On citations and plagiarism

A class today brought to my attention the fact that most college students don’t appear to have a very clear idea of what plagiarism is, or why citations are needed in scholarly work. This is unsurprising, given that studies show that high school English teachers, who are meant to be instructing them on just this topic, seem to have a fairly shaky idea of what constitutes plagiarism, too.

First, it is my observation that students seem to equate plagiarism with copyright violation. While it’s true that some cases of plagiarism involve copyright violation, the relationship isn’t so simple.

A copyright violation is an act which violates a specific legal code–in particular, USC Title 17 in the United States, though the particular infringing acts are likely to be infringing in most countries due to international treaties. Plagiarism, on the other hand, is a violation of moral principles–a crime against academic integrity. It’s more like trademark law, really, than copyright law. Plagiarism occurs (broadly speaking) when one misrepresents another’s work as one’s own. While this could be done by simply copying parts of others’ work verbatim, even paraphrased work, which would not violate the copyright of the original author, ought to be cited properly–paraphrasing work does not make it your own, after all.

Today I heard students suggest that using a figure (e.g. XYZ Movie grossed USD 50 million in three months) without citation was plagiarism. Not so. Failing to cite a fact like that is sloppy work, but not plagiarism. The key element is that this fact does not involve any sort of creative work or any significant original research to discover. It’s like listing a person’s (well-known) date of birth; nobody would think that you were the one who originally discovered this fact, so by failing to cite it you do not mislead anyone into believing that it is your own work.

This isn’t really a topic I can get terribly worked up about, though. I shall, perhaps, in the next few days, write a post describing my opinion of students’ knowledge of copyright law, which should be more interesting.

Math library closing

I have just been informed that the math library here at the university will be closed down and moved into the main library in order to make room for a tutoring lab. Apparently, if one says that one would like better tutoring facilities, one needs to be sure to include “…but not at the expense of our library, you idiots.”

This is positively terrible–the math library is lovely, and is located conveniently in the same building as the math department. This means that aspiring math students have a nice, educational place to go between classes, and a convenient place to work.

I’ve spent more hours than I can count in there over the last few years, and learning that it is going to be closed down is a fairly good way to ruin the good mood I’d acquired due to classes being over.

Student sues college over grade curve

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a story from The Boston Globe about a student who, dissatisfied with receiving a C in a course after a curve was applied to the grades, sued the school. The judge dismissed the suit, and the student intends to appeal.

This is a little odd, but frankly not that shocking. More interesting are the comments on the story: a number of people seem to feel that since the student is paying tuition, he somehow deserves a good grade, regardless of the judgment of the instructor; others seem to believe that all grades should be assigned purely based on percentage of questions answered correctly on exams; still others contend that this is all due to the unconscionable practice of having TA’s grade exams; a few even feel like it may have been correct for the judge to dismiss the suit.

I must say that this response surprises me a little. After all, it is the public (which must include those who have commented) that will suffer if the university awards a degree to a student who does not deserve it. As I see it, with regards to grading, the course instructors have a duty first to the public, then to the student, to grade accurately. That the public could be harmed by inaccurate grading is fairly clear: no one wants a student managing their finances who should not have passed their arithmetic courses. That the student should receive the grade he deserves is similarly clear, although the definition of ‘deserves’ might merit observation.

Many of the comments to the story indicated that the student ‘deserved’ an A because he had expected to receive one; had he expected a C, even having performed exactly as well in the class, there would have been no doubt that he deserved that grade. I agree that it seems unfair to give a student false expectations, but I feel that it would be a greater crime to grant an unearned A than an unexpected C.

I could say much more, but I will address only one further topic: many commenters seemed to feel that it would be acceptable to grade ‘fuzzily’ (i.e. partly at the discretion of the instructor) in courses in English or the humanities, where correctness might be a matter of degree, but that there was no such room for discretion in a course in mathematics, where ‘obviously’ an answer would be either right or wrong, with nothing in between.

To this I must respond that I have had only one math class with multiple-choice exams, but nearly every non-mathematical course I took had at least a segment of most exams multiple-choice. In my math courses, I expect my answers to be graded based not only on whether I eventually arrive at the desired result, but whether my method of solution implies sufficient knowledge of the subject. Of course I do not mean to say by this that math courses require discretion and other courses do not, but rather that all courses that deal with any subject in any but the most elementary of fashions will require some amount of care on the part of the instructor to assign grades appropriately; judging knowledge and especially understanding is rarely a matter of counting the number of correct answers.

Vows and Honor

I finished Vows and Honor by Mercedes Lackey a few days ago. I must say that I liked these two better than the trilogy centering on Talia which I read a while ago. Vows and Honor is about Tarma and Kethry, two characters first introduced in MZB‘s Sword and Sorceress series. I’ll have to see about getting some of those if the stories in them are anywhere near as good as Vows and Honor.

I want to start reading Lord of Light soon, but I’ve just downloaded The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (translated by Sir Richard Francis Burton) from Project Gutenberg. It’s too much to read at once (16 volumes, in fact), but I’d like to read some of it, anyway.

These things aside, I hope I can accomplish something useful today. I stayed up very late (or rather very early; it was nearly 7 AM) last night working on some things, but when I set my alarm I somehow managed not to turn it on (which is odd since it turns itself on automatically when set; but I digress) and as a result slept entirely through my classes. This is especially bad since some of the things I was staying up to finish were homework assignments that I meant to turn in, but I suppose it’s more important that I complete them and learn what they have to teach than that I turn them in. That’s how I’m rationalizing it, anyway.

The Man Who Mistook etc.

I completed The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat yesterday, so I can now give my opinions on the work as a whole. I still feel that it was a good book, but some of the sections were less interesting than others (although none were entirely dull), and it did have slow moments; I admit that I skimmed over a paragraph here and there. One thing I want to remember from this: a book by Robert Silverberg called Thorns was referred to in a footnote, and I think that I may read it.

I’m getting further and further behind on Wikipedia–I keep seeing pages and thinking ‘Oh, I need to fix that later,’ and then just adding it to the end of the growing list of things that I may not get to any time soon.

I’m not making much progress mathematically, either. I’ve not read any more of the analysis books I acquired, despite having a deadline since I got them via ILL. Part of the problem is that I cannot realistically finish HAF before I’ve got to return it, so I have trouble gathering the willpower to return to it.

Not only am I behind in my private studies, I’ve got work piling upon me from classes, as well. I’ve a cryptography test to complete, a programming assignment to both start and finish, and a problem set from analysis all to be done by the end of the weekend. It’s probably less than eight hours of work, even if I take my time, but it still irritates me.

To make matters worse, I’ve decided (for no good reason, I’m sure) that it might be neat to be able to submit patches to MediaWiki (which I believe anyone can do). This wouldn’t be a problem except that actually doing it would involve learning PHP, a language of which I know nothing, as well as studying the MediaWiki code. I may not even be capable of it (at present), since I’ve little experience with coding outside of mathematical things which are generally more procedural. Probably I won’t end up doing this, but that just means that I’ll have substituted surrender for defeat, which is an unpleasant choice to make.

The Lathe of Heaven

I’ve just (yesterday) finished reading The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a sci-fi novel about a man whose dreams have the power to change reality. It was enjoyable, but I found that it wasn’t always clear just what was going on, and why (then again, this may have been intentional, since the main character also seemed confused). It was worth reading once, anyway.

As far as math is concerned: I’ve discovered that I hate category theory. It seems like it ought to be good for something, but I’m just not sure how it all works, or even what some of the terminology and notation means. I’ve still got one category theory book which I may try to read a bit more, but I’ve little motivation at this point.

I’ve got a test tomorrow in statistics, a class which I haven’t been attending since the first week of the term. However, it’s a very introductory course. The topics to be covered on the exam (as far as I can tell) are binomial distribution, normal distribution, and the prerequisite knowledge for these like mean, median, standard deviation, etc. I’ll discover tomorrow whether my ‘sleep now, study later’ policy was a good idea.

Also: my computer hates me. I’m not sure why, but sometimes it just slows down so that even typing into notepad is unbearably slow (i.e. I finish typing a sentence and have to wait 5-10 seconds for the text to catch up). Even as I type this, I’m getting a bit ahead of the text on screen. Sometimes, though, the computer works fine. Unfortunately, the ‘unbearably slow’ times seem to outweigh the ‘fine’ times, so I will need to do something. My solution at the moment is to download an Ubuntu live dvd and just boot into that to do everything. It’ll probably be faster, by and large, than what I’m suffering through now, and it’ll prevent me from needing to do anything drastic to my computer. I really would like to just format my drive and install a copy of debian, but I fear that there’s some windows-only thing that I’ll need, so I keep putting it off. Well, here’s to procrastination. I’ll fill in the rest of what I meant to write tomorrow. For now, fiction and my bed beckon.

Update (2007-09-12): The computer problem was due to overheating. Cleaning the fans thoroughly fixed it.

Minor updates, and the teaching of mathematics

I have done nothing of value for days.

However, notice this cartoon. I had an enjoyable discussion Friday with a professor in the math department about why students fail ‘simple’ math courses. I commented that it would be nice if we could convince students that it really is in their best interests to do well in their math classes, but I know of no way of doing that. The fact is that many students don’t come to college to learn; they have some other goal in mind, be it football, getting a job with help from the degree they’re pursuing, or just wasting time before they go out into the ‘real world.’

I tend to think that the major problem with math classes is poor background in the basic concepts: as I recall, the basic ‘business calculus’ course has a failure rate of 60%, roughly, and the best predictor for success is a placement exam which focuses very much on algebra. This suggests (to me) that the problem is less with the teaching of the course, which we (we, colleges, interested people) have some amount of control over, and much more with how well the students were taught arithmetic and basic algebra in primary and secondary school. But what is to be done about it?

Of course, that’s not all of it. Sometimes, classes are genuinely poorly taught. Sometimes there is a disconnect between what is taught in one class and what is expected in the next. These things will also have an effect on success rates, but I can’t imagine that they amount to more than a few percent of the failures.

But perhaps there is nothing to be done. We could also improve success rates by just kicking out everyone we don’t think will pass. I certainly don’t have any better solution.

Wikipedia update, Mini-Sudoku

I’ve still not written the article on rook theory I meant to write, but I did find several other topics to write about, so hopefully I’ll get something done. I’ve made several redirects, which I suppose is helpful, and added a bit of info here and there, but I mostly feel useless.

I’ve got a programming class this term. It’s sort of an entry level class (second class in a series that’s taken by both CS majors and science majors generally), but it seems that not much is expected from the students. Example: we were given an assignment to write a program that would solve 6×6 Mini-Sudoku puzzles (the kind that USA Today provides for people too stupid to solve regular sudoku puzzles). Fair enough; it’s a basic exercise in recursion. The problem is that this is a two-week assignment and the emailed instructions say “Start on it today!!!! It is challenging!!!!” It might have been challenging if I had to write it in a single class period with no time to think about it. As it was, I wrote the whole thing in 90 minutes (counting time to rewrite half of it since I forgot about some restrictions on programming style) while carrying on a conversation and reading my email.

That is to say: Wikipedia hard; classes easy. And that’s all for now.

Wikipedia, libraries, and school

I’ve been putting off writing an article on rook theory for wikipedia until I got a few resources together. Well, it’s been a few days since the book I ordered through ILL (which turned out to be a lovely, bound copy of someone’s master’s thesis) arrived and I still haven’t written the article. I did, however, discover that my library has a nifty scanner that will email scans to you, so I scanned in the relevant portion of the book and returned it. I’m leaving in my inbox to make me feel guilty until I write the article.

In school-related news, my combinatorics class is something of a joke. I like the professor well enough, but the material he plans on teaching (as I understand it) is a subset of what was taught in the undergraduate course I took last year. Something of a disappointment, but it will ensure that my GPA stays high, I suppose.

I’ve just read Arrows of the Queen, Arrow’s Flight, and Arrow’s Fall by Mercedes Lackey. I’ve got a copy of the Vows and Honor omnibus (containing the first two books of that trilogy) coming on loan from some other university, so that should keep me occupied once it arrives. I had a copy of The Last Herald-Mage (an omnibus also) on order (from another university), but it got canceled, so I’ll have to find another copy or buy it. Since I’m a poor college student, I’m hoping for the former.

Enough of this: I’ve a test tomorrow in at least one class, and several things to accomplish before then.