Update to Yesterday's News - The Life and Thoughts of Zach
Mar. 30th, 2005
05:15 pm - Update to Yesterday's News
Lots of people posted yesterday about a certain plagarist.
Even though the story was a good one I didn't contribute to the blanket blog propagation of this particular bit of information because I figured the rest of the blog world was punishing this girl enough without my sector of the blogosphere contributing to the harsh. Anyway, how was I to know whether it was a hoax or not.
Well today there is an update. If you noticed at some point yesterday that the girl's name changed, it did (to protect the guilty). She did get punished harshly by the blogosphere and the original author is requesting that folks lay off the poor (foolish) girl (and her nice mom) as she's pretty much as caught as she can get. And that's that. Assuming it isn't all a hoax.
Not sure how I feel about this one. I know that many many people at IMSA split up problem sets to spread out the work and then got together to put it together. I didn't, but on the other hand I very rarely managed to finish the problem sets. In any case, I don't think I'm willing to condemn them for that. So where's the line on academic dishonesty?
I've heard many teachers say that they don't mind people splitting up problems sets (some teachers say they purposely make them so long that they HAVE to be split up) because the students are learning collaboration.
I think there's something about the spirit of it all. Personally, while I've collaborated on many problem sets in my life, I've never turned in work that I wouldn't personally vouch for. I always check and verify the work even if a peer helped with it. I always made sure I was learning what needed to be learned. It seems clear that this girl had no intention of learning the subject matter. That's miserable.
Agreed.
My fellow Journ 101 TAs and I busted a student for plagiarism once, and it sucked. We felt awful -- he was the first one in his family to go to college, and here he was flunking a class because of plagiarism in his first semester. But we couldn't let it slide -- particularly in a freakin' journalism class.
One thing that always used to bother me when I worked at Kinko's was the architecture students who would come in and ask me to 'blow up' a 4"x4" square into an 8.5"x11". I would try to explain that enlarging to fit the page would elongate one side. I would use the term 'proportion'. "No, I want it blown up to fill the page!" OK, here it is. "What is this? It is all stretched out?" I hope to god that they either never graduate with their architecture degrees or that I never have the misfortune to step into one of their designs and have it fall on my head.