Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Against Cop Shit

jeffreymoro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 73 posts

Re: Against Cop Shit

#41

Post by wanderingjew »

542458 wrote: post #10
ses1984 wrote: post #2

I'm not sure I'm against plagiarism detection tech.

I was gonna say. The author never elaborates on it, but this is a profoundly silly take. Plagiarism is not just unethical, it also is (in my experience) a pretty good indicator the student didn't learn the subject matter. If you know what you're talking about, it's relatively easy to put it into your own words. Students that I've caught plagiarizing either: a) Can't actually explain what they were writing about b) Di…

While plagiarism is unethical, nearly all means to combat it (detection software, esp. Turnitin) is also unethical; two wrongs don't make a right.

Under the ToS of all plagiarism detection software (at least that I've looked at), the student's work is added to the corpus against which all texts are tested against. This is what you would _obviously_ do if you were building a plagiarism detection app, however that means a student is forced to submit work to a private company, which will then profit off of their work.

You might say what the value of a gen ed term paper is to a student, and I'll agree it's not much. But that's not the point. The student is forced to provide that to a third party by the school, which will then profit from it. This isn't a Facebook-like situation where you can just not make a Facebook account. I would guess in many schools, refusing to submit to plagiarism detection software would be taken as evidence of plagiarism.

This is probably a few years out of date, and I see that Turnitin recently shut off their 'upload your own work so you can see if it's plagiarized' product, but for a student to have an active defense against plagiarism _costs money_. Yes, if a student wanted to make sure their paper wasn't accidentally plagiarized (this is common, because their algorithms are shit), that will cost a few dollars. This is unacceptable.

And for anyone who says, 'just transfer sections to a prof that doesn't use the software', there are contracts with entire departments and schools, which then force professors to use the software. Yeah, you could transfer _schools_, but the point stands.

Plagiarism detection software -- which purports to support the intellectual property of the author -- does just the opposite.

Also, I should mention that if someone wanted to cheat, they wouldn't plagiarize; they would simply get someone to write a paper for them. This service is far, far more common that you would believe.

Re: Against Cop Shit

#42

Post by evrydayhustling »

I'm all for limiting data collection from kids, and for making our schools less like jails. But I don't think the author does a good enough job defining "cop shit" for discussion.

"Anything that presumes an adversarial relationship..." is an elegant description that might work for adult relationships, but it's harder to say what presumptions are baked into the structures you use with kids. My experience as the parent of two toddlers is that they are way happier with some forms of structure and discipline, including evaluations and positive and negative rewards. Humans actively seek that kind of "cop shit" out in their games and even personal relationships.

This essay seems to reject some pretty simple forms of structure and discipline (e.g. "badges"), which is a really presumptive thing to do. Try it at your school / on your kids and let us know how it goes. See how it interacts with kids having different needs, backgrounds and social environments. Not that there aren't many kinds of "cop shit" that is just as untested or which makes things worse, but assuming a (philosophically) simple solution is bogus.

Re: Against Cop Shit

#43

Post by HarryHirsch »

Minor49er wrote: post #37

This author categorizes plagiarism detection and rigorous learning experiences along with "any interface with actual cops". This is under the blanket presumption that all of these things "[presume] an adversarial relationship between students and teachers", which is fundamentally wrong. He is, by his own admission in the post, an inexperienced teacher. He also does not appear to be a parent. I think he should get a l…

What? The author says he's a graduate student (consequently very likely a TA) with a 7-year old daughter.

Re: Against Cop Shit

#44

Post by wpietri »

rootusrootus wrote: post #7

I think it's important to draw some distinction between primary, secondary, and post-secondary education. In primary school I am 100% for focusing on learning, and limiting the bureaucracy around it to only that which furthers the goal of learning. Punishing tardiness or unexplained absences doesn't make much sense, but noticing it does, because improving attendance is a worthy goal in pursuit of learning. When you g…

Nah. The customer model is frequently corrosive to mission-driven organizations. Imagine it in medicine, for example. If I asked my doctor to prescribe me morphine because I'm the customer and I want it, they'd refuse. They should.

Education has a deep societal purpose, especially in democracies and advanced economies. Its consumers are generally immature, and are definitionally people who are ignorant about important things. Education must not be structured solely around whatever a 19-year-old happens to want.

Re: Against Cop Shit

#45

Post by evrydayhustling »

jessaustin wrote: post #14

Haha 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...

Just want to add a voice that this should not be flagged.

Re: Against Cop Shit

#46

Post by 542458 »

jgwil2 wrote: post #32
jessaustin wrote: post #14

Haha 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...

I think HN could really benefit from some adjustment of the flagging/killing process. An article like this is going to attract lots of knee-jerk flaggers based on the title alone, but the guidelines state, "...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." Perhaps in this case the title could have been changed under the "linkbait" criterion. It's just annoying to see things f…

A 100% agree that adjustment is needed. I don't even like TLA (end plagiarism detection? Really?), but I think the discussion around it is valuable.

The flag system gives a small number of users the ability to kill articles entirely too fast.

Re: Against Cop Shit

#47

Post by klyrs »

jdm2212 wrote: post #20

This 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.

Those kids need better outlets, and more support; cop shit turns it into a power struggle that entrenches their adversarial mindset.

Source: I went to a "bad" public school, take issue with abusive authority, and had a mix of bad-cop and supportive teachers. It's the supportive teachers who rolled their eyes and moved on from my antics, and rewarded efforts I put into the class (regardless if they were trollish misinterpretations of assignments -- the good ones celebrate the creativity but still give a fair grade) who actually flipped me from being a class clown. Now, I've got a PhD in math.

Take a hyperactive, disinterested, insubordinate student and you will find intelligence and creativity. You can steer that focus towards destruction by whacking them with sticks, or you can steer it towards productivity by wafting carrots. Cop shit doesn't help except when students are literally beating eachother and you need to pull them apart.

Re: Against Cop Shit

#48

Post by majormajor »

austenallred wrote: post #22
majormajor wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

Industrial mass-produced "assessment" is only necessary in a mostly-anonymous, un-personal system. If you have time to actually talk to a student, you can figure out pretty quickly how well they understand something.

I think of it like stack overflow. If someone borrows ideas and code from there for a code review, I'm fine with that, as long as they understand how the system is doing. Being able to do research and find information is a useful skill! But only if it's applied correctly, with understanding. So I'm going to probe on that. And it might be blindingly obvious to me that they didn't understand what they were doing, or why the pasted code isn't appropriate. And I don't need a "stack overflow detector" to see that.

Re: Against Cop Shit

#49

Post by majormajor »

542458 wrote: post #40
HarryHirsch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That injects a ton of bias into your marking though. Under that method, shy students and students with poor verbal skills (for example, ESL) don't stand a chance. I have seen excellent work come out of students that you could barely talk about the material, but could produce excellent assignments (this is in a domain where plagiarism would be very easy to detect, so I'm very confident it's actually their work).

It's better for shy students or students with poor verbal skills to work on that in an academic environment than to be dropped into a work environment where those things are just as important without their education ever bothering to help them with it.

"Interpersonal skills are optional" is not a good side effect of our current educational system!

Re: Against Cop Shit

#50

Post by mmm_grayons »

jessaustin wrote: post #14

Haha 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...

I can't seem to vouch it, so I guess it's dead now. I think there's some rule that after getting resurrected and re-flagged, something is dead? I looked at this and figured it might be someone yelling for more "disband the police" or whatever, and the title is pretty inflammatory, but I clicked and agreed with the article. I suppose HN could replace every link with a tracking link to force people to click before flagging/voting/commenting, though that runs into concerns with data collection...
Post reply on HN