[ale] LaTeX question?

[Thompson Freeman]

On 12/20/2007 06:52:13 PM, George Allen wrote:
> >
> > Nah, plagiarism is a problem in other disciplines, too.
> My GF
> > teaches anthro and education classes (she's an
> anthropologist,
> > but also teaches teacher certification), and catches a
> couple of
> > plagiarists every semester.  She showed me a paper in
> which one
> > of her students  had just copied and pasted a bunch of
> statistics
> > off of a web page without crediting the original
> researchers :-/
> >
> > -- JK
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something...
> 
> Since every quotation, every data-set, unless it's
> original data, needs to
> have a citation, if they don't cite it, it's plagarism. I
> wouldn't turn in or
> accept a paper that didn't have a footnote for each
> figure, chart, or set of
> quotes...
> 
> I don't see how that's a hard concept to gather... even if
> you're going to cut
> and paste... just give the source... cite it... then slack
> on the rest if you
> must. Doesn't make a good paper, but at least makes it
> morally sound even if
> it's intellictually crud.
> 
> Then if it IS original data - I'd expect to see collection
> methods...
> metrics... process...  seems like you could still
> determine the merit of the
> paper's origionality based almost soley on it's method and
> detail in the
> footnotes/references. (metadata I guess?) Any student who
> has gone to enough
> trouble to read the field enough to develop a good
> bibliography - ought to be
> able to easily defend anything they write.

I'll make an assumption here: you haven't tried to grade a  
block of 300 student papers yet.

My experience dates back close to 30 years, and was quite  
limited even then, but I'd be quite happy to automate any  
grading process I could on the basis of that experience.  
Partly due to better documentation standpoint when you  
catch a plagerist or other infringer. That is, being able  
to show the dean, and then the student's possible legal,  
and then a court in the insane extreme that the student  
pushed that hard, _why_ and _where_ the charges developed.

There was an article I saw perhaps five years ago,  
regarding a general science class for non-science majors.  
Highly failible memory says Virginia Tech, but I'm not  
confident of that. In any event, it was early in the era of  
computer checking of student papers, using a home grown  
system. In the second or third year of the systems use, the  
final course paper showed something horrible like 30%+  
students reusing papers from the previous years students,  
many of which were literal full copies. Which amounts to my  
other big reason for rather liking computer assistance: a  
huge percentage of students is looking for, and working  
very hard at, finding a way to avoid doing something that  
they don't want to do - the assigned work.

Unfortunately, and not just in academics, there are many  
people very happy to pass of the work of others as their  
own.

> 
> 
> OBLIG Linux Tie IN:
> It would be like code - you can't use GPL code without
> including the GPL...

I like it.