One of my favorite subjects is woven through the highly entertaining This American Life segment about Emir Kamenica. I highly recommend listening. Unrelated to the main story, at the very beginning Michael Lewis details a very nice defense of plagiarism:
The concept was alien to me, I mean I just thought it was an odd concept because you repeat what other people say all the time, I was just repeating what someone else said, it was a very intelligent thing to repeat. And I thought I was saving us a lot of trouble… save him the trouble of having to read something really awful and I wouldn’t have to write a boring book report or even read the boring book and so I was doing both of us a favor. And it seemed sortof counterintuitive to have to generate a thing that had already been done.
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September 10, 2013 at 7:40 am
Niceh Amster
Its nice and rhetoric, but logically false.
So, in the hypothetical situation of a term paper, he admits to misleading the teacher about the authorship of his work? That is the crime.
Because if he states explicitly the author of 2 lines of his work, then this is a quote and not plagiarism. If he submits someone else’s paper, (his counter intuitive notion) then he has failed to fulfill the basic requirement of the course, so he fails the course.
September 10, 2013 at 8:29 am
jeff
i don’t know the details, but for the sake of argument suppose he copied verbatim someone else’s work, gave an accurate citation and added nothing else. is that a crime?
September 10, 2013 at 10:40 am
Niceh Amster
Nope. But then, it isn’t plagiarism, right?
You as a teacher, would you let him pass the exam? Isn’t the purpose of writing a paper to let him think about the subject himself? This is the only fallacy of his reasoning. Yes, sure, I would love to read sci-fi short story from my favorite author as a term-paper in econ 101. It just means that the student doesn’t know about econ.
September 10, 2013 at 11:41 am
jeff
lets compare two students. the first one writes his own term paper and its just ok. the second one goes to google and finds 100 articles written on the subject some of which are really bad, some of which are ok, and some of which are spot on. he picks the spot-on one and submits that as his term-paper.
which of these students has revealed a better understanding of the subject?
September 10, 2013 at 1:02 pm
Niceh Amster
This discussion has strayed from plagiarism.
I would pick student 1 and this is because of my own experience.
Choosing your own words, among many synonyms with slightly different meanings, can lead to more understanding of the core of the problem than just picking up the article with most citations.
That said, for student 2 to have a deep understanding that would prompt him to pick the top article, he has to have gone through writing a paper. Most often this is not the case with undergrads. If it were – then he has already fulfilled the objective (he could submit his own paper), but has found better words through the top article and this wins him the prize.
Given that 2 is a tail event(subjective), I will stay with 1.
September 10, 2013 at 1:40 pm
jeff
I would pick student 2. I would summarize your comment as saying you would also pick student 2 but you just don’t think something like this example would ever happen. Since its not about what would ever happen but just what we would do conditional on it happening, i therefore shorten your response to say that you would pick 2 as well.
I don’t think this has strayed from plagiarism because i don’t think the reasoning behind favoring student 2 has anything to do with whether he gives a citation for the paper he cribbed from google.
if he finds the right idea out of the pile of wrong ideas he has revealed his understanding whether the pile of wrong ideas he was sorting through was in his head (student #1) or on google (student #2).
whether he cited the person who first wrote down the right idea has no bearing on that inference. that is, if he “plagiarized” we would still give him the better grade.
September 10, 2013 at 2:34 pm
Niceh Amster
“if he finds the right idea out of the pile of wrong ideas he has revealed his understanding whether the pile of wrong ideas he was sorting through was in his head (student #1) or on google (student #2).” I agree with this. Also conditional on happening, the two 2 students would bring forward ideas of the same value, so the hypothetical teacher would be indifferent between them two.
I have another defense for plagiarism. There is this notion around, like “there are no new ideas, everything is a recollection of something that has already existed”, similar to how the words we learned to use in language are the brainchild of someone, who existed before us. While in these cases we do not quote the source (we could not, even if wanted), an original thinker has at least the right of having his name attached to his choice collection of words, summarizing a new concept. (Don’t we all hate it when somebody present our idea as his own?-a feeling as a source of property right)
Yet, ideas travel around and the name of the thinker often gets lost (as for e.g. “I dunno remember who said this”), so plagiarizing is inevitable and we all have committed it. Then, if you and I have committed it, who are we to judge others?
Therefore, open source could be the asymptotic equilibrium.
September 10, 2013 at 2:18 pm
SuperAnon@WhyCareAboutAnonymity.com
Suppose I am trying to train an individual to do research whereby they have to think creatively about how to solve game theory (or any sort of math) problems. I write a problem. One approach to solving the problem is to try to develop an intuition for how it works, visualizing it geometrically, make false-starts, simplify the problem to solve it in special cases before generalizing etc. Another approach would be to find someone else’s solution to the problem, admire someone else’s ability to prove it elegantly, and reproduce the solution.
Both approaches build important skills. I would like to think that reading papers / books for class is enough to build the latter skill. I (like to) believe that students who tackle the challenge of solving problems by themselves benefit from developing those intangible skills. It takes less for someone to appreciate the elegance of a brilliant paper ex post than to write that brilliant paper.
March 18, 2014 at 12:35 pm
Katerina
This was really ittreesning information. Times have changes so much since I taught academy English 10 years ago. My first major confrontation with plagiarism was my discovery of a floppy disk on which a group of our top students in the school saved copies of book reports that they wrote and collected from other students. These book reports were being adapted by students throughout our student body and turned in over and over to the other English teacher and me. We were shocked by the number of students who were participating in this deception. We had to scramble to not only deal with discipline, but to develop a system of checks to minimize future problems and most importantly, to educate our students better regarding plagiarism, honesty, and Christlike character qualities.In the significantly more digitally focused world we live in now, I can imagine it is even more of a problem. I am glad to know of these resources to help teachers check their students’ work. Without them the thought would be overwhelming! (Even with them it’s overwhelming!)I also appreciated the additional list of resources provided at the end of the document. Thanks for sharing!