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The problem with plagiarism isn't best characterized as some sort of power struggle between teachers and students via bullshit assignments. The purpose of lear

• 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...
  • coffeecat 6y ago
    But isn't this abstract notion of improvement supposed to be the entire point of education? It feels to me like education's purpose is undermined by its role as a prerequisite for a middle-class career. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
    • themodelplumber 6y ago
      Abstract or not, it's completely qualitative / subjective. Easy to argue. Very easy. Try it: Pick a specific, abstract notion, name the institution, and talk to the students.
  • HenryBemis 6y ago
    (for work) I have both "plaigiarised" a policy that I found on the internet, AND written one using as source the ToC of 2-3 other policies, but did the fill-ups all by myself. I learned nothing from copy&paste, I gained plenty from typing it up from scratch myself (even added points that the ToC's were missing). The clients got the same value (they wanted a v1 policy, and they got one). I became better by doing the work, so next time I had a discussion on the matter I felt that I controlled the discussion instead of pitching in. Faking it till you make it has the risk that you fake it forever and you become the paradigm of the Peter Principle. Walking the walk takes more time but always benefits in the long run. I have met plenty of people though that take the risk to never grow/evolve and stay in their comfort zone because they just want the base salary to fund their hobbies and they get no sense of accomplishment through their work (for many reasons)(I am not getting into this discussion). Edit: Ps: I now work like this (when asked to develop a policy for a new client): spend some time thinking of key points (technology changes fast enough in some areas), drop a couple of examples for each bullet point, and then "plagiarise" from previously made work. This way I have prepared part of the downstream Procedures. You would think that a Policy is high (enough) level so it shouldn't need frequent changes, but different clients want different things.
  • tripzilch 6y ago
    > a person who's attending school in order to improve their lot in life (because credentials count for so much) If every person at the school had this reasoning, the credentials wouldn't count for anything. The credentials only count for something if enough of the people graduating are actually fulfilling this promise of self improvement in the subject of their studies. The cheaters are literally freeloading off the prestige of the credentials produced by the people who do put in the effort. If that group of people did not exist, the credentials would be useless to the cheaters as well.
• themodelplumber 6y ago
  > Power struggle between teachers and students via... Uh, did I say that, or were you intuiting? Not exactly a learner's approach :D > Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you. Except when it benefits you? This is the subjective perception I was talking about. That their mindset differs does not instantly make them wrong, especially when you can throw a dime out the window and hit an educated professional who falls short of the best (heaven forbid the "perfect") ethical standard. Ethics is, and should be, hard. If you put words into my mouth, is your position ethical? This stuff requires the ability to stick around, listen, learn, and stay in the game, moreso if you plan to claim the high ground.
  • infogulch 6y ago
    This isn't a subjective ethics problem. It's a competence problem. If you can't formulate your own thoughts into a coherent statement (the purpose of learning to write) then you'll be useless to anyone that needs new coherent arguments.
    • themodelplumber 6y ago
      That's a bit of an overreach, isn't it, calling my writing incoherent and incompetent? (Edit: Parent clarified that "you" is meant to mean a hypothetical student, not me.) If more information is needed, as was the case here, we can ask questions. That's got nothing to do with author competence. It's not an essay contest. And why assume we know it all, filling in the gaps like that? In a discussion of ethics, this is a qualitative issue to say the least. The concept of competence as you describe it is also very much a vague, subjective concern out of which you've just attempted to carve a covert competence contract. This leaves your blind spot unguarded because you are unknowingly making the discussion focus on you and your own competence level. And this is a big part of why "hyper ethical" subjective ethics people struggle--they assume their view is right and don't ask questions of others.
      • deleted 6y ago
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• khawkins 6y ago
  This is under the assumption that you see college is a program of self-betterment and not busy work for receiving a degree that says you can have a middle-class job. It feels like even the universities themselves see it as the latter these days.
  • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    But if you can't do the middle-class job because you can't write, the piece of paper will only get you so far. It may get you an entry-level job, but you probably won't get much in the way of promotions. So even from that perspective, plagiarism isn't helpful.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      To be honest, I arrived at university fully capable of my first job out. I think most people do. The selection process has you write essays and do math and all that shit. Work is hard, but like most things you learn best doing the thing. Not saying SICP was shit. Just that I could have done that in high school and accelerated my time to money (and through it, contentment). Maybe I'll let my kids do something like that if they feel the mildest desire to.
      • derwiki 6y ago
        Kudos to you— having started coding QBasic in fifth grade, I definitely needed 3-4 years of undergrad to be ready for my first professional SWE job.
        • renewiltord 6y ago
          That's really funny. We first did Logo and then BASIC at that age (~10 years). Good times, eh? Back in the day? Everything was new and fresh.
          • derwiki 6y ago
            I was _thrilled_ that I could program with something already on my PC. This was before the internet, and I was under the impression a C compiler was several hundred dollars that we couldn’t afford. Eventually, I even wrote “production” QBasic: my boss at the ISP would manually move spam to a spam folder in Thunderbird, export it periodically and kick it over to tech support. We used to manually look at IPs and enter them into the Cisco blocklist, until I wrote a super janky QBasic script to extracts IPs. Two years later, I learned about regular expressions.
• StupidPeople 6y ago
  > Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you Except learning isn't really the reason most go. It's to get a well paid job at the end of it.
  • austincheney 6y ago
    As a software developer my education has nothing to do with a job or my salary.
  • andykx 6y ago
    I returned to college after 10 years in the insurance industry. I’ve always viewed programming as a hobby, but decided to take the leap and pursue a career that I might actually enjoy. Anyway, I notice a lot of younger students have this attitude and it frankly causes them to produce really crappy work. As long as they pass the class, they don’t really care to absorb the material. I can’t help but wonder what kind of job they’re hoping to get when they leave school. What will happen when they get a technical interview? I can’t imagine them doing anything beyond answering phones at a company’s IT Help Desk. I dunno. I listen to every word the professors say as if they’re telling me the secret to eternal life while half the class is dozing off.
    • TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      > I listen to every word the professors say as if they’re telling me the secret to eternal life while half the class is dozing off. This is absolutely brilliant.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      > What will happen when they get a technical interview? I can’t imagine them doing anything beyond answering phones at a company’s IT Help Desk. My experience says you'd be very surprised. As in most fields, networking, charisma, and ability to bullshit play a substantial role in IT hiring.
    • freeone3000 6y ago
      The one class I took in college that was relevant to my job, at all, was the AI course on structured vector machines, which were irrelevant after two years. For most programs, correctness is a nice-to-have, forget speed or responsiveness or data structure choice.. and in production code, non-technical and constant factors override theoretical solutions. University computer science courses, on the whole, are quickly obsolete or obsolete to begin with, incompatible with software development as it's practiced, and are best reviewed in the week before seeking a new job to score well on leetcode. The best skills you're going to learn are the metacognition you're picking up in university, the ability to learn new languages and adapt to new environments and solve new problems, not anything that's actually taught.
• a-nikolaev 6y ago
  I think, plagiarism also harms the character. If instead of doing things right and put effort, you cheat, eventually you learn that doing things right does not worth it. And then it becomes a personal trait, so to speak.
  • Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > I think, plagiarism also harms the character. If instead of doing things right and put effort, you cheat, eventually you learn that doing things right does not worth it. And then it becomes a personal trait, so to speak. Welcome to the underlying systemic problem with some of Society's more critical institutions. Fraud and corruption have become institutionalized, and lying and cheating are just the name of the game. Explain to me how Banks got away with what they have if not fir this very root issue; blow up the economy because of reckless, risky investments: Bonus, bailouts, and golden parachutes for all. Default on your student loans, utility bill or car payment? We'll ruin your credit for all of your miserable existence, while you slave away anyway because the former cannot be expunged. I'm so glad I borrowed from family and friends instead of banks or the State. It was hard paying them back, but if I had to choose a creditor of last resort I think I made the right choice.
• andrewxdiamond 6y ago
  I wonder if a similar principle is at play when people throw links at each other in place of a debate
• xelxebar 6y ago
  > Plagiarizing some work doesn't really hurt the work, it hurts you. Funny enough, this idea is almost certainly one you are plagairising. Perhaps you could find nuance, depth, and understanding by turning those words on themself? Somehow I feel like most of the debate here centers on these words: > The purpose of <foo> is <bar>. That little word "the" there at the beginning seems a bit myopic to me. I mean, clearly, something like writing functions in more ways than one. Here are some other potential purposes of writing, off the top of my head: * Deconstruct your personal ontology, * Intrinsic artistic value, * Emotional expression, * Elucidation of unconscious grammatical habits, * Social signaling. Any of those are perfectly functional operations of the writing act, and a few of them actually benefit by plagiarising (Identifying these is left as an exercise for the reader). Of course, saying that "university should allow students to operate under any possible goal framework" is a different matter, but hopefully that at least points toward one way of thinking with more nuance about plagiarism.
• VLM 6y ago
  Not necessarily hurt you, but doesn't help as much as it could. From talking to people further along the plagiarism spectrum than myself, they see it as developing good taste or almost coaching. Yeah yeah in a writing class its hard to justify not learning to write. But in any other class... Lets hypothetically say we're in a computer science class and our assignment is to write an essay on the supremacy of the C++ language. There's all these English department goals of becoming a better writer that would be met by my pitiful attempt to glorify polymorphism. But the C++ goal of learning to be a better C++ programmer would be best met by extensive reading and research to find the best Stroustrup quote. If I were involved in the academic scene of converting papers into salary via cooperation with other researchers, I need to quote my coworkers accurately to share the revenue appropriately. However what if I don't have the goal of playing that game? In a learning environment in casual verbal conversation I might tell my C++ instructor that C++ main() returns an int. Yet if I write that down as I just did, I'm committing the academic sin of plagiarism by not properly footnoting Stroustrup, that's a direct quote from him. But I'm not trying to play the academic game, I'm trying to learn to program, and develop good taste by copying the right people. It seems a little unfair to grade students based on playing a different game than they signed up for. Even if the institutional goal is to produce little academics, in practice almost none of the kids will become academics. That's a very authoritarian example of copying a guy at the top; but it also applies to lower level copying. They're not necessarily wrong or self destructive, just kids on a different path with different priorities.
  • cutemonster 6y ago
    I was going to write sth similar -- that if a writing assignment seems pointless from a student's point of view, and s/he thinks the study time is better spent in other ways, maybe coding a software program instead, Then to some extent I could sympathize with those who plagiarize. ... If it's to save time for something more on topic they think. But if it's a writing class, then, no! Or writing about history or society etc