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
>
>
>
--
Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Professor of Politics, 234 Crown College
UC-Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA
Phone: (831) 459-3275; Email: rlip...@ucsc.edu; Web:
http://people.ucsc.edu/~rlipsch;
