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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 26 2018, @05:23PM
Yes. Correct. Perfect answer. I agree about 10,000%. Now, how do we convince managers to understand and adopt the attitude?
A couple places, I've wanted to insert something similar into the previous conversations. Something like, "If you think he cheated, but aren't certain, and/or can't prove it, give him a low passing grade, and let him sink or swim later in life." But, that "sink or swim" stuff really doesn't work. It's the networking that works, for so many. No need to really understand what you're doing in your shop/lab/factory if you have a buddy that you went to school with. Or the boss is an alumni of the same college. Or, you go to the same church as the HR. Or, you drink with the right people. Nepotism has no boundaries. If you have friends in the right places, they won't let you sink.
Those of us who grew up believing in a meritocracy have experiences some pretty sad disillusionments.