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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, 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!