Having just started my first week in a new semester with seven classes running 18 credits I've been told many many times that if I present someone else's work as my own I will face the academic firing squad. I'm sure that I would actually get a session of positive counseling and a second chance but that seems like a pretty fair deal when some of the people in my classes only academic bona fides are a high school diploma. For the past two weeks many of the social justice warriors I follow (and admire) on twitter have been wringing their hands that the president of Harvard shouldn't have to face consequences for plagiarizing. I've been wholly indifferent their pleas. I don't' care that the president of Harvard has been taken down by a fucking conservative devil, if I plagiarized twice I'd be kicked out of school. It's even crazier that if you are a tech bro that plagiarizes you should get to become a billionaire. I shouldn't be surprised. Why would any argument that helps you become a billionaire seem perfectly suited to reality if the steaks are billionairehood.
I laugh at the whole thing because plagiarism got so weaponized that it’s being used against the administration that like everyone else has occasion to cheat, cut corners and make citations mistakes. Most of the plagiarism that was found isn’t material to the ideas of the actual work it’s all a technical gotcha. That being said if it’s zero tolerance for the student the administrators need to be crucified to the same standard, only then will stupid policies change.
Friend of mine did 20 years in the Coast Guard. Was the quartermaster for entire 250-foot cruisers and shit. He's got a little GI Bill left and discovered they will pay him to go get (another) associate's degree, and since he's got a '50 Chevy in need of restoration, he's doing auto body repair. He called me up despairing because they spent half an hour talking about how to sweep. "Dude," I said, "You're in among a bunch of community college students who in the Year of our Lord 2024 thought they had a bright and shining future in Bondo." He laughed but it calmed his ass down. Apparently he'd never heard "green side up" as an epithet. I dunno what Oregon is like but in Washington, the state legislature set a ceiling for community college salaries. It's the same in Yakima as it is in Capitol Hill. End result is that the folx teaching community college around here are either old and jaded and been doing it for a thousand years and are now looking for the door, or they're the youngest, dead-endgingest dead-enders you've ever seen. Guy who was ostensibly teaching me CNC was making $21 an hour. As a junior in college, halfway through a mechanical engineering degree, I was making $26 an hour in 1995. Into this mileu? throw "Hey Siri, write my essay so I don't have to learn anything." It's gonna take ten years before academia has figured out how to deal with the fact that the essay, as a fundamental tool of evaluation, is gone. There's simply no way to make the exercise use more bandwidth than the protection of the exercise. People are still gonna learn but the easy ways we have to ward against cheating are fuckin' done. And it can't go away fast enough. The thing about all this plagiarism shit is that it's not about "did you pass someone else's ideas off as your own" it's about "did you properly cite the APA style guide for the year your research was published." Nobody wants to admit that 99.999% of all theses are dumb boring bullshit that nobody is ever going to read again; you might as well write "I want a fucking Ph.D" a million times across the chalkboard since it's fundamentally a hazing ritual anyway. The advent of the Internet has simply made it easier to weaponize decades into the future. And no - I don't disagree with you. If the game is "did you dot your i's and cross your t's a million times" then those who can't drive spellcheck don't pass. As far as I'm concerned society should solve this particular problem by putting Claudine Gay, Neri Oxman, a chainsaw and a halberd in Thunderdome and let the one who leaves with a pulse rule triumphant. To me? The problem is not plagiarism, the problem is thesis advisors going "nice research be a shame if I published it under my own name and set you back years." Of the six women I know well with advanced degrees, five had their research stolen by their advisor. It's all tedious rich people bullshit and if this is the petard they're going to hoist themselves on, sell fucking popcorn.