In "How can universities stop students cheating online?" Harry Slater (2014) says that the explosion in online courses has led to an increase in university efforts to detect and deal with cheating amongst students, who often come from different cultural backgrounds. These efforts include educating them as to what counts as cheating and using sophisticated computer programs to detect dishonesty, although courses for which formal credit is not given might "have a less robust approach to tackling dishonesty" (para. 13).
Back to my introductory questions: I assume we all agree that murder is wrong, and it probably isn't seen as a good thing in most cultures, although there might be some disagreement as to what counts as murder. Is killing your daughter and her lover because he is the wrong religion and has dishonoured the family murder? Some cultures think not.
More obviously, many people appear to think that there is nothing wrong with stealing from film companies such as Warner Bros, Sony and the like by buying pirated DVDs. Of course, people who do this are stealing and they are thieves, but presumably they don't see themselves that way. Or do they? Are they, perhaps, telling themselves that although they are criminals engaging in illegal behaviour when they buy a DVD from Silom Road or an illegal copy of Microsoft Word, they aren't actually doing anything wrong? In just the same way, many drug users, along with many police and other officials, know that buying and using yaa baa is illegal but not obviously morally wrong.
And as Slater notes, quoting expert in electronic plagiarism and university lecturer Michael Dunn, "In some cultures, repeating the thoughts of another author is considered a form of flattery" (2014, para. 8). However, cultural differences are not an acceptable excuse: good universities around the world don't care if you commit murder, or steal a few million dollars - these crimes won't stop you getting a degree. But every good university on Earth cares very much about the crime of plagiarism: and that will stop you getting a degree; and if you already have a degree, the discovery that you committed this most awful academic crime will make you lose the degree.
In one recent example, the son of a noble German family, a baron whose family titles and castles date back 800 years to 1315, a man voted most popular minister in the Angela Merkel's government, was discovered to have plagiarised in his Ph.D. thesis (Pidd, 2011). The result: "the University of Bayreuth stripped Guttenberg of his doctorate" (para. 4), and he was then forced to resign his post as Germany's Minister of Defence. Baron Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has paid a heavy price for his dishonesty as a student, which he said was "accidental," though it's hard to see how you could "accidentally" copy and paste without knowing you were copying and pasting: perhaps he also has more serious mental problems.
And the shame did not end there: the once most popular politician in Germany quickly got a new nickname: "Baron zu Googleberg, the minister for cut and paste" (Pidd, 2011. It's all in the name section, para. 4).
If you must commit crimes while at university, stick to ones that don't matter, like murder and drug use: don't become famous as "Mr (or Ms) Copy and Paste" - the garbage universities might not care, but not a single good university in the world, one worth having a degree from, will accept this academic crime.
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Reference
Slater, H. (2014, March 14). How can universities stop students cheating online? The Guardian. Retrieved March 17, 2014 from http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/mar/14/students-cheating-plagiarism-online
As you can see, I published this post at 9:27 this morning, just before class, and it was a bit rushed. I've just made a revision that I hope makes my summary paragraph a bit clearer. It's now two sentences rather than one. (Remember: the maximum number of sentences for the summary is two.)
ReplyDeleteAnd I fixed a couple of errors I'd missed because I didn't have time to proofread even quickly before posting - I do recommend checking your work at least once before clicking the orange "Publish" button.