Slow-going sweater

I've been working away on Honeycomb, but because it's a sweater knit of approximately sport-weight yarn, and every seventh row is pretty much nothing but cable crosses, it goes slowly.

It's hard not to get discouraged when you've knit for an hour or so and not even finished a single, 12-row repeat.

***

I'm working on a hopefully-discussion-generating presentation on plagiarism (with a focus on off-the-Internet plagiarism) for the OAS meetings. I'm reading a lot of papers written on the topic, mostly research papers based on surveys of students. (An aside: can you trust someone to truthfully report plagiarism, even on an anonymous survey?)

Men report higher levels of plagiarism than women do. Students with poorer grades prior to college report higher levels of plagiarism. Students who are heavy internet users report more internet plagiarism (especially people who use what one writer termed "creative" download methods for music and movies - I presume the author meant "shady if not outright illegal" with that coy "creative")

However: a couple studies found that online vs. offline plagiarism levels don't differ. In other words: it's not going up, just how students do it changes. The numbers have held steady, ranging from 40% to 50% having plagiarized more than once, depending on the school (and on how you define plagiarism: some surveys included "copying a string of five or more words," others required whole paragraphs to be copied for it to count, apparently)

There's also a lively debate about "education vs. enforcement" - can we cut plagiarism down by really talking about why it is a problem (for one thing, it's theft of someone else's work, and for another, the student doesn't really learn what they're supposed to learn by cutting and pasting) and by coming up with "creative" assignments that are less likely to have papers available on places like "schoolsucks" and "non-plagiarized-research-papers" (both websites where a person can allegedly buy papers. I don't know if they put in the coy disclaimer of "this is for research purposes only, don't turn this in" but I've heard that some sites claim that).

I don't know. The independent research project I do in ecology is pretty dang "creative," and I also try to work closely with the students on it, and over the years I've done it I've found one wholesale plagiarized paper (from a student in a previous semester), one I seriously suspected of being plagiarized but I had no way to prove it, and a proposal for a project that was about 80% cribbed off of a website (that was easily found by me with a Google search). (Maybe those are actually pretty good stats, seeing as I've been doing the project nearly 10 years. But then again, it's only been in the past 5 years or so that I've really been hardnosed on checking - after getting that first "It looks hinky but I can't prove it" paper).

I will say I hate the whole "enforcement" step of things. It makes more effort for me (searching papers - we don't have Turnitin, so I have to manually search phrases using a search engine) and more effort for the students (requiring them to hand in a paper copy for me to mark on, plus either a paper or electronic copy for my files. I haven't yet had anyone play the "intellectual property" card and refuse, though someone could and I'd probably have to accept it.) And also, I hate playing cop. I hate suspecting people. (Though I hate it more when I get a paper and realize it "sounds" like it came from somewhere else, and it turns out to have.)

So far, the only penalty I've ever given was a 0 on an assignment, which in some cases is enough to drop the person a letter grade. I've never pursued it further, partly because my policy is "first violation, get a zero; second violation, worse penalties" and I've never yet had anyone violate twice (that I caught) in the same semester. (I did have someone plagiarize one semester, fail the class, come back the next semester, and plagiarize again - and then say to me, when I handed him back his paper with a 0, "Aw, man, I didn't think you'd check this time." Seriously? SERIOUSLY?)

But also, I've heard anecdotal evidence from folks at other schools that (a) pursuing a plagiarism case towards expulsion of the student is a giant headache and (b) if their parents are donors, or they're an athlete, or if they're a friend of someone in the administration, you might as well just go bash your head against a brick wall for a while instead. (I have no idea how it works HERE, though all campuses tend to be a little similar in some ways.)

I don't know. I guess I come down on the side of "educate the students, but still check up on them - and still prosecute clear cases of plagiarism." Because while it's very nice, and thinking-very-well-of-human-nature to believe that "if we just teach them well enough not to plagiarize, they won't," there are still people with the attitude - and I remember hearing this attitude from some, as an undergrad - of "this is all a game, it doesn't count, these papers are busywork [or another 8-letter word beginning with b]" and so the person doesn't quail at copying - and in fact, in some cases, feels triumphant when they've "pulled it off."

I don't know. I guess I had right and wrong too heavily instilled in me*; even the stuff I suspected was "busywork" I did my own work on. (I was also too afraid of getting caught.)

(*though perhaps, "having right and wrong too heavily instilled" is not such a bad thing after all)

Of course, the fact that I'm also a biiiiiig nerrrrrrd who likes learning stuff contributes to that, I'm sure: I took a certain pride in doing my own work and learning whatever the goal was to be learned. (And in the cases where I didn't do so well and didn't get the grade I had hoped for: well, at least it was all my own work, and if I failed, I failed on my own merits and not because I grabbed someone else's crummy work)

And actually, that makes catching cheating and plagiarism more frustrating and, I think, more challenging: I'm not used to thinking about ways to be devious so I don't always consider all the possibilities. (For example, I allow students to use their cellphone calculators on tests, if that's the only calculator they claim to have. Granted, I do periodically look over their shoulders to make sure they're not texting a friend for the answer, but still...I know some profs who actually require students to turn in their cell phones to the front desk on test day, and they can retrieve them after the test.)

It's actually a huge field, the study of plagiarism. And there are all kinds of complexities: cultural differences, for example - in some cultures, it's seen as a form of respect to copy an authority's words (rather than paraphrasing), in other cultures the "everyday rules" on intellectual property seem to be looser (and this is still the case, and I've heard of pattern-writers venting their frustration about their for-sale online patterns being freely copied and distributed without charge in those cultures). And there's the issue of ESL students who are not totally English-proficient...(then again: I wrote essays, in French, without resorting to using someone else's work. But then again - part of the point of writing them was for my French teacher to see how well I was grasping grammar and style, it wasn't solely the content that was important...)

****

And finally, a smile for the day. This is quoted from the Guardian newspaper in the UK, from a column by Oliver Burkeman, published on Saturday the 28th. (Someone quoted this on CPaAG on Ravelry and I wanted to share it further). Call it a triumph of "creative politeness," or "how to defeat the self-entitled Speshul Snowflake":

"Today, a true tale of heroism that takes place not in a war zone, nor a hospital, but in Victoria station in London in 2007, during a tube strike. Our hero – a transport journalist and self-described "big, stocky bloke with a shaven head" named Gareth Edwards, who first wrote about this experience on the community blog metafilter.com – is standing with other commuters in a long, snaking line for a bus, when a smartly dressed businessman blatantly cuts in line behind him. (Behind him: this detail matters.) The interloper proves immune to polite remonstration, whereupon Edwards is seized by a magnificent idea. He turns to the elderly woman standing behind the queue-jumper, and asks her if she'd like to go ahead of him. She accepts, so he asks the person behind her, and the next person, and the next – until 60 or 70 people have moved ahead, Edwards and the seething queue-jumper shuffling further backwards all the time. The bus finally pulls up, and Edwards hears a shout from the front of the line. It's the elderly woman, addressing him: "Young man! Do you want to go in front of me?""

I particularly love that last bit. (And yes, I'm quoting Burkeman's words wholesale, right after bemoaning the high levels of plagiarism. But the difference? I made it CLEAR I was quoting, and I cited the source. [and arguably, a blog is not exactly the same as a journal article or a college term paper])