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Kevin Chen writes a post in his blog about incentives and scaling from his two years as a teaching assistant. Specifically in his current post he addresses plagiarism in computer science and why it has still not stopped.
The most important goal is to keep the course fair for students who do honest work. Instructors must assign grades that accurately reflect performance. A student who grapples with a problem — becoming a stronger programmer in the process — should never receive a lower grade than one who copies and pastes.
Finally, as educators, we also hope that the accused student can learn difficult lessons about ethical behavior in the classroom rather than the workplace.
From his experience, every semester somewhere between 10% to 40% of the students carry out blatant, indisputable cases of plagiarism with an unknown amount of less clear cases left unaddressed. How does this match with soylentil's experiences here, either in computer science or other fields? The perspectives are likely quite different from institution to institution as well as whether you are still studying in college or university, recently graduated, or in a teaching role.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @12:14PM (7 children)
The plagiarism debate is amplified when you only look at the result of an assignment. If someone wants to copy, then there is no (foolproof) way of stopping him or her. The premise employed is that you can assess a person's abilities by analyzing the result. However, the result is just the final stage of a learning process. Therefore, only looking at the result of an assignment will always be problematic if you want to assess the learning of a student.
Assignments that require the documentation of the development process are much harder to plagiarize. One of the reasons is in the personal strategies employed by each student to go through the learning process. The process of learning can surely be plagiarized, but when the student, as a result, actually has gained insight into the subject matter, who are we to judge the way you became smarter? The point being, we all base knowledge in one or another way on replicating other's work (we are big apes). Therefore, plagiarism is an integral part of learning. The key insight here is that the measure of knowledge gained is not solely a measure of result. It is a measure how much a student adapts his though-process to get to the result. As such, an assignment that includes documentation of process can help both teacher and student.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 26 2018, @03:16PM (6 children)
As mentioned in some threads above, there is in fact a foolproof way of stopping a cheater: Oral exam. Ask a student who did the work about their work, and they can tell you. Ask a cheater, and they can't. It's that simple, and it's one reason that doctoral candidates and many master's candidates have to defend their theses before a panel.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @03:36PM (5 children)
Actually, oral exam is not foolproof at all.
How would you react to the situation where the student copied all of his work and is able to defend everything that is in it(*)? Do you fail the student for copying, or does he pass because he knows the subject matter?
There is a subtle and fine line to walk here. No single way will be able to "solve" the problem. It always depends on the details.
(*) been there, seen that
(Score: 2) by tekk on Monday March 26 2018, @05:40PM (2 children)
Pass because he knows the subject matter. The problem with cheating is that you go forward without understanding what's going on.
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @05:59PM (1 child)
No, during oral exam, if you understand the subject matter then you know what is going on. It is actually quite easy to weed out those who do not understand. Those who reiterate the content instead of explaining its meaning do not understand the subject matter at all.
It is the task of the examiner to determine to which degree a student understands the (deeper) meaning and the consequences of the subject matter. That is what the grades are supposed to reflect.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:16AM
I think we're in agreement?
The hypothetical given was "what if a student plagiarized their assignment yet they successfully demonstrate understanding of the subject matter in their oral exam."
The answer to this, in my opinion, is that if they fully understand what they submitted and the subject matter of the project, then I would pass them.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday March 26 2018, @06:21PM (1 child)
So the downside of being able to defend plagiarized work would be that the required knowledge doesn't extend past the contours of the problem at hand? I could see where someone could study someone else's work sufficiently to explain it, but then couldn't synthesize anything similar. That doesn't sound much different than being a literary critic.
The curriculum would have to change to ensure that the gaps were filled in, perhaps with extraordinary volumes of additional work. But that would encourage even more plagiarism. Damn you and your details!
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by BsAtHome on Monday March 26 2018, @06:53PM
The whole point is that much of education exactly starts with reproducing the knowledge of others! We give the students books and assume they know the content. Reproducing someone else's work is what every student starts with.
The part of synthesis is the taxonomic leap we want to see in students. It is assumed that a student attaining sufficient subject-literacy in different fields will result in a student to be able to use and combine that knowledge and get to a higher level than the sum of subjects. And this is exactly what the grades are supposed to be based on; to which level has the student assimilated knowledge _and_ to which degree he can use and combine this knowledge to see and create a bigger picture than its constituent parts.
Therefore, the process of learning is an important part. Simply asking factual knowledge is like asking the library for a book containing words. If the student actually understands the subject matter, he will be able to explain the relational contexts of that subject matter, regardless where he started.
It actually does not matter at all where the student started, or we would need to throw every single student out of school for plagiarizing the books they learn from!