September 19, 2011 at 9:43 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Free as in Beer
September 19, 2011 at 10:03 pm
I agree with you on your main point - why are you studying if you don't want to learn to do it yourself?
I'm not so sure that turnitin is so great though. They also provide writecheck, which basically lets you test your plagiarised assignment to see if you've disguised it well enough to pass turnitin. Seems to me like they're selling arms to both sides of the war.
September 20, 2011 at 12:00 am
The case of a student paying for school, then paying again to have his/her homework done by someone else (hence getting less value out of more money) is ironic at best...:-)
It's the future employer of these sad sobs (that could be me 🙁 ) that really pays in the end, they expect a certain level of expertise based on the diploma/degree they DO get in the end.
September 20, 2011 at 12:03 am
I agree, I think more and more today is all about instant gratification. Some people does not expect to have to put in any form of effort to receive a reward or gain success.
How someone does not want to do their own homework is strange to me because why would they take the course if they don't want to learn it and how do they think they will do on the market?
September 20, 2011 at 12:49 am
I can understand the other side of the story as i thought university was a joke really. There i was at home putting computers together from piles of junk (couldnt afford one at the time), learning how to use slackware, apache, mysql and perl (main ones), having a great time of it too.
Went to uni and they ask us to build a tamagotchi in vb (wtf?), this is a degree in software engineering btw.
If i could have paid someone to do it for me i think i would have (i had much better things to do). I think a lot of people could well do the work themselves, they just couldnt be bothered either and i think the fact there are so many of these essay sites, homework jobs on rentacoder, etc out there speaks more of the schools and uni's than it does the students.
What would Mr Miyagi say
"I cannot fathom why people do not want to earn their own accomplishments"
lol... highschool was hardly an accomplishment, i thought of it more as glorified daycare
September 20, 2011 at 2:34 am
All of this just reiterates the need to make job candidates answer real technical questions and/or sit a relevant test as part of an interview.
You have to take CVs and qualifications with a pinch of salt. Many of those CVs will have been written by someone else for them as well!!
September 20, 2011 at 3:02 am
Hmmm. Another less than honourable contributor, I wonder? Seems we often (rightly) get an editorial like this when a potential contributor has been trying to take the mickey.
Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat
September 20, 2011 at 4:03 am
There are similar parallels to be drawn in other areas of life as well. My spare time is sometimes (well, maybe a lot of times 🙂 ) spent playing games online and I often find myself the recipient of other players asking me me to "boost" their game accounts, essentially playing the games for them so that they get the rewards without the time and effort needed, typically for some fee but not necessarily.
It really just boils down to the same thing that one of the other posters said about instant gratification. There is a seemingly growing portion of society that wants something now, but aren't willing to do it "properly" for lack of a better word.
I think it's a shame, and will inevitably lead to those poor fools deluding themselves that they can do something when they can't. When it comes to jobs, that not only affects them, as they'll not be likely to hold down a post that requires them to be able to do something they can't, but also the employer that hired them as they wasted their time and would have to start again. I wonder though, could we be heading towards a situation where someone is fired because they couldn't do something they claimed to be able to, and the firing be viewed as legal due to the person's false representation of their skills?
September 20, 2011 at 4:10 am
rashton (9/20/2011)
... I wonder though, could we be heading towards a situation where someone is fired because they couldn't do something they claimed to be able to, and the firing be viewed as legal due to the person's false representation of their skills?
Apologies if this is a naive question, but isn't that the case now? After all, it is effectively a form of fraud in order to gain money, and that's illegal.
Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat
September 20, 2011 at 5:12 am
slhope (9/19/2011)
I agree with you on your main point - why are you studying if you don't want to learn to do it yourself?
I think that you'll are actually missing the main point, and diving in on the example given. Let's take a look again at the first sentence in the article:
It's amazing to me that someone can take the words from another and publish them as their own.
The main point is: passing something off as having been done by you, when it was in fact NOT done by you. Be it homework, or anything else.
A strongly related theme in this is plagiarism - something that some of the articles that I have written have been a victim of. (I actually have to periodically scan the internet looking for my articles being plagiarized, and then go through the BS to get them removed.) Late last year, an entire web site was taken down for over two weeks after it was revealed that some of the "authors" that publish on that web site had done nothing more than plagiarize articles from others, and post them as their own works. What makes this particular case really sad is that this web site was just about to receive an award for all the good that they had done (IMO, based upon what else I have seen on this web site, a well-deserved award) - but these actions by a few select "authors" had that award yanked away from them. The web site went down (voluntarily) so that the owners could ensure that everything on their site was proper.
This all boils down to cheating. If proven, classes should be failed (even retroactively). Degrees should be withdrawn (even retroactively). Employees should be fired AND prosecuted for fraud. Sadly, this won't stop until the punishment is worse than the crime. Let's go draconian - if you used your hand to steal, your hand gets cut off. Making the punishment unbearable and a public humiliation is the only thing that will stop this kind of cheating. (If it infringes on your ability to gain employment... so be it. Maybe it will stop you AND OTHERS from doing this again.)
There are NO EXCUSES for doing this. None.
Wayne
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008
Author - SQL Server T-SQL Recipes
September 20, 2011 at 5:18 am
@majorbloodnock: My apologies, I've re-read what I put and I wasn't as clear as I thought :-).
I meant that my impressions of employment tribunals and employment laws (at least in my country) seem to favour the employee nowadays, so it's really quite difficult for employers to fire staff unless there is evidence of some sort of gross misconduct or a very long period of poor performance. Employers have to jump through a lot of hoops to get rid of people (which I'm not against, please don't misunderstand me on that point, I like being gainfully employed! :-D).
What I was trying to say is that by getting someone to do your CS project at university, therefore getting a pass without doing the work to learn the skills needed, may (should?) be viewed as lying on your CV which is (at least at the places I've worked) a suitable reason for a gross misconduct charge and subsequent dismissal. I'm just wondering how long it will be before I read a story like that in my morning paper...
September 20, 2011 at 5:52 am
IceDread (9/20/2011)
How someone does not want to do their own homework is strange to me because why would they take the course if they don't want to learn it and how do they think they will do on the market?
The easy answer to this is it was a required course for the degree. Not that I condone this type of action at all. In fact it's probably those classes where you would most need to do the work. Just because you can't understand why "Business Writing" (or any other class) is important doesn't mean that it won't be important in the business world.
September 20, 2011 at 5:55 am
rashton (9/20/2011)
@majorbloodnock: My apologies, I've re-read what I put and I wasn't as clear as I thought :-).I meant that my impressions of employment tribunals and employment laws (at least in my country) seem to favour the employee nowadays, so it's really quite difficult for employers to fire staff unless there is evidence of some sort of gross misconduct or a very long period of poor performance. Employers have to jump through a lot of hoops to get rid of people (which I'm not against, please don't misunderstand me on that point, I like being gainfully employed! :-D).
What I was trying to say is that by getting someone to do your CS project at university, therefore getting a pass without doing the work to learn the skills needed, may (should?) be viewed as lying on your CV which is (at least at the places I've worked) a suitable reason for a gross misconduct charge and subsequent dismissal. I'm just wondering how long it will be before I read a story like that in my morning paper...
Ah, OK. Understood and agreed.
In fact, I'd link in with WayneS's post too, and hope that degrees can be withdrawn retrospectively, thereby needing the qualifications to be removed from CVs and present employers to be informed of what would now be inconsistencies in their employee's paperwork. It's all probably a bit pie in the sky, but being fair minded I like seeing unfairness uncovered.
Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat
September 20, 2011 at 6:33 am
I've ran into this problem in the work environment in a more insidious way. Many moons ago when companies had VAXen running VMS, I created a nifty utility in DCL that cut a lot of my departments busy work by a couple of orders of magnitude. A few politically connected co-workers decide to boldly lie and take credit for my work. Thankfully I was soon let go in one of many rounds of lay-offs and found a better company to work for. I often wonder how far these two advanced in life if they continued this behavior?
September 20, 2011 at 6:49 am
Ian Scarlett (9/20/2011)
All of this just reiterates the need to make job candidates answer real technical questions and/or sit a relevant test as part of an interview.You have to take CVs and qualifications with a pinch of salt. Many of those CVs will have been written by someone else for them as well!!
Actually, I've had my resume plagiarized. How weird is that?
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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