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Tag Archives: plagiarism

Why punish plagiarists?

11-Nov-09

A recent post at the great philosophy teaching blog In Socrates’ Wake had a reader asking the audience whether, by not automatically giving a student an F for the course after plagiarizing a one-page assignment, he had “gone soft”. Simultaneously, I empathize with the instructor and I am baffled by why I empathize. In the [...]

The ethics of Turnitin, or How I Learned To Stop Detecting Plagiarism

04-Sep-09

Yesterday I was feeling sorry for myself with regard to Turnitin and the like. I ended up having an interesting discussion with @LanceStrate, @mattthomas, and @KelliMarshall about the ethics surrounding plagiarism detection service. It got me to thinking about why it bothers me. My gut feeling is this: Turnitin, SafeAssign et al make big bucks [...]