~Story time.~

I used to be in my University's Imaging department and holy shit was it a boring slog of scanning and archiving pages for hours at a time that I have thankfully left. I mean goddamn, CU, why did it take a flood for you to realize that you should make sure every single freaking transcript should have been digitized a long time ago?? Ugh.

So anyways, there was one aspect of the job that made me not want to stick my head in a scanner and slam the cover on my head repeatedly until I couldn't feel any longer - the Honor Code scanning. Basically we got to scan any of the pages that dealt with drama in the school. JUICY.

So I can't say much because FERPA but it felt like plagiarism occurred a lot more often with kids from eastern countries. I dug into it a bit more and the reason that happened was because in Eastern culture, quoting the information word for word was a sign of reverence and respect for the person who wrote it. Information was considered something owned by society as a whole, not any individual.

It's interesting to me that plagiarizing is pretty much primarily a western notion. It's that Socratic vs. Confucius approach to knowledge. So it sucked reading some story about a kid who just came to America and having this drama happen to him or her right off the bat. There's a zero tolerance policy at our school, ESL students or not. I think there should be more of an acknowledgment of why plagiarism shouldn't occur, or, like this article states, shit can go down.

This is tangentially related. Also my new job is way better.