On Mon, 20 Jan 2014 18:39:44 +1100, Ben Finney wrote: > But sometimes different skills are being examined, and the student > should be exercising skills on their own without basing it directly on > the work of others. In these cases, penalties for plagiarism are > appropriate, would you agree?
How can anyone possibly agree without knowing what those penalties are, what the definition of plagiarism being used is, and how guilt or innocence is determined? According to some people in a much better position to judge, significant parts of academia has collectively gone mad over so-called plagiarism. "I started off researching the subject of plagiarism thinking that sensitivity on the issue was getting a little bit out of hand. What I found when I viewed actual guidelines and articles on the subject was just plain appalling. Academia has simply gone crazy on this subject; not figuratively crazy, but certifiably, clinically, sociopathically insane. I'm talking delusional, loss of contact with reality insanity." -- Professor Steven Dutch, University of Wisconsin http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PlagShame.HTM More here: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PlagiarNonsense.HTM According to Dutch, the University of Phoenix academic guidelines includes *failing to give a page number* of an otherwise fully cited source as plagiarism. If you read nothing else, read the second link, as Dutch gives practical guidelines for distinguishing significant and unethical plagiarism from insignificant and normal borrowing and sharing. Let's take this word of advice from "Plagiarism Today": [quote] In the end, it comes down to the same tried and true system of always attributing any content that you use, no matter how small, and always showing respect for the words of others, even if you have permission to use them. [end quote] http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/02/20/the-obama-plagiarism-scandal/ Do you notice the assumption made? Let me highlight it for you: THE WORDS OF OTHERS The hidden assumption here is that *words are property*, that they belong to whomever first publishes them. Having now written those few words, nobody else is permitted to use those same words in the same order without crediting me. Failure to credit me is a sin of the highest order, enough to get you kicked out of your university, your name blackened. Unless, of course, somebody else wrote those words before me, in which case *my ignorance* of that earlier usage does not diminish the magnitude of my sin. In that regard, plagiarism is rather like patent infringement. This attitude is part of the compartmentalisation of culture into walled gardens, where nothing can be done without the permission of the "intellectual property owner". This is dangerous enough when it comes to ordinary, regular language, but it is astonishingly harmful if applied to code. It goes against the principles of openness and freedom which the FOSS movement stands for. Code, for the most part, is extremely cliched. Very little code is original, and none of it is created in isolation. There are only so many ways to walk a list, or search a body of text for a word, or calculate the cosine of a float. You sometimes have the option of shuffling the order of operations around a bit, or changing variable names, or slight modifications of some algorithm. As a community, programmers may not always share code, but they share ideas, coding idioms and algorithms. The academic definition of plagiarism, if applied in its full and strictest form, would essentially make coding impossible. We do not know how strict the OP's college is about so-called plagiarism, whether they only intend to come down on outright copying of significant bodies of code, or whether they have a tendency to go after trivial borrowing of simple idioms or minor duplication of insignificant portions of the program. (If I walk a linked list using mynode = mynode.next, and you use the same variable names, is that an indication of copying?) Without knowing what the OP's college considers plagiarism, how can judge the OP's reaction to it? -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list