Philosophy
As we've seen before (in a case in which a professor discovered a massive collective case of cheating), academic dishonesty is a serious and growing problem. What most cheaters don't always realize, however (especially those who engage in plagiarism), is the paradoxical nature of cheating: those who need to do it are usually not clever enough to know how to do it well enough to get away with it, and those who could get away with it are smart enough not to need to do it...
To paraphrase something I read in a fascinating article on anosognosia a couple of years ago: if you're too stupid to cheat, you're probably too stupid to know you're too stupid to cheat... The irony, of course, is that if you think you're clever enough to get away with it, you probably don't belong to the clever category...
Now, while the following video disavows the existence of our agency, those of us who, willingly or unwillingly, work for the Department of Plagiarism Investigation are familiar with lots of different versions and variations of cheating, and the disadvantage of any one cheater is that he/she is competing against the accumulated knowledge our agency has collected since its inception a long, long time ago...
Here is just a small sample of the many ways (both laughable and frustrating) in which students think they can get away with plagiarized work:
Of course, we can't divulge all the methods we have for catching instances of plagiarism, but even if you don't care about education itself or the value of honest work, it's still in your own self-interest not to cheat because if you get caught... well, let's not go there...
- Is There Something Intrinsically Good About Fair Play?
I told the shorter of the short people yesterday that he should not cheat at solitaire. He responded, "Why not?" To which I said, "Ummmm..." Clearly, "cheating" in this case indicates breaking the rules and not swindling another player. By breaking the...
- Plagiarism And Language
Guest-post from Michael Schmidt today: The ethics of plagiarism have been crossing my computer screen a lot, lately. On August 9, Stanley Fish wrote on opinion piece in the New York Times stating that plagiarism ?is not a big moral deal.? The rules of...
- Would This Be Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is the theft of intellectual property. If you take the ideas or worse the words of someone else's published work and include it in yours, you've got a case of plagiarism. But here's an interesting twist. Suppose the idea was yours...
- The Growing Problem Of Academic Cheating
Many of us whose job it is to educate young minds do it because we think it's important and because we want to make a real difference in the world. In fact, in some cases we decide to teach even at the expense of personal well-being and practical...
- Cheating--who Suffers?
You have seen and probably used one of these...an unattended snack box where payment is on the honor system. Well, the same can be understood in the following story...sort of an invisible ethical administrator. "The Temptation to Cheat in Computer Science...
Philosophy
The Punishable Perils of Plagiarism
To paraphrase something I read in a fascinating article on anosognosia a couple of years ago: if you're too stupid to cheat, you're probably too stupid to know you're too stupid to cheat... The irony, of course, is that if you think you're clever enough to get away with it, you probably don't belong to the clever category...
Now, while the following video disavows the existence of our agency, those of us who, willingly or unwillingly, work for the Department of Plagiarism Investigation are familiar with lots of different versions and variations of cheating, and the disadvantage of any one cheater is that he/she is competing against the accumulated knowledge our agency has collected since its inception a long, long time ago...
Here is just a small sample of the many ways (both laughable and frustrating) in which students think they can get away with plagiarized work:
Of course, we can't divulge all the methods we have for catching instances of plagiarism, but even if you don't care about education itself or the value of honest work, it's still in your own self-interest not to cheat because if you get caught... well, let's not go there...
- Is There Something Intrinsically Good About Fair Play?
I told the shorter of the short people yesterday that he should not cheat at solitaire. He responded, "Why not?" To which I said, "Ummmm..." Clearly, "cheating" in this case indicates breaking the rules and not swindling another player. By breaking the...
- Plagiarism And Language
Guest-post from Michael Schmidt today: The ethics of plagiarism have been crossing my computer screen a lot, lately. On August 9, Stanley Fish wrote on opinion piece in the New York Times stating that plagiarism ?is not a big moral deal.? The rules of...
- Would This Be Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is the theft of intellectual property. If you take the ideas or worse the words of someone else's published work and include it in yours, you've got a case of plagiarism. But here's an interesting twist. Suppose the idea was yours...
- The Growing Problem Of Academic Cheating
Many of us whose job it is to educate young minds do it because we think it's important and because we want to make a real difference in the world. In fact, in some cases we decide to teach even at the expense of personal well-being and practical...
- Cheating--who Suffers?
You have seen and probably used one of these...an unattended snack box where payment is on the honor system. Well, the same can be understood in the following story...sort of an invisible ethical administrator. "The Temptation to Cheat in Computer Science...