(teach) Online materials & "cheating"!

[Ria Smit]

I would like to ask Tom Robb and others who have experience with
online materials that are a required part of a course to what degree
do you think students do the work correctly and not copy the work of
others or get a friend to answer the questions??
_____________________________________________________
I have never been to any other country (and these feet have trod the
soil of 106 countries) where plagiarism is so ingrained in the culture
as it is in China.?Say, if someone did it right, why should I do all
that work and come up with something so much worse.
Mert - Dr.M.L.Bland, Arlington, VA, USA
-------------
Yes, Mert, I agree.  And why is this so?

English is taught without any real culture.  All that is taught it
HOLLYWOOD.  So it is natural, and has been since English became the
language that was taught here, that plagiarism should exist.

The Chinese Culture admires and exhorts people who can reproduce what
the ancients wrote.  It is not expected that the student come up with
something new, but that they reproduce what the ancients wrote and how
they wrote it.  Therefore, without teaching of real culture with the
language, (other than Hollywood), it can only be expected that the
students will use their own culture.

The foreign teacher comes on the scene too late to change this.  It is
well ingrained and then the foreigner brings some foreign notion that
it is wrong, when their whole nation admires it.

The answer:  The concept of plagiarism should be taught from the
earliest time that English is taught.  Now, how can that be achieved?

Ria
--------------
Ria Smit, Zhengzhou, China
Phone:[phone]
Mobile: [phone]
SKYPE: riacalling
www.yellowwattleenglish.com
www.betterphoto.com?englishteacherinchina
***********************************
Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least
triviality that happens to us,
and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the
same person?
                            -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld  (1613-1680)

[Jada Rufo]

I would like to ask Tom Robb and others who have experience with
online materials that are a required part of a course to what degree
do you think students do the work correctly and not copy the work of
others or get a friend to answer the questions??
____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _____
I have never been to any other country (and these feet have trod the
soil of 106 countries) where plagiarism is so ingrained in the culture
as it is in China.?Say, if someone did it right, why should I do all
that work and come up with something so much worse.
Mert - Dr.M.L.Bland, Arlington, VA, USA
------------ -
The foreign teacher comes on the scene too late to change this. It is
well ingrained and then the foreigner brings some foreign notion that
it is wrong, when their whole nation admires it.

The answer: The concept of plagiarism should be taught from the
earliest time that English is taught. Now, how can that be achieved?

Ria
___________________

Agree with Ria here. Not sure when it would be the best time to teach Chinese that plaigiarism is wrong. I can't imagine Chinese kindergarteners doing research papers in English. But I have seen a Chinese art teacher at an international school in Zhuhai teach expat kids to draw Mickey Mouse.?For those who had other ideas on how to draw Mickey Mouse she actually held the kid's drawing hand and basically "drew" the cartoon for the kid. So much for creativity.

I do think that a lesson in plagiarism is a must for those who are going overseas to study though. When I took some Masters courses at UH-Hilo, some of my professors were complaining that the Chinese students' papers were clearly plagierized. I think copyright infrigement should be taught before Chinese students go abroad.

Jada




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[JimMahler]

If we're going to teach Chinese students that plagiarism is wrong, we'll need to be clear about exactly what it is, and exactly why it's wrong.

Dictionary.com, citing Random House Dictionary, says "plagiarism" is: "the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work." Thus, we can say there are three elements: (1) unauthorized copying (2) of another's words (3) without attribution.

Unauthorized copying is not in itself plagiarism and in fact is done all the time in academic writing -- the lack of attribution is the crucial element. Also, plagiarism deals with words and ideas, so analogies to copying music or Gucci bags may well be misleading.

Lawyers distinguish between "malum in se" and "malum prohibitum", that is, acts which are intrinsically evil and thus condemned in all cultures (such as murder) and acts which are prohibited in a particular culture but not intrinsically evil (like jay-walking). The fact that the Chinese attitude toward plagiarism is so different from ours argues strongly that plagiarism is not intrinsically evil, but simply prohibited in Western cultures.

So, if our Chinese students ask us what's wrong with plagiarism, what do we tell them? Do we say that it's prohibited in Western societies, so you shouldn't do it if you go to school abroad? Or should we say you should never do it under any circumstances. If the latter, what can we say to convince them that it's as evil as we Westerners think it is?

Jim Mahler

[Mario Rinvolucri]

Dear Jim,
          When I was a student I was encouraged by my teachers to reproduce
their ideas and information in my own words.This was part of my UK education.
I was encouraged o plagariase intellectually but not
linguistically.Paraphrasing was fine.
 
Are we a little unself-critical about our own system, us odd wsterners?
 
Greetings from Beijing,
 
Mario ( Rinvolucri) UK

[nate jarvis]

Jim:

Plagiarism is not just lying, but lying to obtain a reward (ie, fraud). Do
we really need to convince our students that lying and fraud are bad?

I think if we want to get philosophical about the issue, the practice to
look it as not is not counterfeiting(be it money, "hard" products like LV
bags or "soft" products like Photoshop or movies) but code poaching. How
many lines of someone else's code do you have to lift before you're
ethically obligated to the terms of their product's license? If it's ecma or
html--for example--and there IS no license because s the code's not making a
product but simply part of the product's (ie, web page content) delivery
system? Given the existence and size of communities which _give away_
templates and example code, do you assume that, even if the code you lift is
not free-to-all that _somewhere_ an indentical piece of code is?

I'm not a real computer guy, and don't know what real computer think about
the ethics of code poaching, but lots of students seem to approach their
essays they way one would writing a piece of code;

1) if someone's already done it, why should i reinvent the wheel?
2) find code that does what i want to do
3) grab it and put it in my program/webpage/etc

nate.


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[nate jarvis]

Ria wrote:

The Chinese Culture admires and exhorts people who can reproduce what the ancients wrote. It is not expected that the student come up with something new, but that they reproduce what the ancients wrote and how they wrote it. Therefore, without teaching of real culture with the language, (other than Hollywood), it can only be expected that the students will use their own culture.

Jada wrote:

But I have seen a Chinese art teacher at an international school in Zhuhai teach expat kids to draw Mickey Mouse.
>
>
hardly unique to china. the west isn't that far past a time when a student would be expected to learn whole passages of long poems, or where one's ability to translate would be based on translating cicero then translating him back, then seeing how closely the two versions matched. i had to memorize the first 100 or so lines of the canterbury tales in college(though that was done more to reinforce the differences in vowels between 14th and 20th century english).

art students go to museums and do "studies" of other artist's work, even (if not especially!) their 2 dimensional work. some of them try to do very identical copies, some of them less so (bacon/velasquez anyone?).

students in the US plagiarize. they copy term papers off the internet and pay people to write them. they copy homework off their friends and quizzes off their neighbors. the difference is not in sociological origins of the phenomenon of cheating. it's in what happens WHEN THEY GET CAUGHT. i don't believe for an instant that school administrators tell us "just give the student a B instead of an A" when we catch students copying essays wholesale from the internet or books or classmates because they believe the students
should venerate the ancient greats, or in some chinese equivalent of
why-confirm-empirically-when-you-can-just-quote-aristotle. i think

1) they're lazy. they don't want the hassle/extra work of disciplinary
action.
2) taking disciplinary action will upset students and their parents, leading
to more hassle/extra work
3) if the punishing students leads to students failing, the school loses
tuition money, which is simply not permissable
4) if punishing the student leads to students being expelled, the school
loses tuition money, which is simply not permissable
5) the school is in the business of exchanging degrees for tuition. making the students go to classes (at the schools where attendance is mandatory), giving tests, hiring teachers and making students wait 3-4 hopefully have some effect (and i'm not going to claim they have NO effect), but one can view them cynically as so many fig leafs. the school is there to sell degrees (hence teachers being forbidden from failing final year students).producing competent graduates ready to enter the workforce is a starry-eyed pipe dream. what's it matter if students not doing their own homework prevents them from acquiring the skill sets they not only need, but which conferring a degree upon them TESTIFIES they have?

for the students
1) it's less work (incentive)
2) they don't learn (disincentive)

without some additional disincentive from the school, 1>2.

what am i'm curious about is the role of entrance exams. do schools tell themselves the entrance exams guarantee the students are smart enough it doesn't matter? or is it so many protestations of tied hands? or do they really just not care?

nate.


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[Merton Bland]

Jim Mahler asked " if our Chinese students ask us what's wrong with plagiarism, what do we tell them?
>
>
That if they study abroad they can be expelled for plagerism.?That if they try to publish abroad they can be black-listed.?That their current institution can lose endowments.?That they may enrage their Western teachers.?That the leaders of the Communist Party of China have expressed their opposition to plagerism.?That they may find themselves unwelcome in academia and forced to work for a living.
Mert - Dr.M.L.Bland



















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[Russ Taylor-2]

--- In TEFLChina@..., "Mario Rinvolucri" <mario.rinvolucri@...> wrote:
>
> Dear Jim,
>           When I was a student I was encouraged by my teachers to reproduce
> their ideas and information in my own words.This was part of my UK education.
> I was encouraged o plagariase intellectually but not
> linguistically.Paraphrasing was fine.
>  
> Are we a little unself-critical about our own system, us odd wsterners?


My comment:
And in my British education Mario I was taught to paraphrase AND cite who had said it first. For Chinese students taught to use the words and phrases of Kongzi or whoever, say the words, fine, and then tell us whose words they were and why you are using them. Even at school, doing A levels before going to university I was taught to use quotes to make a point, not just to show off what a good memory I had. The referencing is the key point, isn't it? Well that and using the words to make your own point I would say.

Russ Taylor