I'm infuriated because Piper, Kansas, is basically suburban Kansas City and Kansas City isn't in the Heartland®.
"I put that as two different sentences," he says. "So it's not like I copied it straight from the Web site. I changed it into two different sentences."
This has happened to me with two different individual cases at the same college. Every time I think about plagiarism, it's all I can do not to choose to give some very public interview and use names.
2: the only way that could be more outrageous would be if the person said something like, "I typed the sentence myself, instead of using copy and paste. So it's not like I copied it straight from the Web site."
"I copied the sentence but changed 'their' to 'they're' and added six hyphens. So it's not like I copied it straight from the Web site."
Does Matt Groening still do the Banned Words list at the end of every year? I would love to see "teachable moment" on there.
I must say that copying captions for different leaves in this sort of project doesn't strike me as the biggest crime in the world.
"teachable moment" is a phrase, not a word, Smearcase.
I knew a guy whose taught all over the world and claims that Americans are peculiarly anti-cheating. This is depressing if true.
If untrue, it is depressing because it means you know more liars.
What a great headline-writer. Cheating in the Heartland! Cuz it's only dog-bites-man if it's white Kansans doing the cheating.
The heart of America is Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Kansas is more like Spleenland.
Funny, earlier today I got this in email from a friend who teaches. This piece, like the Princessa Rita one in the NYer, is designed to infuriate. "Kids these days! And their parents!"
How did the one student get 101 percent? Why has Ben spelled the post title "Frustation"?
15: Extra credit questions, or conceivably a grading rubric where the maximum is over 100% (I haven't heard of this but I have heard of the minimum being 60% and so forth).
While there's certainly cheating and laziness out there, I do think a lot of students are unclear on what exactly constitutes plagiarism. Especially with assignments that are basically reports, rather than being argument based. What does it mean to put a simple fact that you read on the internet in your own words? It would be great if most sophomores were linguistically sophisticated enough that "Put it in your own words!" were a direction they could easily carry out, but I think it's a skill that has to be taught. (Though copying words/phrases/sentences you don't understand should be pretty clearly on the wrong side of the line.)
16: Hm. I can't say I see the point, but okay.
10 is true, I was grading once and the Russian prof and an Indian TA were expressing amazement about how rare cheating is among Americans. The verdict seemed to be that it was mostly because scores on exams ultimately didn't matter that much for people's lives here.
17 gets at a real dilemma. It's hard to give assignments that make sense in the Wikipedia era. On calc homework I don't bother thinking about cheating cause it's too hard to define.
18: K-12 teachers often offer ways that you can do something extra in order to earn extra points and provide grade insurance for the assignments you do poorly on. If they're doing more work and conceivably learning more, I think that's the benefit/point.
15.2: He didn't just want to copy the dictionary spelling - that would be plagiarism - so he left our an "r".
22: I thought it might have been because he'd earned 101% on an earlier assignment.
The reactions of the students and the parents and school board (including all the specific quotes given, such as how she "missed a teachable moment") all are completely understandable if you think 17 is most likely what was going on. My guess is this by and large wasn't students plagiarizing anything wholesale, it was them taking facts-they-learned-online and turning them into facts-they-report-in-their-reports, which was exactly the whole point of the assignment, and this teacher had a giant bug up her ass about this issue (she made them sign a special contract in advance? really?). So she flunked a bunch of people rather than showing them what the problem was. Does the kid in the quote in 2, who broke his wikipedia sentence in two as he copied and pasted it, does he sound like he was acting with moral culpability, or just not quite understanding how what he did failed to meet the requirements as he understood them?
What makes plagiarism plagiarism is the failure to cite (for factual material, rather than creative writing). If the issue is that she never told them how to cite sources and then flunked them out of the blue for it, that would be awful of her. But it sounds unlikely, doesn't it? The article isn't really clear, it makes it sound as if the problem was mostly that they failed to paraphrase sufficiently, which doesn't make much sense.
The verdict seemed to be that it was mostly because scores on exams ultimately didn't matter that much for people's lives here.
To this point, I believe there was a big cheating scandal at the Naval Academy several years ago, involving a high-stakes electrical engineering exam, on which occasion the parents of some of the many midshipmen implicated tried much the same thing as in this case. (I think the Navy shot down the pleas for leniency, but don't recall exactly how severely.)
failed to paraphrase sufficiently
This, though it sounds like they also failed to demonstrate that they understood the material, as with the "box elder is intermediate in its intolerance" sentence. It's hard to tell from the article quite what went on, but it does seem like demanding rewrites would have been more productive than flunking everyone.
From the way the situation was set up at the beginnign of the article, I thought it was going to be that half the students turned in the same set of leaf samples or something.
15 et seq: in my recently noted stats class people have been getting 120 out of 100 with some regularity, due to randomly awarded bonus points.
It's hard to tell from the article quite what went on, but it does seem like demanding rewrites would have been more productive than flunking everyone.
There are probably a hundred or so better ways to teach high school and college students not to plagiarize than to lecture them about how bad it is, but my experience a lot of lectures and rumors about that girl from Mather House who got Ad Boarded six weeks before Commencement like last year and totally killed herself.
due to randomly awarded bonus points
Literally randomly awarded? That would be kind of awesome in a statistics class, though I'm sure it violates some policy or other.
30: well, true randomness is very hard to achieve, but no system for their awarding has yet been discovered by motivated observers.
29: a favorite choice for hard partying varsity athletes before housing assignments were randomized by the school.
29
I was pretty sure that plagiarism isn't actually a crime at Harvard. At least, the people I saw who got busted for it suffered no negative consequences (other than a year off of school to go party somewhere). They even got a passing grade for the class.
32: Don't forget the brief, feverish era of non-ordered choice.
33: I recall being told that, as for other serious Ad Board-able offenses, the process of petitioning for re-admission could be unpredictable.
34: I was just plagiarizing wikipedia. I know nothing about it.
There have to be rules about and limits to how these bonus points -- in a non-random non-nutty stats class like Sifu's -- are supposed to work out for the course as a whole. That is, surely I can't get 150 percent on the first project and a mere 50 on the second, and still come out with 100, allegedly having masterfully mastered the material in the entire course. Right?
I had the opportunity to sit in the audience for an open Honor Trial at Mr. Jefferson's U. (Most students opted for the closed trial, but this one guy went for the public option.) Controversially, it's a single-sanction system: if you're found guilty of cheating (or lying or stealing), you're kicked out.
That is, surely I can't get 150 percent on the first project and a mere 50 on the second, and still come out with 100, allegedly having masterfully mastered the material in the entire course.
That's pretty much how it generally works.
39 cont'd: I mean, I couldn't figure out if you were asking if that's how it works in my random, nutty stats class, which, yeah, it is, or if you were asking if that's how it works in other classes that offer bonus points which, yeah, it is.
37: I think you're overthinking this parsimon. The world has long been a fallen place.
(32, 34: I honestly don't remember how housing assignments were determined back in the day, except that we specified choices one, two and other. I think. Along with specification of desired suite-mates. Anyway, we all got quadded, so I assume the suite-mate specification was given priority.)
Shouldn't putatively bonus points be awarded for being especially charming or at least grade-grubbing beyond the norm particular brilliance, rather than the brute performance of additional assignments?
33: This is how my school worked for pretty much anything -- go away for a year. One fellow who was sent away for a year for plagiarizing his annual essay whole cloth* was a Rhodes Scholar and later a law professor for a very fancy school.
*He just retyped a journal article.
The world has long been a fallen place.
God totes copied and pasted Eden from another galaxy.
39-41: Okay. I ... tend to think that at the very least a person shouldn't be able to get more than, oh, 20 bonus points max, requiring at least an 80 on the second project/exam in order to count as having mastered things. I would prefer no more than 10 bonus points.
I don't recall ever having had a class in which there was extra credit offered.
17 seems to be correct in my experience. Looking things up on the Internet is how people learn things! Then they know it! Then they can write about it, right? Isn't that how learning things works? We don't have to cite class lecture, do we? The problem is that using Wikipedia in particular seems to short-circuit the entire learning process. This leads to entertaining papers in philosophy.
I think a lot of college students just aren't clear where the line is when it comes to paraphrasing, and composition classes seem to leave them with the impression that the sole purpose of citations is to avoid plagiarism.
39: There are probably a hundred or so better ways to teach high school and college students not to plagiarize than to lecture them about how bad it is
In fact I think the current way this seems to be approached is just about fucked to the max. The current attempts to sorta kinda use the standards for actual scholars are counter-productive and have helped create the current climate of rampant cheating with de jure nuclear retaliation, and de facto selective enforcement and gnashing of teeth on both sides. Blume's 17 has wisdom--it really is a different thing and should be approached differently in pre-college (and even a lot of undergrad*) courses.
*My daughter (who tends to be overly literal on things like this, sometimes to her disadvantage) tells of a discussion with her intro Geology prof that by his nominal rules she should footnote literally every sentence in a survey paper on glaciation since she was unlikely to have an original thought on the subject. He pretty much agreed. But somewhere there is a way to cast it in a more productive fashion.
parsimon, did you go to school in the 19th century, or what?
Surely part of the problem here is the vacuity of the "school report" genre, which seems to amount to "look up and echo a bunch of facts on topic X." So, I think Blume gets
it exactly right in 17.
47: composition classes seem to leave them with the impression that the sole purpose of citations is to avoid plagiarism.
Freshman comp was perhaps the most grueling class I had to take, by which I mean that I barely managed a C on my early submissions, the instructor was unforgiving, and goddamn I learned a lot about what the hell I was actually supposed to be doing. High school had not made that clear, somehow.
My daughter (who tends to be overly literal on things like this, sometimes to her disadvantage) tells of a discussion with her intro Geology prof that by his nominal rules she should footnote literally every sentence in a survey paper on glaciation since she was unlikely to have an original thought on the subject.
I believe this is what government white papers tend to actually look like.
parsimon, did you go to school in the 19th century, or what?
I'm older than you are, but not by quite that much. My memory is also hit or miss for grammar school. But I'm pretty sure there was no extra credit in high school classes (unless it came in the form of being favored by the teacher). Not sure why this is so unthinkable.
It just seems... statistically unlikely? Unless the school didn't allow teachers to decide their own grading policies. And then there's college.
It may be that extra credit is either a response to grade inflation, or else a worse form of grade inflation allowing students to obscure earlier poor performances. Not much anywhere when I was in school (1952-1980).
In one of the intro classes I taught a bunch of times, the curriculum is set for 100%= 500 points, with unlimited extra credit points. You could do literally none of the assigned work, and if you did enough extra credit, still get an A. This is because the extra credit work is just as relevant to the subject matter as the assigned work, so doing 500 points worth of work means you deserve an A regardless of what the work consisted of.
This wouldn't work for more focused courses, (or, probably, math or language) but for freshman surveys in linguistics it's just fine.
It is true that it's going to make a difference what sort of course/class we're talking about.
I don't remember extra credit in high school, or, certainly, at Cal. Not quite the 19th century, although I did start high school during the first Nixon Administration.
I remember some extra credit in high school. I got 120% (or something) in one class where the teacher was trying not to flunk anybody and couldn't manage to write a reasonable test. It didn't count as anything but a 4.0 on my GPA.
I do emember some extra credit in college, but it was only a small number of points (not enough to shift half a letter grade on the overall course) and was awarded as a kind of incentive to practice for a final. For example, you'd get 1/2 a point if you turned in something small assignment that would force you to review. I don't remember it happening often.
I only remember extra credit in one high school class, and I was deeply offended by it. You could get an amount of extra credit bounded only by how fast you could write on my eighth-grade science teacher's tests by producing 'schematic diagrams' consisting of vocabulary words relevant to the topics we were working on connected by lines and arrows showing relationships between them. Just to be a jerk I quit halfway through one test and just went nuts with the 'schematic diagram' -- got about half the actual points but finished up with 150%. Really despised that class. Got a C -- I think because I communicated my opinion of the teacher in an unfortunately direct fashion. And the whole not doing homework thing, too.
56: Wouldn't that reward a humongous amount of shoddy work over a slightly inadequate amount of excellent work?
60: Sounds like you learned the wrong lesson from your 150% grade.
I gave extra credit problems on every homework set when I taught calculus last summer. The homework typically consisted of LOTS of routine problems, and then one or two more interesting problems/proofs for ``extra credit." The grading scheme was arranged so that students could mostly get by doing only the extra credit problems. I did it mostly because the summer school class had a weird mix of different math skill levels, and I liked the idea of introducing proofs in a no-pressure way. I was very pleased with the results: no students did extra credit problems exclusively, but almost everyone did at least a couple of the extra credit problems.
I occasionally give "extra credit" questions on exams, which are of course the same thing as ordinary questions but students seem to like it for some reason I can't possibly understand.
I give extra credit for things that develop good study habits: attending study sessions long before an assignment is due, and outlining the material in advance of when most students would start studying for a test.
IIRC the discrete math and algorithms courses that Otto and I took had extra credit questions on the homework assignments and exams. At least, they were extra credit if you were an undergrad; they were non-optional and non-extra if you were a grad student (and they were harder than the regular questions assigned to the undergrads).
I get offers in the mail every day for extra credit. I'm holding out for the AmEx black card.
I give extra credit, ladies, if you know what I mean and I think you do.*
* If you do, please inform me.
Not only does 'the way' place well, but so do those who take it.
My HS physics teacher would give relatively hard exams and then curve them so the second highest score was 100%. If you got the highest score in the class, you could frequently get 101-105%. He also gave extra credit points if you could explain a hw problem on the board. (He also allowed extra credit labs, but those were significant work.) I had a 110% in physics and it wasn't necessarily the highest grade in the class.
I regularly got extra credit in latin in hs; there would just be an extra question, or extra points if you correctly wrote the date in roman fashion. in math there would be an extra problem or two, rewarding those who worked fast, though I was not one of them. even in college I had plenty of opportunities for extra credit, such that I had a GPA above 4 for a few semesters, which pleased me greatly. I experienced cheating in that the grades for my intro psych class were posted on a board "anonymously" by student ID number, but word got around that I had scored the best, with the somewhat hilarious result that in a huge (tiered, old wooden auditorium-type) classroom with lots of empty seats there was a clot of frat boys around me trying to copy off my (multiple choice, with bubbles) exam. I had to guard it annoyedly with my arm.
On one law school exam, I spent the last half hour or so writing absurd counterfactuals in an extra blue book because I couldn't think of anything else to write about the little short story the professor had served up. I doubt that lagniappe gained me much extra credit, the professor being an old-school curmudgeon, but it turned out one of my better grades.
The thing that irritated me about extra credit in HS was that if you got enough extra credit points, you could get a grade higher than 4.0 for the class. Of course, not all teachers were enamored of this system, the end result of which being that the grade-grubbers (of whom there were many at my HS) would compare notes and try to maximize the number of classes with teachers who were free with the extra credit problems/assignments. I believe there were 7 "valedictorians" who had a total GPA of 4.1 or higher. Not that this really made much difference for me, except w/r/t National Honor Society membership, since my GPA was significantly below 4.0, although still respectable. 3.31 or something. My test scores were a lot better.
My high school capped GPA at 4.0. This had no particular impact on me personally, but I was still shocked to learn of schools where you could have a 4.5 or whatever.
I was saluditarian salutiarian saluditarine second in my class but still not in the top 5%.
I had something like a 4.7, bitches. (AP classes added an extra point, so you earned a 5 for an A in an AP. Yes, this is stupid.)
I think I had a 2.1. I don't really remember.
There were 26 people in my high school graduating class with a 4.0. I had a 3.98. Because of my atrocious class rank, my guidance counselor refused to nominate me for some scholarship or other I was sure I would have won if she had. All seems kind of silly now, but the memory of how angry I was is still pretty visceral.
Texas ISDs have really bizarre mandated rules concerning things that ought to be up to the teacher. Many districts have rules like "All late homework must be accepted for full credit." Ours has a rule "If you are absent fewer than 3 times, you are exempt from the final exam."
This is mandated by the school district! It is completely insane. There are a lot more examples like this, but not having much to do with the high schools, I can never remember the examples.
There weren't 26 people in my high school graduating class.
Ours has a rule "If you are absent fewer than 3 times, you are exempt from the final exam."
!!!
I think GPA only went up to 4.33 in the MPS. I don't remember any special bonus for AP classes either. I don't remember exactly who the 7 were, but I think one of them is a HS teacher, one runs a small museum and one is active in the local roller derby scene. The one I was friends with spent a long time working at SBUX and never finished his BA, to the best of my knowledge.
Grade school always fetishized attendance to the point where they would give prizes to the kids who never missed a day, even when that meant they had shown up ill and infected the whole class with the latest virus.
I once attained a perfect attendance record. It was the year I'd discovered skipping class, but because I had a slightly complicated timetabling clash, the teachers always assumed I was in someone else's class.
I still look back on that as one of the proudest moments of my life, up there with the A in the paper I went to three lectures of.
I won a special prize for attendance where I got to sit in a special room all day instead of going to my classes. Well, okay, it was less a special prize than in-school detention. Because I skipped so much class.
I recall that my friends and I sort of fetishized skipping class; we had t-shirts with crossed absence slips on them that said (in the fashion of the time) "co-ed naked senior skip".
I used to skip class in order play Hearts in the cafeteria. I was terrible at Hearts, too. But it was so revelatory when I got to high school and realized that I could just, like, not go if I didn't want to.
my youngest daughter is wheezing horribly even though she had her ventolin only 2 hours ago. the asthma "action plan" at this point is "go to the ER." I don't want to! I'm sick also. I'll scour the house for liquid ventolin. fuck.
at the ER, next ticket in queue. big ups narnia.
I mean, obviously I typed the comment, didn't post it instantly, then came to the ER, which is next to our house, and hit post.
89: (in the fashion of the time)
Parlance, señor, parlance.
she decided she wanted daddy because he can carry her home (I'm not allowed because of arthritis) and because he reads yotsuba better (her favorite manga.) now I can sleep lie in bed and wait. I'm home. I guess I could look at the internet but I'm tired and I have a piercing headache. weighed myself on the hospital scale, have gained wait on anti-psychotics. FUCKING BULLSHIT. I ate the sameas ever. on the positive side I seem to have broken through the crisis stage insh'allah and am not suicidal or even particularly unhappy!
I think the real complicated, unclear thing about plagiarism is not the Internet, although it doesn't help. It's the fact that plagiarism standards that make sense for professional life or post-graduate work are applied to earlier levels of education, even if they don't always make sense there.
For example, I worked as a substitute teacher for a while once, and I had to give the final assignment for a class and grade it. (Long story.) The class was about computers and communications - using MS Office, using the Internet for research, etc. - so the final project was a PowerPoint presentation about a research project of the student's choice, intended to test both their research abilities and their ability to put together readable PowerPoint slides.
There was a plagiarism policy and I did enforce it, but in hindsight I'm not too clear on why. Any original thought or composition in that project was entirely optional. Mastery of class material is apparent if the text looks like it came from multiple online sources, if the slides' color schemes didn't make the text illegible, and if the student included vaguely appropriate graphic elements. So requiring MLA-format citations would have been pointless, and even the level of rigor of citation that was required probably seemed like an arbitrary "gotcha" to the kids.
One reason to take plagiarism seriously in 10th grade is because it'll be taken seriously in later years. If nothing else, you've got to train kids to be obedient, good, mindless worker bee drones, etc., for the same reason we say the Pledge of Allegiance and require school uniforms. (Just doing my part to get this to 1,000 comments.) But I'm a bit skeptical of that rationale in general, and requiring that for something like this in particular seems like it might not be worth the effort. And for any assignment where original thought does matter, you obviously need to document what isn't original. But for huge amounts of work in school, there is little or no expectation of original work.
Another part of the problem is that even after you spend hours and hours figuring out where every single assignment in every single class falls on the relevance-of-plagiarism scale, you'll still get parents saying taking plagiarism seriously just deserves an "attaboy" and kids saying that the policy wasn't explained to them and originality is breaking one sentence into two. Because parents often don't care about education and are bad judges of their kids' characters, some kids are likely to deliberately ignore plagiarism policies while others are likely to genuinely misunderstand them, people in general suck, and student-teacher ratios make it unfeasible for a lot of teachers to tell all this apart.
I don't know whether this Christine Pelton had "a bug up her ass" about it (1); the article doesn't make that clear. (Yay he-said-she-said "balanced" reporting!) Contracts might have been a good idea if she wasn't sure if the administration would back her up on taking plagiarism seriously, and as it turned out, they didn't. But there actually are complicated issues here. Long story short, I agree with 48.
As for extra credit, most extra credit I remember was either really hard bonus problems at the end of tests or major homework assignments that the teacher didn't expect most people to be able to finish, or entire optional assignments. I seem to remember it being a mix of trying to encourage students to go above and beyond, and teachers thinking something like "Judging by scores on the last test, I made it harder than I thought, so here's a chance to make it up."
(1) Source: comment 24.
I'm not sure, but I think in my high school GPA went up to 5 for all honors classes, not just AP classes. And then at Cornell an A+ was 4.3.
I assume GPA at my graduate institution stops at 4.0, but my adviser has made clear that doing any better than passing indicates devoting too much time to classwork. (On the other hand, to pass I need at least a B+. So 3.5 GPA on the dot, here I hopefuly come.)
no news. sometimes I wish they could just let me take supplementary oxygen home. god, I guess I better at least try to go to sleep, instead of moping around listening to cat power while phantom icepicks of obsidian sharpness, the tips fading down to a few molecules, are being driven into each of my eyes through the pupil. I'll let you guys know how it went tomorrow. I'm 98% certain she'll not be admitted.
Please do update us, al. We've never had to do any interventions with Mara's asthma and I'm afraid that's making us lazy and we'll be in a terrible situation if we ever need more. Luckily I already have a stash of Yotsuba in case of need.
the new spacers are awesome, but the vaporizer, where you put in liquid ventolin and it comes out as a chemical fog is REALLY effective. they hate it though, and holding the mask on a screaming 3-year-old is not fun. only bright side is that they inhale more deeply when they're crying. basically my advice is. follow the action plan religiously. like if it says 6-hourly, set the alarm and wake her up to give it to her in the middle of the night. pain in the ass for everyone, but ultimately the way to go.
Of course, in grad school, grade inflation turns into grade price-floors, so to speak - the range at mine was basically B to A+, with B=F, at least partly due to loan requirements.
My lingering GPA grumble from undergrad is that the one A-minus I got counted against me, while none of the A-pluses counted for me. I guess that's pretty-small-violin, in the symphony of possible complaints in the world.
"If you are absent fewer than 3 times, you are exempt from the final exam."
So in Texas, 100% of life is just showing up?
94: depends on which nerd reference he's making! Onions? Dudes?
My mother-in-law, a college English teacher, was busting on me over the weekend for using Wikipedia as a source of information. That is crazy to me, but Wikipedia as a big collection of facts does undermine some of the theoretical supports for the concept of plagiarism.
I suddenly have a burning desire to know.
106: How, more than any other encyclopedia? You go to Wikipedia, but you give the reference and anyone interested can follow it up to get Wikipedia's sources.