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."

Comments

No. People are stupid

[Sqr(twg)]

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.

Re:No. People are stupid

[MickyTheIdiot]

"liberal view of education"? Wha?

In the U.S. we're teaching right now that the "ends" are what its all about, whether it is a 100k job or whether it is test scores. The means remain murky and, as far as corporate values go, are often totally justified by the ends.

That isn't "liberal" anything, it's the corporate value system, and the corporate values system isn't a liberal values system.

One of the reason that education sucks in the U.S. right now is because the real value in education come in the journey itself. Learning something that doesn't contribute directly to the bottom line of a corporation doesn't make you money, but it does make you a person with experience, and that experience is worth something. When the ends justify the means and everything is cut out but the stuff that makes you a compliant little cube worker then you've got a system for stamping out robots.

Re:No. People are stupid

[wermske]

Given how you express "the point of education," I don't believe you are entirely in outer space. That said, (and at great karmic peril)...

Your provocative "stake in the sand" is nothing but smoke and mirrors. The peg that you hang your hat on and the headline of your opinion is just dreadful. First, you expect the audience to accept your assumption that those who do not maximize their potential do so because they do not value education -- there are no facts in evidence that support your argument. Second, you mistake Populism for Liberalism. Third, you fallaciously munge conflicting ideas of "equal opportunity" with "different rules for different classes" -- monsterous logic. It is distracting, divisive, deceptive, and a flagrant derail of the topic.

1. There is nothing to support a generalization or the causal relationship that people who do not take advantage of education do not value it. Of the many potential alternative challenges, awareness of educational opportunity and access to educational opportunity are key influences on behavior. One simply can not responsibly leap to the conclusion that education is not valued because of the results or outcomes don't meet expectations.

2. You're understanding of "liberal" and "Liberalism" is distorted, ill-formed, and harmful in the echo chamber. With respect, I believe you are either ignorant in the terminology or ignorant in the application of the terminology.

3. Let's be clear about one thing, while there may be philosophical, economic/classical, and social liberals; each with orthodox and progressive advocates -- the foundation of all Liberalism is centered on Enlightenment values put forward by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume who ventured that the fundimental freedom of human beings and the legitimacy of government stems from the consent of the governed.

Put more succinctly, Thomas Jefferson codified core Liberalism into the Declaration of Independence (of the United States): "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the Governed..."

The post hoc argument is vaccuous and vapid... and does nothing to either explain Plagiarism (in the context of this article) or to uplift the dialog about social capacity for intellectual or trade education. I have little doubt that the use of the word "liberal" in this thread is nothing short of literary abomination... much as religious, racial, and orientation labels have been distorted by one faction to be used as hate words for another faction... your madlib rhetoric could just as easily substitute "Catholic" or "Gay" or "Negro" or "Hacker" and been no more (or less) offensive to a marginally representative audience. The argumentation technique is just wrong and has no relevance to the discussion.

Honesty

[Hatta]

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?

Obligatory George Carlin

[dkleinsc]

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.

Re:So

[Anonymous Coward]

"Who are you? 500 words."

Re:No. People are ignorant

[Rogue Haggis Landing]

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.

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.