Plagiarism!!!

[DaShi]

Send in the clowns. . .

Every thread. :sigh:

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Tingkai


Stop being anti-American!

Americans don't cheat! Or at least, white Americans don't cheat. Only people who are not white cheat. Only people in the third world cheat. It's a fact! All those white Americans caught cheating are actuallly Chinese pretending to be white. It's a fact!

I'll bite, because my post is partly implicated here.

I've taught both in America and overseas. I've seen plagiarism and other forms of cheating from all kinds of students. Yes, of course American students cheat.

The difference is that American students seem to understand that cheating is wrong; this doesn't stop them, but it does cause them to go to great lengths to hide it and to be filled with guilt and shame when caught.

In my experience of Turkish students, and my friends' experience of Philippine students, that last bit isn't true in those countries. Very little guilt. Very little shame. Very little sense that they're even doing something wrong. At most, a regret merely at having miscalculated and pissed of the absurdly upright American professor.

DaShi can chime in and say if that jives with his experience in China. It sounds like it does.

I assume the difference is one of cultural attitudes, though I'm open to other explanations.

[DaShi]

I wonder if it could be part of an anti-western attitude. Not necessarily conscious. Property rights have often played a sacred role in many western societies. A certain disrespect for it may have been engendered as a result of western cultural imperialism.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
In my experience of Turkish students, and my friends' experience of Philippine students, that last bit isn't true in those countries. Very little guilt. Very little shame.

Maybe Americans are somehow different from everyone else, but the cheaters I knew in Canada never admitted they had done anything wrong, or showed guilt or shame.

Instead, they usually blamed someone else, or the system, or used the old standby excuse: everybody does it, but they were caught. The usual BS.

Mind you, I would be hearing about it after the fact. You're catching them in the act. Stilll, I would not be surprised if an American acted differently from a Turk when caught doing something wrong. Different cultures have different ways of expressing shame and guilt. Maybe that is the explanation.

Dashie has demonstrated numerous times that despite his time in China, he never learned to understand Chinese cultural contexts and as a result, he was constantly misreading situations.

[Jon Miller]

Very few physicists cheat in my undergrad.. in fact, none did in my class..

PreMeds and Engineers (I TAed both groups, PreMeds in both Undergrad and Grad, and Engineers in Grad) and both groups cheat a bit more.. but it is a result of not thinking the class is doing them any good. I still would say that it isn't something the majority do.

I suspect that they are better in the PreMed/Engineering classes that they think are more important to them (They mostly just consider Physics a requirement to get by)

Jon Miller

[Agathon]

Oddly enough, the worst case of plagiarism I came across was from a Chinese student, but I don't think that they are any worse than the Canadian students for cheating.

[Frozzy]

Re: Re: Plagiarism!!!

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


And DaShi denied being a racist. Right.

Differences in culture != being racist. STUPID STUPID choice of words UR. Absolutely fricking STUPID.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

When I was in a US college, cheating was quite widespread also. We geeks had no need to cheat, but we regularly discovered cheaters and turned them in. The usual penalty is an automatic fail, though a couple got a one term suspension.

you and your friends are a bunch of jerks.

[DinoDoc]

Out of curiosity, wouldn't having such blatant plagiarists at a university cause a loss of face for the institution? Why would thier be such lax enforcement among the educational system?

[RGBVideo]

Urban Ranger posted an unwarranted personal attack as a strawman and Tingkai spam-trolled this thread. Where are the bans?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Ah, but UR is allowed to troll and personal attack. He's protected as a "moderator"

It is sad to see in some areas cheating is not seen as that bad of a vice. I wonder if the parents don't care as well. I know when I was in high school that no student wanted their parents to know they cheated (if they did), because that wouldn't have ended well.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Ah, but UR is allowed to troll and personal attack. He's protected as a "moderator"

Why? Ming and rah seem to get along well with moderating the forum without resorting to personal attacks. I think it is well past time for him to be called to account for ignoring the very rules he is supposed to be enforcing on the rest of us.

[Imran Siddiqui]

And how well have those calls worked in the past? Personally, I reported his post, and I think everyone who thinks he's been failing to live up to the rules he is supposed to enforce should as well.

[loinburger]

In all fairness to UR, trolling and generally acting like a jerk don't seem to be offenses that are as severe as spamming (where a "spam post" is defined as a "post without content," and a "post with content" is defined as "not a spam post"), and in that regard he follows the rules he's supposed to enforce by not posting very many spam threads.

[Apocalypse]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


When I was in a US college, cheating was quite widespread also. We geeks had no need to cheat, but we regularly discovered cheaters and turned them in. The usual penalty is an automatic fail, though a couple got a one term suspension.

Cheaters at my school are kicked out permantly.