I'm not sure I'm against plagiarism detection tech.
Bad teachers may punish students for false positives. It's a tool, not a blackbox of academic integrity.
Against Cop Shit
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: Against Cop Shit
#22I'm not sure I'm against plagiarism detection tech.
Plagiarism detection tech seems like a solving-the-wrong-problem attempt to address a symptom of how we're trying to mass-produce education to save money. If we actually want people to learn, plagiarism detection isn't the problem, it's the industrial factory approach in the first place. Get rid of that, and instructors can know and talk with their students well enough to tell what they actually know and understand i…
I don't agree with this at all. Assessment is completely necessary to understand where a student is at, and plagiarism renders assessment ineffective.
Re: Against Cop Shit
#23Haha I just vouched it back from the grave... [EDIT:]... and now it's [flagged] again. I suspect flaggers may not have actually read TFA. It was published in February, so it doesn't specifically refer to recent public demonstrations. It's pretty clear which side the author would take...
It could be useful to have "February 2020" in the title.
Re: Against Cop Shit
#24Haha I just vouched it back from the grave... [EDIT:]... and now it's [flagged] again. I suspect flaggers may not have actually read TFA. It was published in February, so it doesn't specifically refer to recent public demonstrations. It's pretty clear which side the author would take...
Yeah, I don't think it should be flagged. It's a provocative title, but it's very much an argument about pedagogy and technology in education. It should be in HN's wheelhouse.
(I don't see how to try and "unflag" it, but I'm still not 100% of some of the moderation system here even after all this time.)
Re: Against Cop Shit
#25Haha I just vouched it back from the grave... [EDIT:]... and now it's [flagged] again. I suspect flaggers may not have actually read TFA. It was published in February, so it doesn't specifically refer to recent public demonstrations. It's pretty clear which side the author would take...
the fact that this gets flagged tells me people didn't even read the article and just got offended by the title.
Re: Against Cop Shit
#26Hey so this is awesome, and I'd like to add a few points. (I used to teach HS Math in NYC Public Schools).
- End scanning[1]. Scanning is the practice of forcing students to put their possessions through x-ray machines and walk their bodies through metal detectors. Like, airport security.
- Wrap your head around that for a sec. Everyday, you trek to school, and are immediately put in a hostile environment where you must prove your innocence to be _able_ to learn. Not to mention it's a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment (search/seizure). Oh, and this happens disproportionately to poor/minority students.
- End police in schools, period. In NYC, we have "school safety agents" which are a subset of the NYPD[2]. School Safety, if taken as its own police department, is greater than the size of police departments in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and other police departments with - Furthermore, because you now have cop-lites in the building, you also have cops in the building...because, why not? Minor infractions like fighting, pot, or even "disrespecting teachers" no longer get a call home or a trip to the principal's office, but handed over to a cop.
- Boom, the student is now in the system. This is called the school to prison pipeline[3]. It's real, very real. The pathetic feedback loop of going to school to break out of poverty only to be streamlined to jail...
1. https://www.schools.nyc.gov/school-life/safe-schools/school-safety
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Department_School_Safety_Division
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
Re: Against Cop Shit
#27This is the kind of stuff you can believe in if you haven't been a student at a bad public school. There are students who for the sake of their classmates (to say nothing of the teachers' sanity) absolutely have to be handled with "cop shit" because they won't respond to anything else and will disrupt not only their own class, but every nearby class too.
That's exactly the kind of bullshit that Law and Order people sell every day while they poison our society with violence, force, and mistrust. This is the kind of bullshit that got us the TSA (never forget!) and real censorship (think of the children!).
Law and Order - Destroying our society every day.
Re: Against Cop Shit
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does a good instructor, syllabus, and/or academic institution not need this? I went to an Ivy League school with hopefully above average teachers and saw a lot of plagiarism.
In principle, you remove the incentive for plagiarism by making the students' reward for their work be what they learn as a result, rather than some kind of certificate.
Oh cool, so we just need to fix a massive social problem that's generated by long-running structural trends within our society and economy. Then we can stop using plagiarism detection software.
Re: Against Cop Shit
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plagiarism detection tech seems like a solving-the-wrong-problem attempt to address a symptom of how we're trying to mass-produce education to save money. If we actually want people to learn, plagiarism detection isn't the problem, it's the industrial factory approach in the first place. Get rid of that, and instructors can know and talk with their students well enough to tell what they actually know and understand i…
I don't agree with this at all. Assessment is completely necessary to understand where a student is at, and plagiarism renders assessment ineffective.
In the past we solved that by the instructor discussing the material with the students; it would quickly become apparent who knew something and who didn't. Unfortunately classes have become too big for that.
Re: Against Cop Shit
#30Education by conformance is the only solution that has held up for mass-produced education around the world. In any conformance environment, you'll find actors who are more and other who are less strict. The behavior cited is an outcry against absurdly strict and asymmetric methods for driving conformity.
In reality, a conformance approach is a disservice to all. I am reminded of a story about the initial cockpit designs for military jet aircraft. Designers took a data approach. They measured 140 dimensions of 4000 pilots: height weight, arm span, leg length, ... And found the average for all. The end result was that no pilots fit in the cockpit, many so badly that the air force saw many unnecessary crashes.[0]
The human mind has far more variance than the physical body. Education by conformance is a fail out of the box.
[0]https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...