Slashdot Mirror
Dozens of Reported Plagiarism Incidents On Coursera's Free Online Courses
An anonymous reader writes "The discussion forums in Coursera's Massive Open Online Courses are full of talk of plagiarism these days. 'Plagiarized essay — so disheartening,' said one post. 'Continued Plagiarism in the Assignments,' says another. Students are cheating even though the courses carry no credit. Plagiarism-detection software may be in the future, the company's leaders say."
I'm hardly surprised. Since the benefit to student is actually in doing the work instead of official credits, I don't see that a lot of time, money or energy should be spent in weeding out those that don't wish to actually get the benefit out of it. A public shaming on the boards might be helpful though so people don't get advice from someone who can't be bothered to really learn the material.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
If the courses carry no credit, why do you care that they are plagiarizing? I'm not a fan of ripping others work but if professors can't develop unique questions then don't expect unique answers.
Is there any reason to believe that the problem is any worse at Coursera than at meatspace universities? When I was at NGCSU, there was apparently enough of an issue with plagiarism that more than one professor spent a whole class period on discussing the issue, and a centralized system (Turnitin.com) was used to detect the most blatant forms of cheating.
Amazingly, a lot of people don't know what plagiarism is. The think "write an essay" means the same thing as "copy from an encyclopedia". From TFA: "He said one student wrote him soon after he posted his letter and confessed to submitting a plagiarized essay, but the student said he had not realized that copying and pasting from other sources was wrong."
I think the problem lies in elementary school. Students are encouraged to copy texts (in order to learn writing) and they are simply never told that actual essays are supposed to be something that they invent themselves.
My SO who is an engineer and a research scientist who is currently finishing graduate degree. This is fairly late-in-career move, with SO entering program already with large number of successful projects, dozen published peer-reviewed articles, and established reputation in the field.
Frequent comment I hear is "I wish I didn't have to do all the busy work and could just focus on my research" when I talk about school to my SO.
Perhaps temptation to plagiarize in online courses like Cursera is mainly driven by dislike of busy-work? If you adequately test, why do you also make people jump through the unnecessary steps? It makes very little sense to swamp people with pointless work in such setting.
I once heard a definition of an idiot: Someone doing the same thing again-and-again, but expecting different results (ref: movie '28 days').
If the same information is tutored again-and-again, year-after-year, how many really unique responses (in the form of assignments) do they expect ?
There is a finite ammount of "acceptable" information available, and people "much more knowledgable than you" have already penned down their thoughts. Even if a student does not agree with any of those thoughts, would it be wise to put that in his assignment ? Would he pass the grade ?
In short: repeating what "the people in the know" say but with a different set of words is the way to go. In a sense its the tutors who are, without so many words, asking their pupils to create plagiarised works.
Anonymity makes normal persons jackasses. This looks like another aspect of that syndrome.
Properly cited information is always allowed. You just have to credit the people who actually wrote it. My graduate level classes always require person experience be drawn in and applied to the topic at hand in the mini essays we write. So even if the first few sentences are drawn from elsewhere, as long as they are cited properly, its allowed and even encouraged. The remaining four paragraphs are supposed to be how that has applied to something you've seen or experienced, or how it could possibly apply to you.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Apparently, there are some people who think they have time, only to realize that they don't, but they still insist on completing pointless busywork. I guess that would be a category of "dumb completionists"?
Why should any student worry about getting ahead honestly when the most powerful people in the world commit massive amounts of fraud and nobody seems to care? Haven't we sent the message to people that fraud is OK? Why not academic fraud?
Why should I give a shit about adademic dishonesty when fraud is what makes the world go around?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So long as you give the same assignment to large groups of students year after year cheating is going to remain since the system is built to encourage it. It is just a natural result of how assignments are given, graded and how much depends on the grades. So long as we stay with this system we will continue to have cheating.
I think we need to move to a more modern system based on our technology and instead of having all students in lock step have each student work one on one with a computer with generated problems. I don't know how that would work for art type stuff but it would work for math,engineering, chemistry and physics type stuff. What I would have is students would learn some material in about a 30 minute chunk and then be given some created questions based on what they have learned. They would go on to the next step of material once they had answered a high enough percentage of questions correctly. If the rate is too low have the computer go back and go over the missed points and try again. Keep doing this basically forever since there is no point in going on until you understand the current material.
Every so often the computer would give you a test. If you do well enough you go on otherwise you go back and work on the material some more. There would be no grades since you can't complete a class without complete understanding so there would be no point. If you can't master the material you are not done with it yet. Everything would proceed at your own speed. In the end this is feasible with our level of technology and would cost a tiny fraction of what our existing education systems cost and should give better results.
There is really no way to avoid cheating so don't worry about it. Since the problems are dynamically created it is hard to do a search for them online. Instead what I would do is employers could have the system give you a test based on the information required for the job and see if you pass. That way the point of enforcement is at the point of usage and the companies would have an interest in proctoring that test to make sure you don't cheat. If you cheated to get there you would never pass. All they would do is check some boxes on the required material and the same system that taught you the material would give questions to answer.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
THIS. In a college English classroom, intro level classes, the first MONTH is spent explaining to the students what plagiarism is, and what it isn't.
I don't know where the attitude of "copy and paste != plagiarism" came from (I have theories see below if you want), but it is prevalent. If I had a dollar for each student who "just borrowed" a line or two from other papers or other sources, I wouldn't be a teacher anymore, I'd have a self-funded space program.
My theory about that attitude comes in the form of easy and quick = best. That, above all else is the attitude in today's US society. If it's easy, if it's quick, it must be good. What we're seeing is the disposable consumer culture translated into an educational setting. That is all my opinion and is not rooted in anything outside of my personal experience.
If there are no credits given for this free course, than why would anyone care if they cheat?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If I had a dollar for each student who "just borrowed" a line or two from other papers or other sources, I wouldn't be a teacher anymore, I'd have a self-funded space program.
Plagiarize
Let no one else's work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don't shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please "research" [1]
[1] Paraphrased from Tom Lehrer's song 'Lobachevsky'.
To copy from one person is plagiarism. To copy from many is research. (citation not provided; quote is attrib. to various sources)
There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got... because the owners of this country don’t want that. I'm talking about the real owners now... the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
That's obviously not true for children of wealthy families - we'll send them to the best private schools we can muster, so they'll be well-trained to be masters of the universe.
I am officially gone from
Frequent comment I hear is "I wish I didn't have to do all the busy work and could just focus on my research" when I talk about school to my SO. .
For the SO in this case, who may well have a comprehensive knowledge of the larger field, the non-research coursework may well be busy-work, but I doubt that this is the case for most students. If graduate students focused solely on their research, this would exacerbate the current problem of researchers not always being aware of relevant established results and current research topics. Journals and conferences exist to spread this knowledge, but to be effective, their participants need to be familiar with of the state of the art in the broader field.
Maybe, but what you describe here doesn't sound like that's the problem.
There is value to being able to find, evaluate, and present the best arguments for a particular position whether or not it is your own. So, I can both see why the value in being assigned to right an argumentative essay for an assigned point-of-view, and see it as perfectly reasonable that failing to do so effectively when it conflicts with your personal POV results in a lower grade.
In fact, I remember a number of classes with similar assignments (some written, some oral) where both the subject and which side of it particular students were to take were randomly assigned.
None of this conflicts with students being encouraged to have their own opinions or views, its about students being able to understand others opinions and views, and is part of the foundation on which the ability to critically evaluate others' viewpoints, and their own, is built.
The mindset these students grew up with is either 1) if they're Asians, in their culture there's nothing wrong with plagiarism (goal was met); or 2) if they're Westerners, they've grown up telling each other it's okay to copy anything because it doesn't take anything from the artist/author/whatever (no harm, no foul).
I can tell you where the idea comes from. It comes from the idiotic idea that doing a research paper on a topic that has already been researched a million times before is useful in any way shape or form. It comes from the notion that you can teach PROPER research procedures on dummy(fake/psuedo) research projects.
IF you want to fix the problem, fix the process. Make it REAL research, on things that matter to the kids. Yeah that means more work for teachers, but teachers are supposed to be teaching, and not teaching by rote.
I remember reading books, and doing book reports only to get C's and D's until I discovered CLIFF NOTES. I then did a papers based on those and got B's and C's, and it was much easier. Guess what, I never read the books again. Was the goal of those papers to teach writing or make sure you read the books, or something else? Because it didn't teach me anything of the sort, it taught me that if someone else has done the work, you use that. It also taught me to not do papers on things that didn't interest me at all. Perhaps that was the lesson I was supposed to learn ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I actually got an A on a book report in grade school for a book that didn't exist.
In order to not only publish anything, but get a study through initial approval stages you have to do comprehensive review of existing work. Pick up any peer-reviewed article and read introduction - normally you have at least 10+ (out of possibly hundreds) relevant articles directly mentioned/credited.
How many ways are there to answer the same question? Sooner or later a couple of people are going to have the same thought about something, it's not plagiarism, it is nature. There are finite ways of expressing the same concept. That's where I see the big failing of these services like TurnItIn happening; sooner or later their databases will be so huge there's no way to NOT plagiarize something. You can't account for it and you can't prevent it. I think the larger issue is being completely ignored: does the student actually understand what he/she is talking about? Or are they just trying to pass the course with minimal effort?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
You can't do original research until you learn what is already known, which by definition will be something that someone has already done. There is no way around this problem. No teacher can generate large numbers of projects that are both 1.) simple enough for an introductory student, and 2.) examples of original research. The easy stuff has been done in most fields.
On the Cliff's Notes issue -- I just looked in WorldCat and got over 10,000 hits for Hamlet as a subject. This will include multiple entries for lots of titles (different editions, the German translation, etc.), but you're still looking at 4,000+ books published on the topic, in addition to no one knows how many scholarly journal articles. Do you really think that a high school English teacher is going to be able to come up with an idea for original research on Hamlet that hasn't been covered in one of the previous 20,000 publications on the topic? And then come up with another one for her second and third period classes as well? And then do it all over again next year? Not possible. If she could do that she'd have won a MacArthur Grant and would be running the Renaissance studies program at Harvard. The same problem applies (to a less extreme extent) to every book in and around the Western canon. Now, a good teacher will know what's in Cliff's Notes and whatever it's Web equivalents are, and will assign work on something they don't include. But that's as close to original research as you can get with the average student.
Would there be anything wrong about having a free comprehensive class on Plagiarism and requiring all students to take it?
Save all answers in a single database and word all questions so unique answers are required.
Just throwing it out there.
Necronomicon?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
That's why people take them. If they could afford to pay, then they could afford keyboards that didn't have the ( " ) key missing and you'd know they weren't plagiarizing, they were just quoting.
At length.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
What I'm more curious about is why people even bother plagiarizing at all. If you don't want to do an assignment, can't you just not do it, since there are no consequences to failing to do it? Are people hoping to use the "completed Coursera course" certificate on their CV or something, making it worth the effort of cheating to obtain it?
Yes. Believe it or not, that is the motivation. Plagiarism is rampant in the CS/IT sector. This is one of the reasons more and more companies (at least companies that care) are demanding live code interviews.
True story from a company that I interviewed a couple of years ago. They needed quite desperately to fill a senior position that became vacant. How it became vacant? Well, the person who was in it apparently couldn't code himself out of a wet paper bag. During his hiring process, the applicant, who was in another country, went through all the phone interviews, answering questions flawlessly. The company decided to pick him for the position and paid all relocation expenses.
Fast-track a few weeks later and the guy was unceremoniously kicked out. He simply couldn't code at all. To this day management is 100% convinced the person they interviewed was not the same person who actually showed up for the job. And this is very common. Having learned their lesson, any applicant must go through a battery of live tests, and then more tests in person. This obviously increases the expense of hiring, but that is always cheaper than getting an incompetent code monkey on a critical senior position.
It wasn't like this before when the number of professionals weren't that many, nor computer systems were so ubiquitious. You gotta give thanks to the dot-com for opening the gates. Computer systems have become ubiquitous, which is great. But the bad side of the coin is that you get any savant idiot trying to weasel his way into a good salary without paying the academic/work-related dues.
There are simply no ethics in our industry. None at all, a reflection of society, both ours and globalized. So now that people know companies will look into the coursera or udacity results, you bet they'll try to fit themselves in, like an badly made cog lubricated with pig shit.
I never saw it coming, but I should have given everything I've seen in this industry.
In four years of college, there were only two that were of any actual use to me. One was Cisco (CCNA 1-4), because not sucking at TCP/IP and router configs is a rather integral part of my job. The other was a critical thinking course from a ZERO-BS professor that actually placed value in teaching my classmates and me how to actually think critically.
There was one particular lesson I remember. In the textbook, there was a court case whereby a mother, through neglect and (if memory serves) a lot of alcohol, and a sizeable amount of miscommunication caused the death of her very young (infant-toddler age?) child. We were all unanimous that she should be punished, but to a certain level torn as to whether it was a capital offense (lifetime imprisonment in a maximum security prison without the chance of parole was the alternative for those principally opposed to the death penalty). The room was roughly split 50/50 on it, so we divided the room into two halves - those who believed in death penalty/lifetime imprisonment, and those who believed in less severe prison time + rehab + community service. We then had a debate on the topic, having to defend the viewpoint opposite the one we held.
When forced to find reasons to align with the opposing view in order to win the argument, a nontrivial quantity of people started to seriously reconsider their own viewpoints. It was an eye opening experience for many and (in my opinion) really should be required for everyone to get a diploma.
Only if the individual has no reason to expect there to be circumstances outside of their control that are affecting the result, and the only reason they are repeating those steps is because those steps are an essential part of whatever process is being performed.
A person can get up at the same time every morning and have no compelling reason to genuinely expect that this day will be the same as the previous (because Groundhog day scenarios notwithstanding, it won't be).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
plagiarism is real big in lecture classes and cheating / cramming on tests goes up in classes where it all about the test.
Also you see plagiarism in Busy work classwork that has little educational value
Most of my typos tend to be whole word substitutions. I tend to catch the ones where two or three letters are jumbled. The single letter substitutions from one valid word to another with similar letter shape are the most likely to squeak through.
I'm currently taking the Internet History, Technology, and Security course through Coursera. There was a written assignment, 200-400 words in length where you could describe how people, technology and information connected to create the internet, within the timeframe of 1930 and 1990.
It was hinted at that I plagiarized my answer, mostly because I didn't cite my sources. Well, let's see... I've been programming since 1979, online since 1982, and started using the web in 1994. Did I take my answers from Wikipedia? Did I take them from the web at all? No, because I love computers and have read thousands of books and magazines, talked to thousands of like-minded people, and I lived through a decent chunk of that history. There isn't a clear source to cite, and I doubt that I could say something like: "Tonah, Lo (2012). "Crap I Remember," 'My Old Brain', 00(00)."
So in a 400 word essay, how is there enough room to write something self-created that a plagiarism tool won't trip over?
Interesting, you sound like someone who reads as little as necessary...
Cheap storage VM.
trades based learning and apprenticeships can go along way in fixing issues with education and testing.
And in can give people the skills needed to do the job in a quicker time then the old education system.
I see that you have made 'eyes' rhyme with 'eyes' and that you have also made 'eyes' rhyme with 'eyes'. Clever!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Yes. A great song. But either slander or libel on the name of Lobachevsky. (I'm not sure whether publishing a record counts as slander or libel.)
Lobachevsky may not have been well known, and may not have been well connected to the Western European intelligentsia, but he as an able and innovative mathematician, who is one of the true founders of non-Euclidean geometry.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Absolutely. I think it's important for everyone to get a basic, broad education, but not everyone needs to do it for seventeen to twenty years. Postsecondary trade schools and apprenticeships are extremely valuable. But notice how trades are taught. Hands on, working beside an expert in the field. Essentially the opposite of the video lecture craze.
video lecture is a start and can work for some stuff or even mixed with a trade / apprenticeships.
There lot of IT vender trading videos out there.
Now we need IT to be less about CS and more about a trade school / apprenticeship learning.
I would support this approach also. Actually it would be nice to get a bit of both. Have a computer do a lot of the basic teaching along with hands on practical experience.
It is pretty sad how many engineers I meet that think they will use pen and paper their entire lives to solve problems and they don't really like computers. Some practical experience would go a LONG way in correcting that. Many of the problems they are given in class are only simpler to solve on paper because the problems are so simple and many have the viewpoint that is how real problems are also.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
I don't actually support video lectures. I think they can be okay as supplements. I am thinking of online learning more like how some online programming tutorials are a tiny piece of information and then immediate application followed up by a more complex integration of previous steps of information.
That approach would definitely work for things like fluid mechanics, chemistry, physics, math etc STEM type programs.
It seems that knowledge that is gained in small pieces and immediately used is remembered much better than watching a video for 30 minutes and then applying it. I don't think we can use video games as an actual model but they do a good job of handing someone a small piece of information and then immediately applying it and that same concept can be used in education.
One of the big deals is immediate feedback on if you have done something right. I have had classes where a skill was taught badly and was being done incorrectly by over half the class but it was a few weeks before the homework was returned and the error was discovered. At that point you then have to unlearn the skill and try to learn it again correctly and sometimes you have a test in between. With computer grading systems you an often get immediate and helpful feedback which short circuits that entire process.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
I read quite a bit. I just don't read fiction. I read News, Tech Journals, Manuals, Interesting blogs and so on. I was turned off of reading fiction in grade school where we were told to read this book or that book that had no interest for me. It was easier to get a better grade reading the cliff notes and writing from there. Reading the book itself meant I got a C or D. Cliff Note Report gave me a guarantee of at least a C and no effort actually reading it.
You tell me, what did reading "Where the Red Fern Grows" do for me besides the D on the paper?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It taught me a bit about how rural people lived in the years it depicted. It taught me how to trap a racoon. It also taught me a little bit about human nature.
This is off the top of my head about 20 years after I read the book. I remember it as quite a good book.
Cheap storage VM.
Why should people have to take time to rewrite there own ideas??
also taking your older ideas and updating them as part of new essay that may cover the same stuff that a older one covered can still be flagged as plagiarism.
I think what you're describing is very similar to programmed learning, which was a very popular technique in the seventies(?), but with immediate grading. It is useful, for some things, under some circumstances. It's very good for conveying facts, but not great for teaching skills or reasoning. For STEM stuff there really is nothing like a lab. See for yourself how things work and, just as importantly, that you don't know everything, with immediate feedback. Education theorists call it "guided discovery" and rate it as one of the best methods of teaching, at the opposite end of the spectrum from lecturing. For catching misunderstandings, seminars are great. Students take the assignment home, try it, and come in with their questions to work through before it's due. When I ran a seminar I used to glance at students' answers in the seminar before the due date, and again when assignments were handed in, and work through any issues right away. Most of my instructors did the same thing. I had one psych professor who did a statistical analysis of every single question on his assignments and exams to identify problematic concepts.
Good assignment questions are ones that give clearly wrong results if you do them incorrectly, but they involve that critical step of the student checking... is this a reasonable result? What do I expect? Can I do a sanity check? The habit with immediate grading is to just try things until something works. The way some people just guess then hit compile to see if they got it right.
Systems like you describe are useful, and are being built into things like electronic textbooks now, but they really don't work well for everything.
The largest enrolled courses on Coursera are on AI and machine learning.
Seems like it would be a good class exercise to make a plagiarism detector. I know such things exist commercially using proprietary algorithms and privately curated databases but doing a shoot-out using real world examples from the other courses on coursera could be a cool idea, not to mention a big dissuader for future plagarizers to know their essays are being vetted by ever-changing algorithms. And then you'd have to run them on each other to make sure people didn't copy each other's code :-)
Yes, of course, since coursera is free and not-for-credit right now plagarism "only" hurts the students. But the whole point of coursera is that all the big names in academia don't want to be left behind when whatever happens to higher education finally happens - and a large part of that is figuring out how online courses will be able to handle plagarism and even mundane things like exams and homework. Giving real credit and providing for a true alternative to a traditional brick and mortar education can not happen without addressing those first.
Absolutely, video lectures are better than nothing, and they're great when used sparingly. The problem is, a lot of people are suggesting that regular learning, classrooms and apprenticeships/internships/practicums are going to be (and should be) replaced by online videos.
What would you rather have, a vendor video or a knowledgeable representative doing an interactive learning session? You CAN learn from video lectures, it's just the most difficult way to learn.
knowledgeable representative in small setting.
Having a knowledgeable representative in a big lecture setting not so much even more so when the feed back is a test based on how much can remember.
At least for what they can work for they are better than what most people have now. I do agree that labs could be useful but so far from taking physics and chemistry labs up through organic chemistry 2 none have been useful so far. All just follow x procedure and get y result. I could program a robot to do the lab and it would change nothing. It is not a learning experience since no original thought is actually required or wanted.
I don't know how a system I propose would work for things like english or history but it would work better than what we have now for STEM field classes. Yes you should still have labs but until the labs are not just follow x direction to get y result I don't see the value in them.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
I once heard a definition of an idiot: Someone doing the same thing again-and-again, but expecting different results (ref: movie '28 days').
I have another definition of an idiot: Someone who attributes a quote from a world famous scientist (hint: look up e=mc2) to a zombie horor movie.
I see it all the time in hack shops. Lots of cut/paste from other bodies of code, take presentations from other people and make them their own..
so why should it be any different with papers/homework and testing? A lot of districts and students are doing it and it's a national shame.
Why not just copy something from somebody else? It works right? Yeah this goes to bad moral judgement and an education system that has
itself cheated then why shouldn't the students?
Yes, it's disheartening but it's out there and it's very bad.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
But that's as close to original research as you can get with the average student.
And there's nothing really wrong with that. The goal should be to take the best example from the scholarly literature on whatever question is being assigned to the students and then to compare the responses, with appropriate adjustments for grade level, age and experience, with that "ideal" and grade the papers accordingly. It's highly improbable that a high school student will even approximate, much less equal or exceed, the best works of scholarship on Hamlet, but that's not the point. The point is for students to demonstrate some minimum level of initial skill and then to have improvement of the course of the instructional period. Originality is less important than ensuring that each student reaches their fullest potential.
So, don't do Hamlet. Do some minor, recent play that no one's tried to analyse yet.
Have ANY idea what work has educational value?
In short: repeating what "the people in the know" say but with a different set of words is the way to go. In a sense its the tutors who are, without so many words, asking their pupils to create plagiarised works.
Putting down in your own words what others have already said a billion times over is called "learning" through "research". For example you could learn the proper meaning of "plagiarism" by researching it more thoroughly. ;)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
No.. Really? Get outta here. Fer real? We never expected that to happen! *gag*
Plagiarism and its detection is a small part of the more general problem of grading and giving meaningful feedback on assignments in which there is no "correct" answer. We have no way to scale that through automation and peer grading and feedback have limitations. This may limit the range of classes that can be taught successfully online.
In order to not only publish anything, but get a study through initial approval stages you have to do comprehensive review of existing work.
So are you saying that any student who has had a research topic approved has already demonstrated adequate background knowledge, either simply by getting that study approved, or at least will have done so by the time it is published? I may well be mistaken, but I thought the scope of graduate education was rather broader than that needed to complete a specific research project, no matter how deep and thorough its preparation was.
When i was doing systems analysis and programming at tech school, there were some Chinese people in my class and most of them (all the ones i knew, anyway) wrote their essays by getting chunks of text and pasting them on a page. They had no idea about quality, or plagiarizing, or possibly even understood a lot of what they had pasted. They couldn't paraphrase it. When i discussed it with them they didn't see anything wrong. They just thought that putting a bunch of stuff on a page that was in the vein of the subject, was the solution to being told to write an essay. They maybe needed an intro subject on "how to actually write an essay" and start from scratch.
I dunno if it was cos it was hard enough to write in a different language, let alone make literature, or if it was the way they learned to write essays when they were kids. There's something to be said for "sourcing" information on the essay subject, and maybe in some cases, its enough? I can sort of see how it could work... its not my cup of tea though, at least i rearrange the words!
I read "My Side of the Mountain" when I was a kid. Better story (IMHO), and had all the features you just mentioned (and then some). Where the Red Fern Grows, all I remember is the dog died.
As for learning about how Rural people live, I read "Foxfire" series. Much better resource for "rural" ancient ways living.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I loved "My Side of the Mountain", I was just recently considering locating a copy for my daughter to read. However, it is a very different story and dealt with a different part of the country then "Where the Red Fern Grows".
The Foxfire series is more instructional, I have read some of them. They don't deal so much with local social customs and the interactions of youths.
A good fictional story can more easily reach people and make them understand things from a certain perspective. It doesn't even have to be a perspective they agree with. Good fiction is powerful, look at "The Turner Diaries".
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