Professional Darwinism: Update to OP on p.74

[jedikaiti]

This guy is still employed why???

[WolfWay]

This guy is still employed why???

Trying to fire someone (for anything other than a criminal act) where I live is a nightmare of HR hoops to jump through. Plus Boss seems reluctant to admit he made a mistake hiring him.

[amandaelizabeth]

The advert that appears directly below wolfways post is for a job seeking site.   It is headlined "find a better boss". Most apt.

[WolfWay]

The advert that appears directly below wolfways post is for a job seeking site.   It is headlined "find a better boss". Most apt.

 

[kherbert05]

Does TurnItIn still automatically keep the text from all the papers submitted and add them to its database?  That's the part I have a problem with    I can definitely see how it would help catch plagiarists, though!

POD -- They have no ethical ground to stand on if they are stealing student work to add to their database. If students are required to use the service - then they are not giving their permission of their free will. Students work is their intellectual property and deserves the same respect as any other author.

[ClaireC79]

Also many students will run their own work through it first, to check they haven't accidentally got too close - then if the teacher also does it, well turnitin has seen 100% of this paper before

[Dindrane]

I was once in a literature class in college where a significant portion of the class committed at least a mild form of professional darwinism (student style).

The class covered a variety of works of Shakespeare, so the professor assigned a textbook that contained most of the plays we were going to read (rather than assigning a bunch of individual books). The textbook also included an introduction of sorts for each play, each one written by a different academic in the field. We also had a paper due after we finished studying each play.

About halfway through the semester, right after everyone had turned in a paper for one of the plays, the professor started the class by making a point to remind everyone that it was necessary to properly cite the introductions to the plays as well as the plays themselves, if we used anything from the introduction in our papers. Such a reminder was understandable enough, although it seemed rather oddly pointed.

Until one enterprising student happened to check the by-line of the introduction for the play we'd just written a paper on, and word spread that our professor had in fact authored that particular introduction.

Oops.

Fortunately, the professor seemed to give the class as a whole the benefit of the doubt, and to my knowledge, no actual charges of plagiarism were leveled against any of the students for this particular incident. My guess is that most people, after reading and being influenced by the introduction, used the ideas in their own words without realizing how similar their thoughts were to the introduction. Failing to cite the introduction in that case is, of course, still plagiarism, but at least it's not the intentional variety.

[LadyJaneinMD]

Does TurnItIn still automatically keep the text from all the papers submitted and add them to its database?  That's the part I have a problem with    I can definitely see how it would help catch plagiarists, though!

I think it does!  A friend of mine got 'dinged' for plagarism recently, when she was quoting HER OWN PAPER that she had written in a previous class!

[ClaireC79]

That said when I was in uni our plagarism declaration included a sentence about that we had not submitted any portion of that essay for grading before

[mmswm]

That said when I was in uni our plagarism declaration included a sentence about that we had not submitted any portion of that essay for grading before

Ours had the same line, but we could quote ourselves as long as it was properly cited. It was before my time, but if I remember the story correctly, a professor failed a student for the entire class over a paper in which the student had quoted, and properly cited, a previous essay.  The student challenged the professor, and it wound up before the honor council.  The honor council decided that it was not improper to include one's own previous work when the previous work is relevant, quoted and cited.

[sunnygirl]

My university's English department had a rule you weren't allowed to use work from previous papers, or study a specific topic you'd recently studied before (with certain exceptions), on the basis that you should be learning something new every class. So if you studied Hamlet for a class last year, you couldn't choose again Hamlet for a class this year.

One of my best friends is an actress with the RSC, and she went back to university as a mature student. One of her classes was on Shakespeare, and the tutor tried to reject a paper she wrote because she'd mentioned in a casual conversation once that she'd once performed in that play, by invoking the 'don't repeat classes' rule. My friend pointed out that that was a pretty liberal interpretation of the rule, and that as a Shakespearean actress she would have a big problem studying Shakespeare at all with that rule!

[mbbored]

So, I'm the poster who started the student darwinism topic, with my post on two women in the class I'm TAing who handed in identical homeworks.

We also just had a quiz in the course and I handed back those graded papers as well. One of the women came to me and said she felt that she had gotten an answer correct that I had taken points off for. I looked at the paper and what she wrote was flat out wrong. When I told her I couldn't give points for wrong answers, she told me she didn't believe she was wrong. At that point I said "Well, in science it doesn't matter what you believe, it matters what research has already been done. Your answer doesn't reflect the information in the lectures, the textbooks or any published research on the topic."

[BabylonSister]

This one is school-related but it was the teacher who committed potential PD.  Even though it's been many, many years, I will remain rather fuzzy on the details on purpose.


The whole focus of French high school is the baccalauréat, or "bac", a test that we must pass to enter university or any kind of undergraduate school, as well as qualifying for the lowest-ranked government jobs.  For three years, we live, think, breathe bac.  It does not just involve having knowledge but also writing structured essays on a variety of topics.  Every year, the bac questions are chosen regionally by a panel of teachers.  It's an honor to be one of them.  Because of cheating and fraud concerns, the questions are shrouded in secrecy until the day of the test. 


One of my teachers (Mr. Teacher) casually mentioned, during my final year of HS, that he was in that panel.  Somehow I filed that information away and didn't think of it.  During the year, we had a bac practice.  We had to take, either questions from previous bac sessions, or questions made up by the teachers, in every topic, and we passed the test under the same conditions as the official one, but of course the results did not count. 


Near the very end of the school year, as we were only days away from the grueling series of bac tests,  student attendance started going down because some were at home, madly scrambling to catch up.  My friend "Rachel" and I, being the two biggest goody-two-shoes of the school, attended until the very last day.  On that last day, we were the only two students in our class.  We showed up for our class with Mr Teacher, who paused for a minute and then figured out we could always work on reviewing what Rachel and I had produced for the bac practice.  The topic was, let's say, fluffy bunnies.  He pulled out our essays on the topic, which consisted in analyzing various documents of fluffy bunnies, and we discussed what we did right and wrong.


Two or three days later, it was time for our bac test in that subject.  One of the questions was "Analyze those documents about fluffy bunnies."  It was all fresh in our memories.  I think the documents were either the same, or very similar.  We both got a pretty decent grade.


I'm sure Mr. Teacher was not supposed to use for the bac practice the exact question he knew was coming up for the real stuff.  I think maybe, when he saw that Rachel and I bothered coming to school until the very last day, he decided to reward us by giving us a pretty big hand.  We never mentioned it to anyone, and I don't know if he ever got in trouble for it.  It would not have just been professional trouble, but legal as well.  Bac fraud is severely punished.

[MariaE]

So, I'm the poster who started the student darwinism topic, with my post on two women in the class I'm TAing who handed in identical homeworks.

We also just had a quiz in the course and I handed back those graded papers as well. One of the women came to me and said she felt that she had gotten an answer correct that I had taken points off for. I looked at the paper and what she wrote was flat out wrong. When I told her I couldn't give points for wrong answers, she told me she didn't believe she was wrong. At that point I said "Well, in science it doesn't matter what you believe, it matters what research has already been done. Your answer doesn't reflect the information in the lectures, the textbooks or any published research on the topic."

Curious - if she brought published research that had somehow slipped your notice and which supported her answer, would you have accepted it?

(Not snarky, just curious )

[Elfmama]

So, I'm the poster who started the student darwinism topic, with my post on two women in the class I'm TAing who handed in identical homeworks.

We also just had a quiz in the course and I handed back those graded papers as well. One of the women came to me and said she felt that she had gotten an answer correct that I had taken points off for. I looked at the paper and what she wrote was flat out wrong. When I told her I couldn't give points for wrong answers, she told me she didn't believe she was wrong. At that point I said "Well, in science it doesn't matter what you believe, it matters what research has already been done. Your answer doesn't reflect the information in the lectures, the textbooks or any published research on the topic."

But she's ENTITLED to her opinion that the sun revolves around the earth!!!!!  She can prove it -- just  look out any window around sunset!!!!!!