pondering this plague of pervasive plagiarism

My TA responsibilities recently included marking an assignment for a 2nd year research methods course.  119 students read the same paper and answered the same questions about it (e.g. What were the hypotheses?  What were the dependent and independent variables? etc.)  A significant majority plagiarized.  I was instructed to give them zeros on questions for which their answers were plagiarized, which is a fairly light penalty under the university's plagiarism standards.  Still, the net effect was that the class average was close to failing.

I mention this because I've been fascinated by student response to accusations of violations of academic integrity.  I got many emails from students who plagiarized, and there were several very common responses:

• I am very upset
• I worked very hard
• I did not plagiarize
• I did the same thing on the last assignment and got a good grade
• I don't know how else to say what the authors said

 The first two seem to reveal feelings of entitlement.  If I work hard, I deserve a good grade regardless of the quality of my work.  If I don't get what I want, that makes me upset; if I'm upset, you better fix it.  These people have a very different idea of what "higher education" is supposed to be about than I do, but I'd have a hard time saying they're wrong about what it actually is.

Denial is fascinating to me, because it was clear that most of the deniers didn't even understand what they were accused of.  They just denied as their first instinct.  I'd already sent most of them a link to a university site that explains plagiarism quite thoroughly, which they seem to have completely ignored.  Often denials were accompanied by lame "proof" of their innocence, unambiguous and perfectly preserved electronic evidence notwithstanding.  Once I directed them to the specific section of the website that dealt with their specific form of plagiarism and showed them examples of how what they did is a perfect example, they usually stopped denying and switched to other tactics.  It was especially interesting when the strategy shifted from denial to the 4th response and/or 5th response.  "I didn't plagiarize... I always plagiarize... I don't know how to do anything other than plagiarize."

It became clear while I was marking these that the standard strategy employed by most students was to find the sentences or paragraphs in the paper where the authors came closest to answering each question and just copy what the authors wrote, despite instructions to "use your own words" and despite the general warning issued to the class after the previous assignment to familiarize themselves with university plagiarism guidelines..  Some especially inept students just straight-up copy and pasted words from the paper to their assignment, but most made at least a shitty effort to paraphrase.  (Closely paraphrasing without quoting is a form of plagiarism.)  That's generally a good strategy.  Unless the person marking the assignment knows the original paper inside and out (which starts to happen when you have to mark 119 assignments about it), it is difficult to detect paraphrased plagiarism.  I did find quite a bit of it on their first assignment, but I suspect I overlooked the vast majority.  So they generally face low risk of detection for this form of cheating, and they don't have to do all the hard work of fully understanding the research and expressing ideas in their own words.

This is all consistent with what I've observed for quite a while: undergraduate students are generally terrible at writing and critical thinking, and go to great lengths to avoid both.  And I can't really blame them, because that's a fairly rational response to the incentive structures they typically face.

BINGO!

usually i just delete emails from my alma mater, but i paid attention to a recent one long enough to decide it deserves ridicule. check this out! let's have a big gambling contest and pretend we're learning something!

some people get it

Here are a pair of inspiring blog posts I came across today:

America Via Erica's valedictorian speech (via Ethan)

the Anarchist Mother's unfooding experiment

both of them have other interesting items on their blogs. check them out!

more of my students ought to hire this guy

prison

yeah, i'll just keep going with my wildly unpopular criticism of institutionalized education and say i agree with that perspective.

if i'm correct in assuming that the use of physical or authoritarian coercion is truly avoided except in self-defense or the immediate defense of others, the only thing i can see wrong with this alternative system after a quick perusal is that it isn't the system for every part of everyone's lives. it almost seems unfair to provide people with such an ideal environment, knowing that it will be extremely different to replicate that experience later in their lives.

thanks to dan for the tip.

leave those kids alone

I just sat through this talk about how you can maybe treat ADHD by treating associated working memory deficits that pissed me off.

Working memory is supposed to be useful for "goal-directed activity." The behavioural patterns associated with ADHD include things like poor academic performance, not sitting still in class, talking out of turn, and poor performance in memory tasks in the lab. It strikes me that all these behaviours involve goals imposed on them by authorities, authorities who then cite a child's reluctance to subordinate his own goals to the goals of the authority as evidence of a "disorder" that requires pharmacological intervention or behavioural modification therapy. Seems to me like ADHD is an independent-minded social strategy that doesn't fit well with our social system, so we're trying to modify the individuals to fit the system, rather than the other way around. Procrustes smiles.

When I brought this up to the speaker, she cited ADHD kids' poor perform at video games ("their favorite thing to do!") as evidence for inability to perform well at their own goals. I've played video games; sometimes you just don't want to do what you have to do to "win." Sometime you just want to go jump on that thing and see what happens. When I questioned the ecological validity of video games, she said something about how when they play baseball ("what could be more ecologically valid!?") they have trouble remembering how many outs there are or some shit. Uh, maybe they just want to catch and throw a ball without keeping score? God forbid we try to have fun without a way to keep track of winners and losers.

It just strongly felt to me that I was in the presence of the worst evil of academia, where some "expert" is highly paid to make it sound like fucking people up to serve the interests of power is somehow "science" that we should all take seriously and respect. Fuck them.

My friend at Think Love, who studies psychological phenomena related to so-called ADHD, has some further commentary, touching on some important points like how this kind of "science" is funded, and what might constitute natural child behaviour (hint: it doesn't involve sitting still in a classroom all day and filling in the right circles with a #2 pencil).

weighing the question: does it matter?

One reason I'm studying what I'm studying is that while I enjoy learning just for its own sake, it feels like masturbation if it doesn't matter. And I know that pursuing science just for its own sake can, and often does, lead to something that matters. But I like studying cooperation and conflict (as opposed to string theory or tactile perception or Russian literature) because, aside from the masturbatory feeling that it is enjoyable and interesting, it also seems to me that this shit matters. It seems clearer in my academic field than in some others (and less than some too) that my work has potential to do some good. I suppose that is a personal judgment, perhaps largely political. My hope is that as I get better at doing the science, I'll also be increasingly able to do it in a way that facilitates positive social change, if only on a tiny scale.

I hope that will be worth the valuable time and energy I'm devoting to the formal process of obtaining the proper credentials required by the gargantuan institutions where most of this kind of work is done. Grad school is good because it, at least in theory, strips education down to its best parts: there is minimal formal coursework, most of which involves small class sizes, and there is lots of independent, self-motivated investigation of topics that interest you (although personal interests have to be weighed against the interests of the people funding the research), under the guidance of experienced and knowledgable supervisors. Grad school is bad because in order to afford it, most of us have to actively participate in the formalization of the worst perversions of education: marking exams and teaching huge introductory courses to masses of students with little interest in the material.

here's what school is really all about

Maryland teacher calls police when her 13 year old student refuses to say the pledge of allegiance.

We need men with guns to deal with the threat posed by a child who won't swear fealty to a bloody fucking rag on a stick. Bow before the altar of the state, lest the state's hired goons drag you away.

more on schools

or, or, as prof crispy says:

surely schools are good at absolutely anything compared to their ability to teach individual responsibility. they're more effective at nurturing an extreme ethic of concealment, even as they try to encourage a culture of anonymous denunciation of others etc. and of course what you're subjected to in terms of actual subject-matter is standardized across all individuals, and the behavioral goals are uniformity, silence, and detailed control over people's movements and expressions to achieve homogeneity.

or, as RAtM says, the classroom's the last room to get the truth

what schools are

IOZ says schools are "miserable, enervating, spirit-crushing, thought-destroying, mind-rotting, child-processing, conformity factories." IOZ is right.

hiding in a spider hole

In reference to how the supreme court thinks its pretty much just fine for school officials to strip search little girls to make sure they don't have any WMDs tylenol hidden in their panties, I'd just like to second IOZ's point: public schools are prisons for kids.

Is there any imagined threat that doesn't justify a US Government invasion of some kind?

my job this semester

The class I TAed last semester was amazing. I wish I had taken something like it as an undergrad.

This semester I'm TAing a behavioral ecology course:

Behavioural Ecology is a field devoted to understanding animal behaviour in terms of evolution and ecology. In this course, we will study the behaviour of animals, why such behaviour evolves and how behaviour may enable animals to adapt to their environments. As a field, behavioural ecology emerged from a synthesis of many scientific disciplines including ethology, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, zoology and population genetics. Note, this course is NOT centrally concerned with Homo sapiens, and will take a comparative approach to the study of
animal behaviour.

I would have loved this course as an undergrad too, but I stayed away from biology because I hated dissecting things. I haven't taken a biology course since my freshman year of high school, 1994-1995. I don't remember evolution being covered in that course, and there certainly wasn't any cool analysis of behavior. The stuff worth learning managed to elude me for a long time, but I found it eventually.

molding young minds

BO saw this, and decided he needs to bring this to the national level. Read that if you're interested in education.

and 64% of prisoners break prison rules!

I gotta agree with the professor:

so 64% of american students cheat. let me say this: that would be bad if education were not compulsory. if i enter into a contest - a sporting event, a game of chess or poker - because i want to play, then to cheat is disgusting. but if you put a gun to my head and make me play, then i have no obligation to abide by the rules; no one should blame me if i do whatever i can get away with. indeed, under such circumstances, cheating would be a nice little act of resistance. i think it's deeply reprehensible when an author plagiarizes, but if writing books were compulsory, plagiarism would be understandable and at worst morally neutral. in other words, compulsory education abrogates anything we might think of as educational ethics: destroys it, vitiates it, suspends it. that's one reason (of many) why compulsory education is an absurd concept, or merely a contradiction in terms. our educational institutions teach that capitulation is the essence of honor, which of course is exactly the center of our moral training of young people. if they come out of that cheaters, you're getting what you deserve, what you're begging for.

some other field

BF: Your book is really an antidote to the dominant Chicago school of free marketeers. What is the meaning of “free market” these days, as understood on Wall Street?

MH: It's exactly the opposite of what Adam Smith, and Ricardo and the classical economists defined as a free market. Classical economics defined a free market as one that is free of overhead charges, free of unnecessary charges of production, free of watered stock. Today a free market means that predators are free to extort any price from the public, they are free to deregulate, free to lie to consumers, free to exploit, free to load any company they want down with debt, and basically lead (us) to a world of debt peonage... So the whole concept of freedom has been turned upside down by the Chicago school and by the Bush administration.

BF: Why is today's understanding so different?

MH: Because hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to mislead people and to endow business schools and universities to stop teaching the history of economic thought, to stop teaching the classical economists, and essentially to brainwash students, so that those with a sense of realism simply drop out of the field of economics and go into some other field.

Ding ding ding!!!

stupidness: my transcript

I have 2 degrees from the University of Maryland. I have a bachelor of arts from the school of behavioral and social sciences, for my economics course work. And I have a bachelor of science from the business school, for my finance course work.

Now the reasons that I think so little of my undergraduate degrees are numerous and probably require a great deal of explanation, but there's something so simple in just noting the absurdity of the nomenclature. The dismal science seems to be exercising some surprising humility by handing out arts degrees, which I guess is fair enough because undergraduate economics isn't especially scientific. But it is a fuck of a lot more scientific than anything the business school has to offer, and yet somehow they're handing out science degrees?

This of course isn't uniquely a Terp thing. Everybody's doing it, which must mean it makes sense somehow, right?

shut down The Fed?

Coming from an undergraduate economics background, I was raised to love The Fed and worship Alan Greenspan. I hadn't thought much about that in a while, but this is an interesting case that The Fed is a tool of tyranny. Check it out.

The pernicious role of The Fed was also examined in The Conservative Nanny State,
which is well worth the read, and a real bargain at $0.00.

what is the point of school

A while back I mentioned an interest in home schooling, but haven't directly followed up on it since. I haven't done much more research specifically about home schooling, but I've done a significant amount of reading and reflection about learning and the function of institutionalized education.

When I first contemplated home schooling, one of the first drawbacks I considered was about socialization. How would the kids learn how to interact with people? It is a very common concern, but I imagine almost all of the people who share this concern have one thing in common: they went to standard schools. Since that's where they (we) had their (our) first social experiences, it is hard for us to even imagine growing up in a different environment.

My sister sent me a great essay about this topic of socialization in institutional schooling that makes several great points. Exactly what does this oh-so-important "socialization" process actually teach kids? That they have to stick with people of exactly their own age? That you should sit indoors, bored out of your mind, being forced to pay attention to some subject you don't care about? That you shouldn't talk to your friends or make jokes in that situation? That you have to keep interacting with the same asshole that you don't get along with every fucking day because that's the way the seating chart is assigned?

Basically my position now is that I see little of value in the traditional education system that couldn't be better achieved through alternative methods. And I see lots of things in the standard school system that are extremely negative, aside from what I mentioned above. In my recent post over at Inertia Anonymous, considering how academic success is largely measured by test scores, I wrote:

Well what do tests measure except the ability to tell authority figures what they want to hear, to regurgitate information that we committed to short-term memory simply to earn the approval of the authorities, to jump through fucking monkey hoops just to see a shining "A" on the "report card" that the school authorities sent out to other school authorities (not to mention our home life authorities.)

Institutional schools are class societies. The ruling class makes the rules and enforces them cruelly. They control information and tell you what you can believe. They allow you a certain amount of freedom amidst your drudgery, and you spend your whole days looking forward to it, but they always remind you that this is a privilege that they can revoke at any time. The lower class must obey the rules, or else they are punished. They must stand in lines and tell the authorities what they want to hear. They are prevented from doing what they naturally want to do, and forced to do mundane tasks for no apparent reason. They must stick within their own groups in the lower class, groups formed arbitrary conventions like age and name, with little regard for personality, interest, or ability. Sure you sometimes have honors classes, debate teams, or a sophomore on the varsity soccer squad, but these are exceptions and afterthoughts (that suit the needs of the ruling class, who have their own rulers they must answer to).

I don't even have a kid, and it makes me queasy just thinking about putting a child through that if there are better ways to raise them. I don't know that that makes homeschooling the default alternative. I could imagine a variety of alternatives to mainstream schools, involving various combinations of formal and informal opportunities.

My personal statement for grad school applications

Here are the opening sections of the personal statement I attached with my graduate school applications. Below this would be a customized paragraph expressing interest in the work of specific faculty members at each school, and sections about my academic, research, and other experiences.

In this personal statement I essentially want to summarize where I am and how I got here. Along the way I will discuss my research interests, career goals, and relevant experiences.


Worldview

My views include the following ideas:

• The foreign policy of the United States Government has been grossly immoral for at least 100 years. Many of its executive branch and military leaders during this time should be considered war criminals, with Congressional leaders of both parties fully complicit.
• Increasingly authoritarian domestic policies have eroded personal liberty in a multitude of ways, and are contrary to our supposed national ideals.
• The vast majority of our national dialog on these and related matters is remarkably ill-informed, predicated on false assumptions, and dominated by people with an interest in keeping it that way.
• The American lifestyle is perilously unsustainable and unhealthy. Our transportation, energy, and agricultural systems depend on unsustainable resource consumption and environmental destruction. Our economy is propped up by unsustainable debt levels. Our high-calorie diets and sedentary lifestyles are leading to deteriorating health while our healthcare system becomes increasingly unaffordable.
• Religion is a negative societal force. Its destructive consequences include the following: encouraging pride in scientific illiteracy and historical ignorance; glorifying sexist, racist, and homophobic ideas and actions; inhibiting compassion and stunting our moral reasoning abilities in favor of punishment and deference to authority.

These views are based on a great deal of reading and reflection, but each point would take far more space to adequately defend than I have available in this format. So I present them as an unsubstantiated list of my personal views, for which I believe I could argue convincingly and passionately, though I always consider myself open to intelligent counterargument.

Taking all of those views together, I find the hypocrisy, injustice, and immorality disturbing, almost indescribably so. I see understanding the thoughts and behaviors behind each of those points as a necessary contribution to fighting them, and I find myself driven to pursue this understanding.


Academic, Career, and Faculty Interests

I want to understand how individuals can hold obviously contradictory beliefs. Why do people have strong opinions on subjects about which they know almost nothing? I want to understand how each individual within a population can assume patterns of behavior that seem so obviously self-destructive to the group as a whole. How can people come to value superstition and dogma over logic and evidence? What forces drive these behaviors?

I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in trying to make sense of these things, and I’ve concluded that an academic career in psychology would be the best avenue for continuing this pursuit. I envision myself as beginning an academic career with a unifying theme of studying conditions that encourage or discourage reasonable behavior, drawing on findings from, and contributing to the body of knowledge in the fields of personality/social psychology and evolutionary psychology.

My interest in those particular fields developed because they’ve offered the most compelling insights for me as I’ve explored those questions. The classic social science experiments – Milgram, Stanford Prison – shed valuable light on Abu Ghraib and our national torture debate (I still can’t get over that there is any debate). I’ve found the personality research of Dr. Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, who has extensively studied authoritarianism and religious attitudes, similarly illuminating. Evolutionary Psychology offers the insight that many of the disturbing problems I listed could be united by a common theme of human confrontation with evolutionarily unprecedented situations: huge states, agriculture, powerful weaponry, hydrocarbon energy, and advanced scientific knowledge. The vast majority of the evolution of the human mind occurred in the absence of these innovations, and thrusting our stone age brains into the space age seems bound to cause trouble.

I’ve given political issues a prominent place in this essay because they arouse my passions these days, but I’ve touched on other areas as well: education, morality, health, religion, media consumption. There are a number of kinds of behavior that interest me under all of those headings. I hope to have the opportunity to explore one or more of those interests as a graduate student and beyond.