~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.
Sure - but so's attribution. I think this is half the story. Well, yeah. But the Socratic notion is that knowledge is something you discover. Something you drive through and discard in pursuit of better and better knowledge. The Confucian notion is that knowledge is something you cherish. Something you reinforce and repeat because all that ever was is all that ever will be forever and ever amen. I can see this being a problem with, say, a book report... but the whole idea of "research" is that you're finding something new. I agree with you that the Confucian approach definitely favors reheating the past, and that Asian countries in general have less of a beef with copying (lookin' at you, Daihatsu). I'm not sure I agree that college-level hand-holding is necessary. Yeah, maybe Western audiences are more steeped in the notion of "you do not rip off other people's shit" than the Koreans or Chinese. But when you're forced to sit in a class for a quarter just to learn how to cite your sources in the proper MLA style I think it stands to reason that not citing your sources at all is a bit of a party foul.in Eastern culture, quoting the information word for word was a sign of reverence and respect for the person who wrote it.
It's interesting to me that plagiarizing is pretty much primarily a western notion. It's that Socratic vs. Confucius approach to knowledge.
Couple of the guys I studied with "failed" finite element analysis. This is a 400-level mechanical engineering elective, offered once a year, that certain companies in the Puget Sound area (Genie, Boeing) pretty much require you to have in order to get a job. It was weird - they were doing okay, we were all studying together, and then one day they had "failed" the class. When asked about it, they bitched about how unfair the professor was, how a certain test had been tilted unfairly toward them (we all took the same test, etc). Next quarter I took a 500 level acoustics class. My study partner was the grad student that had TA'd Finite Element Analysis. Turns out they hadn't "failed" - they'd bought the answer manual to the textbook. In order to get a deal, they bought the manual from the previous year. Which, of course, had subtle changes to every 8th problem or whatever. So when the professor started to see a pattern - exquisite work, wrong answers - he started assigning the problems that were different from one year to the next to see who else was cheating. Then, to really seal the deal he assigned a take-home test with problems from the book. flush And that was that. Here's the dumb thing: 1) If they'd read closer, they wouldn't have gotten caught. 2) If they'd actually studied with the rest of us instead of fucking around, they wouldn't have gotten caught. 3) If they'd fuckin' shared the wealth they wouldn't have gotten caught - 'cuz we could say "this problem is, like, not the one in the book, Joe." 4) If they'd ponied up for this year's answer manual, they wouldn't have gotten caught. That's why I have such a dim view of plagiarism: before the internet it was so easy to do in a non-shitty manner that if you actually managed to get caught, your ass was hangin' out so far... in the days of the Internet, of course, all you need to is slam a paragraph of text into Google or a term paper site and you're busted. So you're basically banking on your TA being lazy. And, okay, if your TA is lazy, you can get away with it. But if your TA is lazy, you aren't learning as much anyway so you oughtta double down on the studying since you're learning less. And you're paying the same anyway. Dunno. Grinds my gears.