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."
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.
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?
If there is some sort of certificate or recognition, then allowing cheating makes said certificate even more worthless than it already is. It essentially makes it impossible for legitimate students to gain any recognition for their REAL work. It's the same reason that a big cheating scandal at an accredited school ultimately cheapens, at least a little, the degrees from all institutions accredited by the same organization.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
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.
If Slashdot points carry no credit at all, then why do Slashdotters users care if they have moderation points or not?
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.
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 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.
Ah interesting, I hadn't seen that until now. This Chronicle of Higher Ed article has a bit more. Apparently the agreement between Coursera and several universities included a section entitled "Possible Company Monetization Strategies" that discusses some of that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"Who are you? 500 words."
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.
Necronomicon?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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.
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
Thick much? It's easier by the trillion. Suppose we have a body of 1000 short stories, each of about 30 pages in length.
Using the vocabulary of source A, the imagery of source B, the structure of source C, write a five page story in the style of source D. Follow this with a two page essay on the challenges posed and the opportunities discovered in combining these sources.
1000^4. Done. For the grading system, you need to send four to six papers with the vocabulary of source A to peers intimate with source A; and likewise with the other three axes.
Or you could find peers strong in any of the six pairwise subsets of the four attributes (AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD) for grading on whether that pair of attributes is well combined. If every student is expected to be strong in 30 randomly chosen stories out of the 1000 stories in inventory to act as a peer grader, it won't be hard to find evaluation peers for any pair of stories in a well-subscribed online course (concurrent enrolment of 10,000 students).
One of those can be from your personal base of 30 stories. The other three attributes can be stories you haven't been assigned before. You'd only have to read 90 pages per assignment.
That took me longer to type than to figure out.
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