Cheating Facts

After reading my earlier post on academic fraud, Peter emailed in this presentation on academic cheating. The figures are arresting, though I question how serious most of the cases are. I suspect that most of the plagiarism is failure to properly quote rather than passing off a whole paper made up of other people's work as one's own. The fact that watching the movie and writing a book report on that instead of the actual book is considered cheating by the graphic kinda confirms that it's extremely strict; I don't think that counts as cheating either, it's just a good way to get a bad grade. If the teacher can't tell you didn't read the book, then either the teacher or their assignment is at fault as much as the student. It's a bit dishonest, but I certainly don't think it should be punished beyond a bad grade.

Not surprising, though, that those with the most to lose and the highest pressure (i.e., the top grades) are the most likely to cheat. I wonder why they aren't getting caught; stuff cribbed from Wikipedia ought to be the first thing anti-plagiarism software detects.

I remember when I was taking an English Literature college class. I was astounded that most of my classmates were using Wikipedia as their primary source, something I never considered doing as I believed it was inappropriate (aside from the fact that the page could be complete bullshit at the time you read it due to bad luck, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and by the time your in high school you should be beyond depending on encyclopedias as a source for papers).

Graphic after the fold.

Is this the sexual equivalent of the one-drop rule?

Leading with "The dead keep getting outed:" Andrew Sullivan quotes a New York Times article speaking of an "early homosexual relationship with a white businessman." This comes after Andrew just had to walk back his absolute certainty that Gandhi was gay and take the position that we'll probably never know his sexual orientation.

The problem, as I see it, is first that Andrew doesn't really believe in male bisexuality, and second that he always favors evidence of homosexuality over evidence of heterosexuality (at least in famous people). In Malcolm's case, his six children (two of which, twins, were posthumous) were a little too much for Andrew (possibly in a more cautious mood after the Gandhi experience), but he still led with "outing" and held it open. Come on, the sexual relationship, if it happened, was when he was young with someone who was apparently powerful (meaning the relationship could have been a power relationship, or done for mercenary reasons, etc.). It is utterly unreasonable, given the weight of evidence against his being gay, to think it's really an open question. Unless one bit of gayness makes you gay as one drop of African blood made you black back in the era of Jim Crow (obviously with the reverse intent).

Stanford's Cathedral to Wikipedia's Bazaar

At least as far as the field of Philosophy goes. As the story submitter points out, their idea of what belongs in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is broad enough to include an article on Quantum Computing.

Mac's Favored by College Freshmen

Slashdot reports that Macintosh's share of the Freshmen market, so to speak, at the University of Virginia has steadily risen and is threatening to break 50%. Not surprising. Macs are cool, pretty, have Unix at their core but unlike Linux can run Office and Adobe Creative Suite. And if you're already spending a gazillion dollars on tuition, why the heck not?

Academic Cheating and Internet File Sharing

This New York Times article describes widespread copying off the web without attribution in colleges across the country. It also makes a link between that and rampant piracy, which Matthew Yglesias takes issue with.

I think that the relationship between the two is highly exaggerated. As one of Yglesias' commenters pointed out, "It’s perfectly legal to submit “Paradise Lost” for your MFA thesis, but that wouldn’t get you anywhere with your committee chair." And it's perfectly legal to buy the copyright to a paper from someone else and submit it as your own, but it's still plagiarism in the academic sense.

I do think that nebulous authorship does have a lot to do with it, though. If the college does not adequately drill in to student's heads that they have to attribute everything, even things written collectively and especially even Wikipedia, it is easy to see yourself as a part of the collective and regard it as unnecessary to attribute. Besides, you might reasonably have some trouble figuring out how to attribute something like Wikipedia if your handbook isn't really good about websites.

Finally, I find this quote from the NYT article to be astonishingly stupid:

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

“If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade,” Ms. Blum said, voicing student attitudes. “And it’s O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit.”

College itself requires you to put on personas and say things you don't believe. Tell me you've gone to college and never gotten a writing assignment that said, "Take a strong position on x and back it up with facts and arguments." where you still had to do it even if you didn't have a strong position on the chosen topic. Heck, we had to do that in my grade school where we were all split up into two teams to debate whether smoking should be illegal or not.

Oh, and social networking and Internet personas have nothing to do with "writ[ing] papers you couldn't care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade". That also is an essential part of college. Not every assignment is going to be one that you care about for anything other than the grade it gives. That was just as true 100 years ago as it is today.

As for anonymity being a consequence of the alleged lack of uniqueness the Internet age engenders, I think the reason for it is actually tied to uniqueness of identity now as much as back in the era of Publius and the Federalist Papers: you write anonymously because you want to protect your unique identity, i.e., your reputation, and still speak in an unfettered manner.