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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."
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?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If Slashdot points carry no credit, then why do Slashdotters care if they have mod points or not?
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.
Given that coursera courses tend to be orders of magnitudes larger than those at universities, dozens actually sounds pretty low to me.
If Slashdot points carry no credit at all, then why do Slashdotters users care if they have moderation points or not?
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!
There's little incentive not to cheat in this setting though. The repercussions for cheating at traditional schools are significant in that there are real career and financial ramifications. Here you're simply kicked out of a free online program where you likely can just re-enroll under another name.
Until cheating is dealt with in a satisfactory manner, I don't see how these online offerings will ever be a credible alternative to traditional schooling.
"if professors can't develop unique questions then don't expect unique answers."
Go ahead. Develop a unique essay question. Just one. Post it in reply.
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
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.
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.
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