5 ms·

Your second point is utterly infuriating. That an institution whose mission is to educate people would refuse to allow the observations of a person to refute th

by yock 12y ago

Your second point is utterly infuriating. That an institution whose mission is to educate people would refuse to allow the observations of a person to refute the obviously incorrect observations of a machine is astounding to me.

wsxcde 12y ago
There's nothing infuriating about it. Students are usually prohibited from posting homeworks and/or solutions online because courses reuse material from previous years. Students can consider themselves lucky if the only fallout from this is the DMCA takedown because at Princeton this would be considered a violation of the honor code, which has very serious implications.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  You're missing the point... madaxe_again was disciplined for plagiarizing themself, because someone decided to ignore the reality of the software having caught madaxe_again's own website. I look forward to hearing what revenge madaxe_again exacted on the culprit. The closest thing to this that happened to me not being allowed to take a graduate-level class based on a piece of software that I helped develop, because I was an undergrad. That was dealt with by disabling said software for the instructor until the stupidity ended.
  - mister_m 12y ago
    A lot of universities have policies surrounding using work you've done for other classes in subsequent classes too. For instance, if you write a paper for one class and use it in whole, or in part in a different class. I think posting finished homework online is a silly thing to do regardless. There's no reason to do that. I'd wager students get informed of these policies well before it gets anywhere close to where this went.
    - madaxe_again 12y ago
      Nope. No such policy. They made it policy after I left.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Wsxcde is not missing the point. Students are not allowed to post the work that they do to the Internet. madaxe_again did post the work they did to the Internet. They were incorrectly punished for plagiarism - it was their own work - but they could have been punished for posting homework to the Internet.
    - spiritplumber 12y ago
      So yell at madaxe_again for publishing proprietary stuff, not plagiarism. The internal justice system made two errors, not zero. That's never okay, especially if it claims to be errorless ( shawn-furyan put it better than I did) Would you be okay with getting a fine in the mail for having done something that is logically impossible to do (such as plagiarizing from yourself), regardless if you had to pay a different fine for a different issue or not? EDIT: I can't answer to the post below, for some reason, thanks for the correction on self plagiarism!
      - akerl_ 12y ago
        In the interest of accuracy: it is possible to plagiarize yourself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism
    - madaxe_again 12y ago
      It wasn't against any regulation in 2002 - but I suppose you think I deserved this because... What, I should have known that in the future it'd be against the rules? Cool logic man. Report yourself for punishment, being called Dan might be against the rules one day.
  - wsxcde 12y ago
    You are missing the point. Student not allowed to make their homeworks public and this is for a very good reason. It helps other students looking to plagiarize, and students have a responsibility to make a reasonable effort to prevent this. And while I can't comment on what these particular students were told, I can guarantee you that all the instructors I know make it a point to tell their students that they are not allowed to put their homeworks up online. Another issue to consider is that the homeoworks are not student property, they largely belong to the instructor. A lot of effort goes into producing interesting and educational homeworks, and it's all lost if students can just google the answers. If you disagree with the idea that homeworks are instructor property, ask yourself if it would be okay if an instructor at Princeton just reused (without permission) the homeworks from a course at Harvard.
    - shawn-furyan 12y ago
      madaxe_again said that the University gave him a zero for plagiarizing a website when he was the one that controlled that website. Whether or not it is legitimate to post solutions online, this is not what madaxe claims to have been penalized for. In my opinion, arbitrarily shoehorning a perceived infraction into a preexisting rule that it doesn't fit so that you can punish behavior that you hadn't thought to disallow before the fact is an abuse of university policies. If madaxe is recounting the event accurately, then I think that the university is more in the wrong. University policies are hard enough to follow in situations like this when the university sticks to the letter of the policy. Plus, universities can always go back to update policies as they see new behaviors that they would like to disallow. But if the university uses whatever policies that they do have on the books to punish arbitrary behaviors that they don't disallow, then it puts the student in the situation of having to predict how this practice will impact them in the future. This is essentially impossible, and quite defeats the entire purpose of having policies written down in the first place. If this practice is common, then the policies are merely legitimacy theater, and are in fact illegitimate. The situation is further confounded by the power dynamics at play. Tanking a students GPA is a pretty tremendous bludgeon, and outside of retaining a lawyer, a bludgeon against which students have little defense. This power discrepancy demands discretion on the part of the university. There is a level of injustice in the act of a university wielding this power against a student without a grounding in legitimate policy.
- madaxe_again 12y ago
  In 2002 at Durham (UK), it wasn't prohibited at all. They'd only just started using anti-plagiarism software. It also wasn't really a very plagarisable piece of work - big research paper on supersymmetry. Finally, the publication date on my website was several days after I handed it in - so I assume you, like they, believe I have a secret time machine?
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
At the same time though, what's the institution going to do? Teachers are already underpaid as it is, and you want them to manually check results from the websites their anti-plagiarism software finds to identify the owner and check if it's the student that submitted the work? Good luck with that, also given that websites are often not tied to single identifiable persons.
- whoisthemachine 12y ago
  Professors at universities are not typically in the same financial boat as teachers at public K-12 schools. They usually earn in the range of 70k-80k (at least they did when I went to school 5+ years ago). Also, they usually have undergrads who will do free manual labor for them.

by yock 12y ago

wsxcde 12y ago

There's nothing infuriating about it. Students are usually prohibited from posting homeworks and/or solutions online because courses reuse material from previous years. Students can consider themselves lucky if the only fallout from this is the DMCA takedown because at Princeton this would be considered a violation of the honor code, which has very serious implications.

spiritplumber 12y ago
You're missing the point... madaxe_again was disciplined for plagiarizing themself, because someone decided to ignore the reality of the software having caught madaxe_again's own website. I look forward to hearing what revenge madaxe_again exacted on the culprit. The closest thing to this that happened to me not being allowed to take a graduate-level class based on a piece of software that I helped develop, because I was an undergrad. That was dealt with by disabling said software for the instructor until the stupidity ended.
- mister_m 12y ago
  A lot of universities have policies surrounding using work you've done for other classes in subsequent classes too. For instance, if you write a paper for one class and use it in whole, or in part in a different class. I think posting finished homework online is a silly thing to do regardless. There's no reason to do that. I'd wager students get informed of these policies well before it gets anywhere close to where this went.
  - madaxe_again 12y ago
    Nope. No such policy. They made it policy after I left.
- DanBC 12y ago
  Wsxcde is not missing the point. Students are not allowed to post the work that they do to the Internet. madaxe_again did post the work they did to the Internet. They were incorrectly punished for plagiarism - it was their own work - but they could have been punished for posting homework to the Internet.
  - spiritplumber 12y ago
    So yell at madaxe_again for publishing proprietary stuff, not plagiarism. The internal justice system made two errors, not zero. That's never okay, especially if it claims to be errorless ( shawn-furyan put it better than I did) Would you be okay with getting a fine in the mail for having done something that is logically impossible to do (such as plagiarizing from yourself), regardless if you had to pay a different fine for a different issue or not? EDIT: I can't answer to the post below, for some reason, thanks for the correction on self plagiarism!
    - akerl_ 12y ago
      In the interest of accuracy: it is possible to plagiarize yourself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism
  - madaxe_again 12y ago
    It wasn't against any regulation in 2002 - but I suppose you think I deserved this because... What, I should have known that in the future it'd be against the rules? Cool logic man. Report yourself for punishment, being called Dan might be against the rules one day.
- wsxcde 12y ago
  You are missing the point. Student not allowed to make their homeworks public and this is for a very good reason. It helps other students looking to plagiarize, and students have a responsibility to make a reasonable effort to prevent this. And while I can't comment on what these particular students were told, I can guarantee you that all the instructors I know make it a point to tell their students that they are not allowed to put their homeworks up online. Another issue to consider is that the homeoworks are not student property, they largely belong to the instructor. A lot of effort goes into producing interesting and educational homeworks, and it's all lost if students can just google the answers. If you disagree with the idea that homeworks are instructor property, ask yourself if it would be okay if an instructor at Princeton just reused (without permission) the homeworks from a course at Harvard.
  - shawn-furyan 12y ago
    madaxe_again said that the University gave him a zero for plagiarizing a website when he was the one that controlled that website. Whether or not it is legitimate to post solutions online, this is not what madaxe claims to have been penalized for. In my opinion, arbitrarily shoehorning a perceived infraction into a preexisting rule that it doesn't fit so that you can punish behavior that you hadn't thought to disallow before the fact is an abuse of university policies. If madaxe is recounting the event accurately, then I think that the university is more in the wrong. University policies are hard enough to follow in situations like this when the university sticks to the letter of the policy. Plus, universities can always go back to update policies as they see new behaviors that they would like to disallow. But if the university uses whatever policies that they do have on the books to punish arbitrary behaviors that they don't disallow, then it puts the student in the situation of having to predict how this practice will impact them in the future. This is essentially impossible, and quite defeats the entire purpose of having policies written down in the first place. If this practice is common, then the policies are merely legitimacy theater, and are in fact illegitimate. The situation is further confounded by the power dynamics at play. Tanking a students GPA is a pretty tremendous bludgeon, and outside of retaining a lawyer, a bludgeon against which students have little defense. This power discrepancy demands discretion on the part of the university. There is a level of injustice in the act of a university wielding this power against a student without a grounding in legitimate policy.
madaxe_again 12y ago
In 2002 at Durham (UK), it wasn't prohibited at all. They'd only just started using anti-plagiarism software. It also wasn't really a very plagarisable piece of work - big research paper on supersymmetry. Finally, the publication date on my website was several days after I handed it in - so I assume you, like they, believe I have a secret time machine?

Cthulhu_ 12y ago

At the same time though, what's the institution going to do? Teachers are already underpaid as it is, and you want them to manually check results from the websites their anti-plagiarism software finds to identify the owner and check if it's the student that submitted the work? Good luck with that, also given that websites are often not tied to single identifiable persons.

whoisthemachine 12y ago
Professors at universities are not typically in the same financial boat as teachers at public K-12 schools. They usually earn in the range of 70k-80k (at least they did when I went to school 5+ years ago). Also, they usually have undergrads who will do free manual labor for them.