you're either a criminal or you're not. If you drive 58mph on a 55mph zone you are. Otherwise you're not. Binary positions are always convenient, once you pick a side.
jariel 6y ago
This is a thoughtful comment, at the same time, it's some pretty scary postmodernism. Advocating cheating because it helps a student from possibly lesser means achieve their 'check-box' in education is missing the point, in a very serious way. We can always strive to have an open mind, to try and be sympathetic to the plight of others - but the Truth is pretty much still the Truth. Plagiarism is not a controversial subject in the context you've mentioned, it's just wrong in every sense. More pragmatically - if someone is in a situation wherein their need for the 'checkbox degree' outweighs their actual need to learn something, then they almost assuredly should not be there. It's pointless for society to be spending a lot of energy and resources only for people to waste them, and it ruins the credibility of the system. I'm not unaware of the fact that a lot of Uni may feel like jumping through hoops, but even then, if the hoops are merely jumped through, we're learning something. Uni is not meant to be enlightening at every step, it's also, like everything a grind. A 'free public Uni' is going to attract a wide swath of students, and there will necessarily be all sorts of issues, probably very low graduation rates, challenges in communicating the material. I totally support the idea, at the same time, we should strive to maintain the credibility of our own ideals and institutions. Universities are there to help develop character, they're not just about 'absorbing data'. In the long run, it's worth it.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  The "checkbox degree" hypothesis is mostly false. Some companies do require a degrees, yes. But that's a minimum requirement. Literally zero companies promise a job to everyone with a degree. It's a bit difficult for me to believe that there are highly competent people who would be effective employees now, but for whom cheating is easier than doing the work. Remember: cheating (without getting caught) takes time too. I can write a few page essay on any given topic much faster than I can figure out how to copy/pasta that essay without getting caught. I can implement most undergraduate programming assignments faster than I can figure out how obfuscate someone else's code enough to fool cheat detectors. Etc. The subset of people who are truly competent but for whom cheating is easier than doing the work has to be vanishingly small.
christiansakai 6y ago
Wait, this is interesting. I thought plagiarism is universally bad? Can someone explain?
- sooheon 6y ago
  themodelplumber is a perceptive observer of human psychology, and they've described some of the ways people justify cheating with one narrative or the other. This isn't advocating for cheating or plagiarism, just hypothesizing why some brains are happy to do it.
- imtringued 6y ago
  People have to justify bad things otherwise they wouldn't do them. This is how we get racism, antisemitism and discrimination in general. A lot of taboo activities have an initial moral barrier and once you break it there is nothing stopping you from doing it over and over again.
sooheon 6y ago
This is a great meta level view of the moral perception landscape, the individual replies advocating for one particular prescriptive position or the other are missing the forest for the trees.
cosmodisk 6y ago
People are extremely good at justifying their own actions in any shape and form. Reminds me ex's mother,who was a hard core church goer and was undeclaring profits from her company. When asked why would she do such thing,her excuse was that the taxes are way too high( the country was within top 20 countries in the world when it comes to taxes). Another thing is that usually these things don't happen all at once but rather gradually. The same is observable in companies,where corruption start from tiny things and evolve over time.
bonoboTP 6y ago
It depends, like many things, this is very nuanced. In my time at university, I knew many capable and bright people who cheated once in a while, but only in well-picked cases, not as their general policy. For example if there was a mandatory bullshit subject, or something that they regarded as worthless waste of time etc. and rather spent the time on the important things. I think it's a very naive shielded "good boy" view of the world that there is some simple rigid moral rule like never lie, never cheat etc. It may work in a benevolent environment like rich protective parents and never dealing with adversity. One has to develop one's own sense of justice. This can be easily misconstrued. The point isn't to believe in nothing, be exploitative and selfish. Rather, be mindful and don't just blindly follow someone's bullshit. Indeed much of the purpose of education is to kill this ability and to certify the capability for blind obedience and jumping through hoops without ever questioning it. One guy I mentioned in the above parts is actually really honest in general and sometimes I wonder how he gets away with it in corporate environments, saying straight nos, not putting up with colleagues criticizing him for working too fast etc. I've usually been much more careful but he's more successful. And it's an art of picking your battles, refusing bullshit, sometimes openly sometimes secretly (at least don't lie to yourself), sometimes making a stink, sometimes just complaining to fellow students, knowing the unwritten lore of which courses are unofficially considered "cheats allowed" by most talented students and probably the teacher included. The world is complicated, but for shielded kids with underdeveloped social skills it can be hard to learn how widespread "rule bending" is in real adult life and how much this is basically known, expected and part of life. Again, this is not to say be selfish and disregard others. Rather, think for yourself, know when something is bullshit (there is lots of fancy official institutional stamped-and-signed authoritative bullshit out there, often coming from people who know it's bullshit but either don't care of feel their hands are tied).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- SupplyChainGuy 6y ago
  I agree. I'm a CS major and am forced to take a class on history. The class is entirely online and the teacher doesn't seem to really care one bit. The entire class is just random quizzes that can easily be googled/ Just follow along on quizlet. I have two options; Read the super boring textbook for 5 hours, take the test legit and get an 80% or I quizlett the test get 100% and spend the next 5 hours listening to Dan Carlins "Hardcore History" Podcast which i find much more informative and enjoyable.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> At the time, my hyper-religious mind was blown to see students outright cheating in the Testing Center. Then you would have lost your mind during some of my upper division STEM courses, where the normal class average is in the mid 40% on the high end and high 30s most semesters. We had a class average of ~83% in one of them, and when the professor was in total disbelief about how blatant they were being (several didn't even try not to get 100%) he got upset and decided to stop re-using the previous year's exams that were circulating amongst the Frats/Sororities and the class average dropped back down to low 30% for the last 2 Midterms and finals. This personally helped me as I got my average to a B+ range after my Lab scores were included. Academia, be it online of IRL, it always going to have that element of corruption, there has just been so much money to be made that it drew the worst from other sectors into its administrations. Eric Weinstein goes into the depth about the artificial scarcity within STEM that was created in the US to favour a 'race to the bottom' approach to wages since the the 90s, and he went to both MIT and Harvard! My best professors were often disillusioned and jaded after having been in Academia for a few decades, one even having to petition and protest to the Dean of their departments to be paid for having taught back to back Summer courses during the budget cuts. A person who went to Oxford for his BSc, no less... All of this is taking place while hearing about some high ranking official or executive is in the process of being disgraced for having plagiarized their Masters or PhD thesis decades ago, which begs the question how the hell did it pass back then? Don't they all have to go through dissertations defenses and have academic advisors who are PhD or Post Docs in the very same department? I won't even talk about the administrative led favoritism and vetting they did for foreign students during my time there, either. I'm a proponent of of Online Learning in general, especially as its disrupting the Brick and Mortar University exploitation model; you can now get a Masters in Electrical Engineering from CU Boulder entirely via Coursera for $20k with installments and Financial Aid available where applicable, whereas that's not even the total cost of a single year of Undergraduate studies there. Which really sucks for incoming students, but could be a net boon if they can start reaching the undergrad degrees in time now that most Universities are having to do that due to COVID. I just think its worth keeping in mind that this institution (academia) doesn't deserve to be regarded anything more than the corrupt money-pit that it is, which occasionally avails itself to allow brilliant minds to excel in their field, after having exploited them to publish and use their labs until the can make a name for themselves and operate outside of it. I just think about the wasted Human capital, talent, and drive that you only have when you're young, naive and idealistic and determined to make make a difference in the World.
wisty 6y ago
How is this different to the following? "Using counterfeit money is arguably OK because some of the people who use it might need it, or see the need to earn a living as a needless waste of time as long as there's idiots who'll accept fake currency".
- SkyBelow 6y ago
  The issue with counterfeit money is that it devalues the worth of all other money. But given who holds the majority of the money being devalued, given the extent that money is already being devalued for the benefit of some at the expense of others, and given that the idea of taking a relative to wealth portion from the group for the benefit of the poor is a form of redistribution the group already engages in regardless of the consent of the giver, I think you can easily construct an argument that it is not immoral to use counterfeit money as long as you pick the right targets.
  - mrybczyn 6y ago
    Plagiarism as a means to acquire a university degree devalues the worth of all other degrees...
  - wisty 6y ago
    Plenty of people can construct arguments that breaking the rules are acceptable when they do it.
TallGuyShort 6y ago
... the Testing Center!? Hey I went there too. But I don't see how this is more nuanced that being honest or dishonest. I really pride myself on being able to see where a lot of opposing viewpoints are coming from, but I can't see how any of the people you describe are doing much more than lying to themselves about what they're doing.
gentleman11 6y ago
Plagiarism was very widespread in my university. The students doing it were simply not punished
tripzilch 6y ago
> Since then I've been exposed to additional perspectives on plagiarism. It is an extremely deep and nuanced topic. There are deep and nuanced ways in which people tell themselves and others how ethical they think they are taking credit for other people's work. It's not really something that is up for discussion whether it's bad. The rules are pretty clear, and for serious higher education the punishments are extremely harsh. And deservedly so. What does it even matter what it says on your diploma if you cheated your way to getting it? These people might pat themselves on the chest for being oh so clever in subverting the system or whatever, but what does it really mean? That you're good at cheating, unwilling to do the work, and gladly take credit for other people's work. In other words, being a useless turd. You could have been studying astronomy, physics, math ... but instead all that you really proved is that you're good at cheating.

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.

dart600 6y ago

This detailed reply is fantastic. I want to paint a narrative in acrylic. (Perhaps just my mood today). It will have a plummer modeling on a catwalk as a moral war rages of cool fashion balconies meet the vision of the dog fights in a proverbial rotation of another fresh coat to the red carpet. See u in the concrete warehouse just short of arms reach, but certainly out of the limelight. Or in. Or out. Or in. Which is real? You're welcome!

infogulch 6y ago

The problem with plagiarism isn't best characterized as some sort of power struggle between teachers and students via bullshit assignments. The purpose of learning to write is to make yourself a formidable communicator. If you can independently analyze a new topic to learn something new and apply the results of those learnings towards a particular goal, you can be amazingly effective in everything you aim for. But if you plagiarize every assignment you rob yourself of your own training of this critically important competency. Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you.

throwgeorge 6y ago
>Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you. and a job well done is its own reward right? i think it's very pretentious to say that to a person who's attending school in order to improve their lot in life (because credentials count for so much); that what's more important than the credential is some abstract notion of improvement. you might as well cast it in terms of sin and salvation.
- airstrike 6y ago
  > in order to improve their lot in life (because credentials count for so much); Those credentials only matter insofar as they describe the likely caliber of the alumni that come from that particular school. Being a terrible student isn't going to help the value of your degree a whole lot...
  - throwgeorge 6y ago
    truly all of the people that receive college degrees and out earn their high school analogues bring so much value to their degrees... i think you have the causality backwards.
- infogulch 6y ago
  > and a job well done is its own reward right? Sure, if the life you want is to be at a desk for 8 hours a day regurgitating your superior's existing biases back at them, go ahead. I find employers much prefer someone that can attack a real problem and think critically about potential solutions from multiple levels of analysis. If all you're good at is chewing someone else's cud and spitting it out with a slightly different word order then you're useless to people that actually want to solve problems. And, sorry to say, credentials are counting for less and less every year. If employers have to take a year to train you to think critically, then what use does a credential serve as a filter? I wonder why that's happening...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

noetic_techy 6y ago

I've seen this myself, and I think this sort of moral relativism is pretty bad for society in general. You can spin a story of victim hood or power dynamic to justify anything unethical. What should be a fair transaction becomes a game of who can backstab first and who is left holding the bag. This I think leads to a breakdown in the fabric that keep things stable eventually.

javert 6y ago

> Can you justify it in seconds, with something that's not simply a subjective perception or largely-covert moral construct of your own You are making this way too complicated. It's honesty vs. dishonesty. Those of us playing on team honesty are right to view the dishonest as playing on the opposite team. Which team is actually morally right, is the complex issue.

BeetleB 6y ago
> You are making this way too complicated. > It's honesty vs. dishonesty. Kind of like you're either a criminal or you're not. If you drive 58mph on a 55mph zone you are. Otherwise you're not. Binary positions are always convenient, once you pick a side.

jariel 6y ago

This is a thoughtful comment, at the same time, it's some pretty scary postmodernism. Advocating cheating because it helps a student from possibly lesser means achieve their 'check-box' in education is missing the point, in a very serious way. We can always strive to have an open mind, to try and be sympathetic to the plight of others - but the Truth is pretty much still the Truth. Plagiarism is not a controversial subject in the context you've mentioned, it's just wrong in every sense. More pragmatically - if someone is in a situation wherein their need for the 'checkbox degree' outweighs their actual need to learn something, then they almost assuredly should not be there. It's pointless for society to be spending a lot of energy and resources only for people to waste them, and it ruins the credibility of the system. I'm not unaware of the fact that a lot of Uni may feel like jumping through hoops, but even then, if the hoops are merely jumped through, we're learning something. Uni is not meant to be enlightening at every step, it's also, like everything a grind. A 'free public Uni' is going to attract a wide swath of students, and there will necessarily be all sorts of issues, probably very low graduation rates, challenges in communicating the material. I totally support the idea, at the same time, we should strive to maintain the credibility of our own ideals and institutions. Universities are there to help develop character, they're not just about 'absorbing data'. In the long run, it's worth it.

throwawaygh 6y ago
The "checkbox degree" hypothesis is mostly false. Some companies do require a degrees, yes. But that's a minimum requirement. Literally zero companies promise a job to everyone with a degree. It's a bit difficult for me to believe that there are highly competent people who would be effective employees now, but for whom cheating is easier than doing the work. Remember: cheating (without getting caught) takes time too. I can write a few page essay on any given topic much faster than I can figure out how to copy/pasta that essay without getting caught. I can implement most undergraduate programming assignments faster than I can figure out how obfuscate someone else's code enough to fool cheat detectors. Etc. The subset of people who are truly competent but for whom cheating is easier than doing the work has to be vanishingly small.

christiansakai 6y ago

Wait, this is interesting. I thought plagiarism is universally bad? Can someone explain?

sooheon 6y ago
themodelplumber is a perceptive observer of human psychology, and they've described some of the ways people justify cheating with one narrative or the other. This isn't advocating for cheating or plagiarism, just hypothesizing why some brains are happy to do it.
imtringued 6y ago
People have to justify bad things otherwise they wouldn't do them. This is how we get racism, antisemitism and discrimination in general. A lot of taboo activities have an initial moral barrier and once you break it there is nothing stopping you from doing it over and over again.

sooheon 6y ago

This is a great meta level view of the moral perception landscape, the individual replies advocating for one particular prescriptive position or the other are missing the forest for the trees.

cosmodisk 6y ago

People are extremely good at justifying their own actions in any shape and form. Reminds me ex's mother,who was a hard core church goer and was undeclaring profits from her company. When asked why would she do such thing,her excuse was that the taxes are way too high( the country was within top 20 countries in the world when it comes to taxes). Another thing is that usually these things don't happen all at once but rather gradually. The same is observable in companies,where corruption start from tiny things and evolve over time.

bonoboTP 6y ago

It depends, like many things, this is very nuanced. In my time at university, I knew many capable and bright people who cheated once in a while, but only in well-picked cases, not as their general policy. For example if there was a mandatory bullshit subject, or something that they regarded as worthless waste of time etc. and rather spent the time on the important things. I think it's a very naive shielded "good boy" view of the world that there is some simple rigid moral rule like never lie, never cheat etc. It may work in a benevolent environment like rich protective parents and never dealing with adversity. One has to develop one's own sense of justice. This can be easily misconstrued. The point isn't to believe in nothing, be exploitative and selfish. Rather, be mindful and don't just blindly follow someone's bullshit. Indeed much of the purpose of education is to kill this ability and to certify the capability for blind obedience and jumping through hoops without ever questioning it. One guy I mentioned in the above parts is actually really honest in general and sometimes I wonder how he gets away with it in corporate environments, saying straight nos, not putting up with colleagues criticizing him for working too fast etc. I've usually been much more careful but he's more successful. And it's an art of picking your battles, refusing bullshit, sometimes openly sometimes secretly (at least don't lie to yourself), sometimes making a stink, sometimes just complaining to fellow students, knowing the unwritten lore of which courses are unofficially considered "cheats allowed" by most talented students and probably the teacher included. The world is complicated, but for shielded kids with underdeveloped social skills it can be hard to learn how widespread "rule bending" is in real adult life and how much this is basically known, expected and part of life. Again, this is not to say be selfish and disregard others. Rather, think for yourself, know when something is bullshit (there is lots of fancy official institutional stamped-and-signed authoritative bullshit out there, often coming from people who know it's bullshit but either don't care of feel their hands are tied).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
SupplyChainGuy 6y ago
I agree. I'm a CS major and am forced to take a class on history. The class is entirely online and the teacher doesn't seem to really care one bit. The entire class is just random quizzes that can easily be googled/ Just follow along on quizlet. I have two options; Read the super boring textbook for 5 hours, take the test legit and get an 80% or I quizlett the test get 100% and spend the next 5 hours listening to Dan Carlins "Hardcore History" Podcast which i find much more informative and enjoyable.

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> At the time, my hyper-religious mind was blown to see students outright cheating in the Testing Center. Then you would have lost your mind during some of my upper division STEM courses, where the normal class average is in the mid 40% on the high end and high 30s most semesters. We had a class average of ~83% in one of them, and when the professor was in total disbelief about how blatant they were being (several didn't even try not to get 100%) he got upset and decided to stop re-using the previous year's exams that were circulating amongst the Frats/Sororities and the class average dropped back down to low 30% for the last 2 Midterms and finals. This personally helped me as I got my average to a B+ range after my Lab scores were included. Academia, be it online of IRL, it always going to have that element of corruption, there has just been so much money to be made that it drew the worst from other sectors into its administrations. Eric Weinstein goes into the depth about the artificial scarcity within STEM that was created in the US to favour a 'race to the bottom' approach to wages since the the 90s, and he went to both MIT and Harvard! My best professors were often disillusioned and jaded after having been in Academia for a few decades, one even having to petition and protest to the Dean of their departments to be paid for having taught back to back Summer courses during the budget cuts. A person who went to Oxford for his BSc, no less... All of this is taking place while hearing about some high ranking official or executive is in the process of being disgraced for having plagiarized their Masters or PhD thesis decades ago, which begs the question how the hell did it pass back then? Don't they all have to go through dissertations defenses and have academic advisors who are PhD or Post Docs in the very same department? I won't even talk about the administrative led favoritism and vetting they did for foreign students during my time there, either. I'm a proponent of of Online Learning in general, especially as its disrupting the Brick and Mortar University exploitation model; you can now get a Masters in Electrical Engineering from CU Boulder entirely via Coursera for $20k with installments and Financial Aid available where applicable, whereas that's not even the total cost of a single year of Undergraduate studies there. Which really sucks for incoming students, but could be a net boon if they can start reaching the undergrad degrees in time now that most Universities are having to do that due to COVID. I just think its worth keeping in mind that this institution (academia) doesn't deserve to be regarded anything more than the corrupt money-pit that it is, which occasionally avails itself to allow brilliant minds to excel in their field, after having exploited them to publish and use their labs until the can make a name for themselves and operate outside of it. I just think about the wasted Human capital, talent, and drive that you only have when you're young, naive and idealistic and determined to make make a difference in the World.

wisty 6y ago

How is this different to the following? "Using counterfeit money is arguably OK because some of the people who use it might need it, or see the need to earn a living as a needless waste of time as long as there's idiots who'll accept fake currency".

SkyBelow 6y ago
The issue with counterfeit money is that it devalues the worth of all other money. But given who holds the majority of the money being devalued, given the extent that money is already being devalued for the benefit of some at the expense of others, and given that the idea of taking a relative to wealth portion from the group for the benefit of the poor is a form of redistribution the group already engages in regardless of the consent of the giver, I think you can easily construct an argument that it is not immoral to use counterfeit money as long as you pick the right targets.
- mrybczyn 6y ago
  Plagiarism as a means to acquire a university degree devalues the worth of all other degrees...
- wisty 6y ago
  Plenty of people can construct arguments that breaking the rules are acceptable when they do it.

TallGuyShort 6y ago

... the Testing Center!? Hey I went there too. But I don't see how this is more nuanced that being honest or dishonest. I really pride myself on being able to see where a lot of opposing viewpoints are coming from, but I can't see how any of the people you describe are doing much more than lying to themselves about what they're doing.

gentleman11 6y ago

Plagiarism was very widespread in my university. The students doing it were simply not punished

tripzilch 6y ago

> Since then I've been exposed to additional perspectives on plagiarism. It is an extremely deep and nuanced topic. There are deep and nuanced ways in which people tell themselves and others how ethical they think they are taking credit for other people's work. It's not really something that is up for discussion whether it's bad. The rules are pretty clear, and for serious higher education the punishments are extremely harsh. And deservedly so. What does it even matter what it says on your diploma if you cheated your way to getting it? These people might pat themselves on the chest for being oh so clever in subverting the system or whatever, but what does it really mean? That you're good at cheating, unwilling to do the work, and gladly take credit for other people's work. In other words, being a useless turd. You could have been studying astronomy, physics, math ... but instead all that you really proved is that you're good at cheating.