181–190 of 195 posts
Off topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. And then media jumped on th…
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I’ve never understood why people on Hacker News feel the need to make these year comments? Particularly in cases like this where it adds nothing at all to the conversation. It has the air of indicating that the content is potentially outdated, but the post is quite little less than a month old. If the content was a couple days newer would there be value in commenting “(2024)”? Beyond that, everything on that page has…
It was on the front page of Reddit a month ago. Why would it be interesting to read again one month later? This is Hacker News, not Hacker Olds.
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Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. It's about passing off material as new when it isn't. You can quote any previous work, others and/or your own, but you must highlight/identify it as such.
Whose definition is this "newness"? Plagiarism is about passing other people's work off as your own. It comes from a Greek root about kidnapping, not about how old something is.
I'm not defending the usage, I'm simply explaining how the term is now used. Language mutates, origins are lost, and usage evolves.
You may choose to quote dictionary definitions, but dictionaries document usage, and of necessity can never be fully up-to-date with more recent changes. This is especially true when the terms are being interpreted within a specific context. In many academic environments "self-plagiarism" is an adaptation of the original concept to indicate that students cannot repeatedly submit the same work over and over again. They will say something like "Work for this accreditation must be new and original" and then use the term "self-plagiarism" to describe when that stipulation is breached.
As I say, language evolves. People even say "The proof is in the pudding" and "I could care less". These are idioms that convey meaning as an entirety and are not to be interpreted according to the meaning of the words therein.
Similarly, now in some contexts "self-plagiarism" is a term used to describe recycling one's own work. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's not.
Love it, like it, or loathe it, the term exists and describes "A Thing(tm)".
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Let's phrase it differently: how many times do you think one should be allowed to turn in the same piece of work for additional academic credit? The issue with self plagiarism isn't that you are quoting your own previous work (you are free to do that), it's because you're not tagging it as a citation and thereby passing it off as new.
> how many times do you think one should be allowed to turn in the same piece of work for additional academic credit? As many as it meets the requirements for. Heck, I submitted the exact same "tell us about a significant experience in your life" story to every single university I applied for. And I guarantee the teachers are duplicating lessons or parts of lessons when they teach related classes. Have you ever seen…
>As many as it meets the requirements for.
What I'm trying to tell you is that it normally won't meet the requirements a second time. It's usually part of the university's examination regulations that a paper has to be original. Everything else is seen as an attempt of scientific deception that consequently can and will be treated as a violation of regulations.
But I have to admit I'm not sure if that's a universal rule, or just where I'm from. I suspect we might be having some kind of cultural divide at play here. May I ask what part of the world you're in?
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Then it’s not copying, is it? It’s using SO as a reference site, like any other reference, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do.
Ctrl C plus ctrl V is copying. Why assume that no verification, testing or checking came after that though?
I wish I could add a sarcasm marker but I see chunks of dumb code inserted in public repos, NPM, etc all the time.
I can only hope that my bank’s phone app has been subject to reasonable code review.
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If I turn in the same project for two different courses without flagging it, that's considered a violation of many academic (teaching) integrity codes. Similarly if you hire me to write a bespoke piece of software (with copyright assigned to you) and I re-use code I've delivered to other clients, that could be considered a damaging violation of our contract. You could refer to both of these cases as "self-plagiarism"…
There's a difference between a school writing up its own set of conduct rules and plagiarism. Any two entities can agree to any set of terms they want. If a school says you have to sign a code of conduct to go there, and it prohibits submitting the same work for more than one course, fine. If someone breaks that rule, accuse them of violating the code of conduct. But that's not plagiarism. "Self-plagiarism" is a cont…
It's also important to understand that many of the lessons we are taught in school about attribution are deliberately over-emphasized by instructors, in order to impart good citation habits. If frightening students to death about "self-plagiarism" causes them to be unnecessarily forthright in citing their own work, even outside the classroom context, instructors are mostly fine with that.
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> how many times do you think one should be allowed to turn in the same piece of work for additional academic credit? As many as it meets the requirements for. Heck, I submitted the exact same "tell us about a significant experience in your life" story to every single university I applied for. And I guarantee the teachers are duplicating lessons or parts of lessons when they teach related classes. Have you ever seen…
The avoidance of self-plagiarism isn't some kind of honour code for all aspects of life - it only applies to the specific case of a paper to submit for academic credit. The examples you describe have nothing to do with that, of course. >As many as it meets the requirements for. What I'm trying to tell you is that it normally won't meet the requirements a second time. It's usually part of the university's examination…
If I had taken two classes that both requested an essay on the symbolism of Plato's cave, I'd be stoked I already had one at the ready. Wouldn't even occur to me that there was some problem with it. But even that isn't what happened in my original post that prompted the question.
I'm in the U.S., and I was pursuing my degree at a university people have heard of in New England (but not the one that probably first comes to mind, especially about this topic lately).
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Whose definition is this "newness"? Plagiarism is about passing other people's work off as your own. It comes from a Greek root about kidnapping, not about how old something is.
Your observation about the root of the word might be accurate, but (in my personal view unfortunately) is not relevant. "Plagiarism" is now used to describe previously published (and in some cases unpublished!) work that is being "recycled", regardless of author, without explicitly noting it to be such. I'm not defending the usage, I'm simply explaining how the term is now used. Language mutates, origins are lost, an…
I'd assume it would have had to be somebody pretty important, for their fiat to have such weight. I'd like to know who it was.