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posted by [identity profile] amy34.livejournal.com at 03:01pm on 09/10/2008
I don't think I'll ever be completely free of the need for outside approval :). But I get what you mean about people stealing other people's work and getting praise for it. I just don't get how that praise could feel meaningful to the recipient. Whoever it is must be so self-deluded that they've convinced themselves the praise is deserved. Or perhaps they don't care what they think of themselves, they only care how other people perceive them.
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posted by [identity profile] asatomuraki.livejournal.com at 04:38pm on 09/10/2008
I hope, for the sake of the world and our future as a species, that individuals who do this grow beyond that sort of behavior. People do this sort of thing on their college papers and things now, quite regularly. It's horrible.
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posted by [identity profile] arachnejericho.livejournal.com at 10:14pm on 09/10/2008
I was a teaching assistant for a while back in University; this'd be really early aughts. Heh.

For coding problems, we wrote a cheat-detection program that analyzed all the students' programs and spat out ones that were too similar. This sounds like we were being freaky, but we did hand-check, and usually it was right (replace some variable names, but don't replacing the spacing or the style of the code---and code does have a distinct style from programmer to programmer. Especially if there are commments...).

One time we had a 30% cheat rate. This was too horrible in a class of 200 and we'd be questioned heavily by the department for accusing so many students of cheating, so my professor came up with the brilliant idea: tell people we'd found out and if they confessed to us we wouldn't zero out their grade for the course.

Almost all of them confessed.

A TA friend of mine on the other side of campus (liberal arts) routinely googled intriguing sentences in essays in Google. The amount of cheating was pretty scary....

However, those are more cheating for passing/not doing work. The glory cheats here are different; they're purely for online peer glory. If you could use "pure" as such a term. Some people are really are so shallow that work they didn't honestly do can still be a source of pride for them if they can steal it.

There are also many people out there who scrape sites and RSS feeds and replicate the content on their own site, peppered with ads. Sometimes if they're fast enough, the original site will be suppressed in Google searches. It's happened to me.

I, of course, feed on self-made glory and haven't flipped yet to Jonson's side yet.
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posted by [identity profile] asatomuraki.livejournal.com at 05:21pm on 10/10/2008
Back when I was in college, the Internet was made of tin cans and wire strung between colleges (just kidding) so plagiarism wasn't as easy as it is now. I remember one girl almost got booted for plagiarizing a cited source because she didn't change the wording enough to suit her professor. It was one of those where you cite the source at the end of the paragraph. She should have changed it more or used quotes, but it was a really gray area. The board decided in her favor (it was not at all intentional) but it was a HUGE thing.

But I'm with you -- I want credit for what *I* do. Jonson just gives us something to aspire to.
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