Re: thesis and dissertation "writing" -- noted without commentWe rely on
turnitin here at UMASS, as well. A colleague told me that it is possible for
students to submit provisional copies of papers to turnitin, and thus game it
until they have a paper which has been sufficiently baudlerized to pass
inspection.
----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew Biro
To: Michael Maniates ; gep-ed@listserve1.allegheny.edu
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 3:15 PM
Subject: Re: thesis and dissertation "writing" -- noted without comment
A further twist to the IP issue.... There was an instance a few years ago
where a student kicked up a fuss about having his/her work submitted to
Turnitin. As I recall, the argument was that, because all submitted work
becomes part of the database that Turnitin checks new submissions against, and
because Turnitin's commercial success partly depends on having as large a
database as possible, the student's intellectual property (assuming that he/she
actually wrote the essay!) was being used for someone else's profit, without
consent or compensation.
Andrew
Andrew Biro
Dept of Political Science
Acadia University
Wolfville, NS B4P 2R6
(902)585-1925
andrew.b...@acadiau.ca
On 07/01/09 3:20 PM, "Michael Maniates" <mmani...@allegheny.edu> wrote:
From Ronnie Lipschutz...I think he's on to something
MM
All rather ironic (or pathetic), in light of the sanctity of intellectual
property rights, no?
I suspect this all goes along with downloading music, film, etc. from the
web.
Ronnie
Michael Maniates wrote:
As most of you know, I was away during the Spring of 2007 with Semester
at Sea. I served as Dean, hired the faculty, dealt with academic
problems...the usual Deanly stuff.
We had ~ 700 students on the ship, from maybe 200+ institutions, from
Ivy League to schools that required only a pulse for admission, if that.
Additionally, we were running under the Univ. of Virginia's Honor Code,
which is probably the strongest in the land: One strike and you're out Code.
Any "cheating, lying, or stealing," and you're expelled. This code was
explained to students, and discussed in class by faculty.
Despite all of this, we had several instances of plagiarism, mostly
involving the cutting and pasting of material from web sources. When
confronted, students seemed to be genuinely shocked. They thought, at least
many did, that this was how one did research: cutting and pasting, with some
bracketed commentary throughout.
One student was expelled for this sort of behavior on a marginal
assignment. Others (for whom we couldn't did up definitive proof) were read
the riot act.
I leave that experience thinking that there's something seriously amiss
in the educational/socialization process, as opposed to a decline in the
ethical bearing of our students. That so many students could think that what
we regard as plagiarism is AOK, even in the face of daunting sanctions, was
alarming.
Mike Maniates
At 01:04 PM 1/7/2009, you wrote:
On cheating, great discussion, thanks to those who have been posting.
A few random thoughts:
Rational choice/incentive model: People cheat when the stakes are
high and the sanctions are low/unlikely. I read of one study in which MBA
students were found more likely than JD students to cheat, attributed to the
latter's fear of not being allowed to sit for the bar exam if caught. I try
reasonably to catch them, but do my students really fear being caught? I doubt
it.
Socialization/norms model: I will speak only for the USA. (1) Studies
show that young people here increasingly crave fame and acclaim (I blame
American Idol, seriously). (2) Neoliberal commodification of education has made
teachers at lower levels into accomplices, which must send a powerful message
to the kids. We have seen MANY staff-facilitated cheating scandals on the
No-Child-Left-Behind standardized tests by which teachers and schools are
increasingly evaluated, including my own kids' former elementary school, with
nobody fired as a result. (3) "Pay to play" politics and financial Ponzi
schemes are pretty much the heart of our political economy, as recent events
have shown. It is not too strong to say that the dominant norms in public life
have become "be famous or you are a loser", "it's the outcome, not the path to
it, by which you will be judged", and "don't get caught."
Information/transaction costs model: The line as to what constitutes
plagiarism has been blurred with online resources, web-sites that interlink and
reproduce without attribution, etc, and students in K-12 are not taught
seriously where the line is; and the transaction costs have dropped greatly
with cut-and-paste, Google, Wikipedia, and online buy-a-paper sites.
In other words, all our social-science approaches lead in the same
direction. Too bleak?
On a lighter note, veterans will recall that GEPED had its own
experience several years ago, when someone posted a paragraph from a paper that
a student couldn't possibly have written, and I recognized it as being from
Nancy Peluso's chapter in the edited volume Ronnie Lipschutz and I did some
years back. I reproduced that e-mail exchange in my syllabi for a while, as a
warning to students....kc
>>> Susanne Moser <promu...@susannemoser.com> 1/7/2009 11:24 AM >>>
Good morning everyone -
I don't know about you all - maybe you're used to this, maybe you're
cynical, maybe you've given up.... but I find all these posts rather
disturbing to read. I don't teach at a colleague or university so
don't
have first-hand experience. Thus forgive if this is a totally dumb
question, but can someone please offer some hunches as to the reasons
for why such services exist?
Are professors placing too many demands on students (either or both in
quantity or quality)? Are students too dumb or ill-educated so that,
by
the time they get to college they can't perform what is asked of them?
Is there a lack of mentoring, lack of writing assistance (because
professors have papers to publish or perish, and advisory staff got
cut)? Is there too much parental pressure to be a straight A student?
Is
it the pressure to get into grad school and super-duper jobs? Is it
vanity? Is it just another money-making ploy by the good old
capitalists
who will find just about any niche to exploit? Are morals that far out
the window and maybe more so than before? And is anyone going to get
on
the barricades and resist this baffling trend of anti-intellectualism?
(if I go on for a bit, it will soon be a GEP-relevant topic....)
Sorry, this just got me all rallied up, and I am not even at the
bottom
of the first cup of caffeine....
Susi
Peter Jacques wrote:
> Also, in this political economy of cheating, Turnitin.com offers a
separate service ("writecheck") specifically and only for students who can see,
for a fee, if their paper indicates plagiarism compared to the turnitin
database without adding it to the turnitin database.
At UCF, thesis chairs are now mandated to submit all theses and
dissertations to turnitincom.
>
> Peter J. Jacques, Ph.D.
> Department of Political Science
> University of Central Florida
> P.O. Box 161356
> 4000 Central Florida Blvd.
> Orlando, FL 32816-1356
>
> Phone: (407) 823-2608
> Fax: (407) 823-0051
> http://ucf.academia.edu/PeterJacques
>
>
>
