Lan Barnes wrote:
Good poets borrow. Great Poets steal.
- T. S. Eliot
It amuses me that borrowing is plagerism in college and a best practice in
later life.
Well, there are a couple of issues here:
1) Copying (aka plagiarism) *by itself* doesn't really bother me that
much, actually. It's copying without understanding that causes a
problem. And, by the way, this is a problem in real-life, too. I have
had to break junior engineers of that habit.
2) In a class setting, copying the work of another for points is unfair
to the rest of the class. Someone gets points without doing the work.
3) However it is *my* job to ensure some level of fairness. This means
creating assignments and tests that will reward those who do the work
more than those who do not do the work. The creation of those kinds of
tests and assignments is time consuming so a lot of teachers skimp on it
and wind up rewarding plagiarism.
I never really seem to have a problem with plagiarism. One student paid
me what I consider to be a high compliment, "Copying things in your
class is more work than just doing it yourself. Somehow, people who
copy code in your class never get it to work with all your tests."
-a
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