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Stop flogging the obvious to death, will ya?

Your situation is as obvious as it can get. If guy one was stupid enough to get convinced,especially by amoron who would get caught, it is his fault.

Nilu, when something happens it does give you ideas about other things and ways to approach them. Just because the catalyst was one incident, not all similar discussions need to be based on that incident. Not all issues are the same and if you think so, then why waste your time reading about them?

then why waste your time reading about them?>/i>..

You are questioning Axiom 1 of Blogworld????

Well, it is a question of hats, as Bernard would say.
Wearing a student’s hat (and plagiarism is hardly unique to univs here), there is a thin line, practically invisible, between “looking at a solution to learn” and blatantly copying it. My personal solution to this dilemma is to explain verbally (or have it explained to me verbally, if I happen to be student#2 ). Unless you know for a fact (and this comes from many semesters of “collaboration”:) ), that you can depend on student#2 to massage his/her version of the solution to make it sufficently different. This is not the perfect solution but it has worked largely well, for me.

Wearing a professor’s hat, I know that 100% of the work is rarely going to be completed sincerely. I accept that and try to set questions that are broad in scope. A professor I had used to give us programming assignments for no credit(precisely because of this problem), but had us write summaries/discussions of the algorithm and possible applications, for credit. Harder to do in some courses than others, though.

Wearing the hat of a RA/TA, I’d issue a warning for a first offence, making sure the student in question understands what is going to happen if he continues to copy.

Oops - Sorry, I forgot you were also a blogger and wasting time only comes naturally to our breed.

That is a good way of looking at things, Avinash - I was at the University of Cincinnati and I remember in my first quarter there on an assignment, the entire calss probably submitted the exact same cut-and-paste job from a book. The professor made sure we were not given such loopholes again.

As a TA, I was grading exam papers all the time and did get into a fight with a guy who refused to admit he plagiarized his entire assignment since there was absolutely no way he could have done such a good job considering his track record.

gotta go - more after I come back from lunch.

Back in 1980 at the Universty of Pittsburgh, I took a required EE class in control theory. The teacher either didn’t understand the work, or couldn’t teach, I’m not sure which. But no one in the class knew what was going on.

During the final, almost everyone was passing around papers. I sat in the middle of this and just did my own work. I knew that I was going to fail but I wanted to fail on my own merits.

The cheaters were caught. Since the class was graded on a curve, I ended up with a passing grade.

I never learned much control theory in the calss, but I did learn something.

John, that is right - especially in the days of Google, I would be extremely careful if I were still in school. Even when I was in school before Google ever arrived, I had heard of professors developing programs that would take excerpts from our assignments and search for them on the web to see if they were original.

Here’s a brilliantly written piece on this very subject by that marvellous writer Malcom Gladwell (of Blink and Tipping Point Fame)
Link

So why didn’t she credit me and Lewis? How could she have been so meticulous about accuracy but not about attribution? Lavery didn’t have an answer. “I thought it was O.K. to use it,” she said with an embarrassed shrug. “It never occurred to me to ask you. I thought it was news.”

She was aware of how hopelessly inadequate that sounded, and when she went on to say that my article had been in a big folder of source material that she had used in the writing of the play, and that the folder had got lost during the play’s initial run, in Birmingham, she was aware of how inadequate that sounded, too.

That part sure sounded interesting to me, Avinash :)

:) well it’s food for thought, certainly.

A very interesting topic and I guess the comment comes a wee bit too late..but I just wanted to add my two cents, more like a confessional, I guess.

I have been in the student #2 position before, and got caught. Well, not exactly a student#2, because the person I copied from was a past student who had already passed the course and I had his full permission to reuse his material. I did make minor changes, but still ended up getting caught (damn google cache!). But I was let off with a slap on the wrist - I ended up getting an D grade, which is just above a fail ( but still a pass), and I had never gone below a B before, so it was certainly an auch!

But the point is, I am eternally grateful to the lecturer who let me off with a strict warning. I learned my lesson and have never plagiarised again. And he dint screw up my life entirely.

Students are young and sometimes it is reasonable that the professors are mature enough to give the kid a second chance.. and i sure appreciate what I got.