Well, sometimes they're your saintly alma mater, and sometimes they're the evil Big Brother (usually in this case they are referred to as The Administration).

Which falls in line with nothing inherently being wrong with caring about what your institution cares about. They're not bad because they're an/your institution. Let them earn your distrust.

{{Gud}}

A UCLA student was telling me that they now have to submit their papers online to a multi-university clearing house site that analyses the essays and compares them to papers (on that topic only? don't know) written by students all over the counry before giving them the "original work" thumbs up. She's not that trusting of the computer's ability to tell, but I can see where the institution cares, and not just for their own petty Fascist reasons, that cheating isn't happening.

It's probably www.turnitin.com. The high school I'm doing my clinicals at this semester uses it. It's a pretty nifty thing. It has a bunch of papers, journal articles, ERIC articles, etc. in it. It also buys all those essays from web sites and puts them in. When a student turns in a paper, that paper ends up in its database, too.

The teacher can look and see a percentage of original vs. potentially non-original work and compare the paper to the source that is identified as the original. The teacher then determines if it was plagiarisim or not.

Quotes will often come up as plagiarism, but it gets highlighted and the teacher determines that it is a quote. Also, you could end up plagiarizing yourself from previously turned in work. But, again, the teacher can see that online so there are no problems there.

The restrictions are always shitty, I think. To me cheating is like [failed analogy]. Let me try again. I don't think you can make cheating impossible (short of the kind of individual attention which would improve education at all levels, but ain't gonna happen any time soon), but you can make it unprofitable and less appealing than the alternative. Treating students like criminals makes cheating more likely, not less. In my opinion, that is. But it's one reason I didn't give a damn about cheating going on around me at BU -- the university acted as though none of us could be trusted, which just made me want to act untrustworthy (I didn't, because -- among other things, like my own ethics -- my mother would keeelllll me, but I could understand the temptation).

Did you ever turn anybody in for cheating, Gris? Would you have?

No, and depends.

In high school, I almost certainly would not have, unless somebody was copying off of ME without my permission - and I certainly wouldn't give permission, except maybe for homework in certain classes where it simply didn't matter. Grades not on a curve, so unimportant.

In college, I would have. In any case I considered their cheating an honor code violation, at least, because I really believed in our code. There were some dumb classes I wouldn't have - the law and political science classes, for example, where grades were not curved. In my hard math classes with 150 students graded on a normal distribution that I spent 10-15 hours a week per problem set? Yes, I would turn them in if I found out they cheated on the final that was 50% of the grade.

That said, Tech is also structured in a way that makes it almost impossible to ever be faced with that quandary. Problem sets are usually completely collaborative - "copying" is encouraged, as smart kids explaining to not-as-smart kids is the best way to learn. Quizzes, midterms, and finals are take-home (though timed) and usually open-book. Cheating methods would be taking longer than given, looking things up on the internet, or copying others' tests, but since I'm not in the room with the cheater to see any of this done, I'm not presented with the moral dilemma.

In general - academic honor policies are BS. you have to sign them - there si no debate. they are words on paper that have been decided by some committe somewhere in the past. But in order for a paper or test to be graded I had to write," I have followed the M- College honor code" . I couldn't begin to tell you what it said.

In current life I no longer recite things in groups that violate what I believe - things like the Lord's prayer and I skip the under god part of the pledge of allegance. CA courts have taken out the bible and the so help me god parts of the oath. And I do tell the truth - which means I don't get picked for juries.

In general - academic honor policies are BS. you have to sign them - there si no debate.

You don't have to go to the school. It's completely optional.

And I actually have some vague memory of someone somewhere who refused to sign saying they wouldn't turn someone in and he was allowed in if he took all his exams alone in a room or some such. Its all very vague.

This starts to sound a little bit like the unjust law question.

{{Gud}}

A friend who teaches at a local college said that she had students copying answers from their neighbors, even though to prevent that the students were given two different, color-coded versions of the test, so the students were copying answers for different questions. At that point, it becomes more a test of "just how stupid are you."

The honor code was part of everything we did at my university. They went over it in orientation and you signed a copy before every test. The philosophy was influenced by a beloved dean of students, who, when he was a math professor, used to give this speech before every test:

Today I am going to give you two examinations, one in trigonometry and one in honesty. I hope you will pass them both. But if you must fail one, let it be trigonometry. Many good men cannot pass an exam in trigonometry; there are no good men who cannot pass an examination in honesty.

The honor code at my college (Norwegian sister to juliana's college) was taken very seriously. Seriously enough that faculty were not allowed in the room while exams were given; they had to sit out in the hallway waiting for people to come out with questions. A member of the class would volunteer to deliver the exams to the faculty member when everyone was done.

So we were not treated like kindergartners. We were in charge. Any reports of cheating were investigated by a student committee and penalties were imposed by the committee. Faculty had no input. It was students who developed the policy and students could have changed it at any time. Prospective students were informed of the policy before they were admitted and were advised to go elsewhere if they did not agree with it.

I never saw anyone cheat, but I would have felt morally bound to report them if I did. Everyone I know felt the same way, which is probably why I never saw anyone cheat. But it was a student thing, not a faculty/administrative thing.