British Expatriate Network

http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6363647.stm

An article on the BBC site regarding undergraduate students cheating their way through university sparked my interest when Baronness Deech is report to have said "the emphasis on original work and creative thought was being lost.

...Students now think they have to 'copy down accurately something that is already on screen'.

BBC education correspondent Sue Littlemore said it is estimated that 10% of university work from across the UK is plagiarised and that most cheating goes undetected or ignored."

Having been a victim of plagiarism I feel I have an understanding of how wrong it is. However, if a student is unaware that that is what they are doing, can it be considered 'cheating'. Surely cheating is the act of knowing that you are taking something that isn't yours and saying that it is?

Isn't that interesting.

Is a sin, a sin, if you don't know it's a sin when you commit it? Paradox?

I don't know how anyone can remember everything they have read. I used a phrase, "...take all appropriate and necessary actions to comply with the requirements...", I know that I had read it somewhere but not exactly where. Even if I had remembered, I could not have cited it in a specification.

Does anyone actually own a sequence of words? how many words before it becomes personal property?

I was going to ask, How many different ways can you say,"the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"? but then, there are so many tunes, different combinations of a few notes.

I remember a guy wrote a new specification for a new subject, and sent it out for review. One of the reviewers was a senior project manager. A month or two later, the same draft came around for review, with the senior project manager as author. I asked the original author what was happening. He had complained to his boss, only to be told not to rock the boat.

It goes on a lot even in life outside of college .
many a movie or book is plagiarized and just by changing a few minor details the work is advertized as *oringinal *


SIN
is a sin a sin if you dont know its a sin thats a easy one its a matter of what your moral are and what religious dotrine you follow . it cant be a sin if you dont believe sin exists

CHEATING
like billy boy clinton who believes that a bj is not sex so therefore is not * cheating * depends on your own concept of right and wrong cant be wrong if you dont believe in the concept of sexually faithfull marriage .

knowing if somebody perposely *stole * others words is a tough one .
need more evidence than just it looks like the same thought . sentence , etc

Interesting thought there. How does one decide what's a sin and what isn't? Is pre-marital sex a sin? I seem to recall some South Pacific cultures have a deal where it's a Good Thing to have a baby before marriage as it shows the woman is fertile, as opposed to the Western idea that a woman should be chaste and pure.

Cheating and plaigiarism are two different things.

Plagiarism is taking whole chunks of someone else work, word for word and settling it into your own description of whatever.

Cheating is having the ability to read and understand some elses work, rehash it and say it in your own words.

Understanding and translating your view of what someone said is becoming a rare ability, we don't pay teachers anywhere enough to demand they ask that from our students.

Don't agree on your definition of cheating. Just about everything we do in school fits in there. Cheating is when you go into an exam with the answers plugged into your wristwatch. Or hacking into the database and modifying the scores.

An acquaintance, a sous-chef came to Phila. to work for a great pastry chef, who specialised in chocolate, to learn his techniques. This is normal. he took the techniques and adapted and combined them with other techniques and ideas, to make his own specialty, for when he became a head pastry chef. This is a normal process.

A woman was sued in Phila. She had worked for another woman who made high end pies for the many restaurants in the area. She left and started her own business. She used slightly different recipes, but the pies had the same look. It was settled out of court, because the plaintiff's husband worked for a big law firm, and they brought in the big guns. It was clear that they would go on until defendent was broke. The settlement was that the pies must also have a different look.

Is it cheating if you don't realise?
Is it stealing when a toddler picks up a chocolate bar in a shop and eats it?

Same answer except that here you are talking about adults who damn well should realise. And if they don't then they shouldn't be awarded their degrees. Not as a punishment, but because that sort of understanding is part of what is required to be worthy of receiving a degree, imo. It's not just about acquiring a bunch of facts -that's what Mastermind is for. Passing these students is what gives rise to the "school of hard knocks is better than academia" argument, and who can blame them if students of this poor caliber are being passed off as employment-ready?

You wouldn't punish the toddler, but neither would you let them carry on enjoying the chocolate bar without any idea that what they did was wrong. You'd explain, make it better with the shop in some way, whatever works with your style of parenting, and you wouldn't let the toddler go into a shop by themselves until the understood the concept of how to acquire the goods in the correct fashion.

It is cheating, same is the toddler eating the chocolate stole it. The lack of understanding does not diminish the crime, but it should alter the punishment/correction process. And it should not go uncorrected. Not understanding does not make it OK.

It's manuscript manslaughter ;)

edited for typos roll

Agreed. But what happens if the toddler is allowed to eat the chocolate bar? We then have a case that the toddler doesn't know the difference between right and wrong? Would the toddler as a 5 or 6 year old know that just taking a chocolate bar from the shelf and eating it is stealing?

The point being, if these students have never been taught how and what is considered cheating, we may see it as cheating but do they? I know in our university the plagiarizer when found guilty has to attend a special course on plagiarism and pass it in order to continue with their degree. But surely if the belief is these students don't know before they do it then the schools are letting them down or the colleges/universities should have a foundation course that includes plagiarism so these students know?

Don't adults generally mention to a toddler not to touch? Should students if entering college/university be taught the same way but because they are older the punishment should be harsher - this is what plagiarism is, don't do it, and now you know there are no excuses? Found out, you WILL be out!

Why are these things wrong? only because we have set up a system for living in which these things are defined as wrong. They are not wrong by any natural or intrinsic law. There are communities where everything is communal property.

We make plaigarism a wrong in school because it interferes with the purpose of developing the pupil's abilities. On the other hand, the average pupil goes to school to get the highest degree within grasp, rather than the pure pursuit of knowledge.

And when does it become wrong because children are allowed to copy out of a text book to answer questions posed by a teacher but they aren't allowed to copy a piece of text and put it into an essay unless they add all the bits to show that it isn't theirs?

Actually, plagiarism came about because of copyright laws. If you stick with the rules of plagiarism then the American constitution would be found guilty and both Shakespeare and Chaucer would be hung among many other well known writers! :wink:

I don't disagree with the ruling that if a student plagiarizes, it is considered wrong and therefore consequences to their actions. What I am questioning is the fact that they are considered cheaters even if they don't know it is cheating. Surely there should be some responsibility on the education that students receive to either explain better or change something.

Also, are copyright laws different in different countries? Would this make a difference to what is considered plagiarism?

I was trying to distinguish between law and morality.

In schooling, no matter what the law says, our objective is to help students to learn and be able to think critically and creatively, as well as take on knowledge. Clearly, from that point of view, straight copying is a negative.

Much is in the measures by which the educators are judged. For example, The VP in charge of a large division of a very large engineering company, wrote a memo in which, he said he placed equal emphasis on quality, budget and schedule. Well, each month, the computer told us if we were on schedule and if we were on budget; it said nothing about quality because that shows up when the thing is built, months or years later. The result is that we were measured only on budget and schedule as far as the near future was concerned.

Teaching to tests is dangerous.

true micheal but in this US world most folks buy on conveniance * schedule* and price *budget * quality unfortunatly is only realized later .

is it because that habit is taught or is that taught becuase of the habit ?? :smile:

my wife is a quality control magre who says quality is the most important of the 3 and whats most lacking in todays world

In the long term, your wife is correct, but it is such a difficult thing to measure. I worked designing things from oil refineries to nuclear power plants and when you build and find that a beam and a pipe want to occupy the same space, that's a lack of quality, but it doesn't show until you build. For the guy working on it, he may not be working for the company by the time they know if it was a quality job or not, and so, is not measured on quality.

The point though is that in education, the measures of success must be fomed to achieve the desired result, and we ain't doing it.