Category Archives: Teaching and learning

Preventing Plagiarism.

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ResearchBlogging.org
Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won’t go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it is our duty to smack it down.
Is there any effective way to deliver a preemptive smackdown to student plagiarists? That’s the question posed by a piece of research, “Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?” by Lidija Bilic-Zulle, Josip Azman, Vedran Frkovic, and Mladen Petrovecki, published in 2008 in Science and Engineering Ethics.
To introduce their research, the authors write:

Academic plagiarism is a complex issue, which arises from ignorance, opportunity, technology, ethical values, competition, and lack of clear rules and consequences. … The cultural characteristics of academic setting strongly influence students’ behavior. In societies where plagiarism is implicitly or even explicitly tolerated (e.g. authoritarian regimes and post-communist countries), a high rate of plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct may be expected. However, even in societies that officially disapprove of such behavior (e.g. western democracies), its prevalence is disturbing. (140)

Here, there is some suggestion of potentially relevant cultural factors that may make plagiarism attractive — and not the cultural factors I tend to hear about here in California, on the Pacific Rim. But maybe we can extend Tolstoy’s observation about how each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way to recognize the variety of cultural contexts that spawn dishonest students.
And this is not just a matter of the interactions between students and teachers. Bilic-Zulle et al. point to plagiarism in school as something like a gateway drug for unethical behavior in one’s professional life — so potentially, reducing academic dishonesty could have important consequences beyond saving professors headaches.
In any case, the big question the researchers take on is how to reduce the prevalence. Is it effective to emphasize the importance of academic integrity, or to threaten harsh penalties if plagiarism is detected?

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Do you want people to discuss your published work?

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There’s a recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication that has been making the rounds. Other bloggers have discussed the paper and its methodology in some detail (including but not limited to Bora and DrugMonkey and Dr. Isis), so I’m not going to do that. Rather, I want to pull back and “get meta” with the blogospheric discussion of the paper, and especially the suggestion that it might be out of bounds for science bloggers (some of whom write the blogs that provided the data for the paper in question) to mount such a vigorous critique of a paper that was, as it turns out, authored by a graduate student.
So, let’s consider the situation more generally:

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Archetypal classroom moments.

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Why is it that it’s not until you’re right in the middle of a class discussion, one where lots of people are actively engaged, asking good questions and raising important issues, and where you know that you are working against the clock to get all the contributions in, that you discover …

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Grading tip: back to the drawing board.

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The semester must be in full swing, because suddenly I have an abundance of papers to grade. So I’m using a brief pause (between grading one stack of papers and grading another stack of papers) to share a grading-aid I just figured out at the end of last semester.
Typically, by the time the stacks of papers come in, I have all kinds of other pieces of work-in-progress on my desk. I could put those away (and hope that I’ll remember where I put them when I’m done with the grading), or try to keep the papers I’m grading restricted to part of the desk. This never works that well, and the feeling of being cramped makes the actual grading painful enough that it’s hard to sit down and just get through it.
Also, the chances of coffee spilling on the student papers is pretty high.
My old alternative was to stick the papers to be graded on a clipboard and work away from the desk. This still involved a sense of being cramped, as I’d have to shuffle the papers I was grading and the grading rubric — your standard clipboard, after all, is just wide enough for your standard sheet of copier paper.
Well, last December, as I was hauling final exams into my office for grading, my gaze fell upon an item I’ve had in my office for a few years:

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When to cancel class.

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At Dot Physics, Rhett Allain discusses his philosophy about class meetings:

Here is the point I am trying to make – class is for students. Class is not for me. Students pay for classes, so they should get them.
Here is the other point. If a student chooses not to come to class, that is the student’s choice. I am ok with that. Maybe it is not a great idea, but these are adults. There can be a problem. What if the class has attendance as a grade? What if the class will give a pop-bonus-quiz if attendance is low (which is essentially the same thing as attendance for a grade)? Well, I don’t do these things nor do I encourage them.

Rhett doesn’t cancel class because it’s his job to deliver a class meeting. If students don’t avail themselves of what he’s offering (which, as it happens, they’ve already paid for), that’s their choice.

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Ask Dr. Free-Ride: True love waits (until the end of the semester).

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By email, a reader asks for advice on a situation in which the personal and the professional seem like they might be on a collision course:

I am a junior at a small (< 2000 students) liberal arts college. I got recruited to be a TA for an upper division science class, and it’s going swimmingly. I’m basically a troubleshooter during labs, which the professor supervises. The problem is that I’ve fallen for one of the students, also a junior. Is it possible for me to ethically date her? The university’s handbooks are little help–sexual harassment is very strictly prohibited, but even faculty are technically allowed to date their students–and my instincts keep flip-flopping. On the one hand, teacher-student relationships are automatically suspect, but on the other I’m not sure that it’s significantly different from TAing the close friends that are in the class.
I obviously have no intention of changing grades or doing anything resembling sexual harassment, and I’m pretty good (sometimes too good) at being objective and keeping work and my social life separate. The grading is also pretty objective, and the professor goes over it to be sure my grades are reasonable. If it is possible, what do I need to look out for? Do I need to inform the professor (she knows I’m friends with the subject of my infatuation)? And in the event that we do go out, do I have to tell her that I grade her tests and labs (it’s unusual for a TA to grade in upper division courses in our department)? It seems like it might be easier if she didn’t know, but it would be at least lying by omission.
I know this probably sounds like it ought to be addressed to Dan Savage, but I’d really appreciate your advice and any advice your readers might have.
Thanks so much,
“Forbidden Chemistry”

I’ll allow as how Dan Savage knows a lot, but when was the last time he thought about the ethical challenges of power gradients in educational and training environments?

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Ethical use of student labor.

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MommyProf wonders whether some of the goings on in her department are ethical. She presents two cases. I’m going to look at them in reverse order.

Case 2: Faculty member is tenure-track and he and I have collaborated on a paper. He was supposed to work on the literature, and sends me a literature review. It reads a little strangely to me, and I check the properties and find that it was actually written by an undergraduate in one of his classes. I write back to him and ask if that undergrad should be an author on the paper, since it would be a fairly major contribution, and he says yes, he forgot. This faculty member is assigned a graduate student each semester. This semester, the faculty member’s graduate student comes to me and said his work has included collecting and analyzing all the data and writing substantial portions of the lit review, but the student is not being credited on the final paper.

This case embodies a number of problems of which we have spoken before, at length.
Indeed, it bears some striking similarities to a case we considered a couple years ago. (In that case, an undergraduate research intern was helping an advanced graduate student in the research group to round up the relevant literature background for their research project … and the undergraduates summary of that relevant literature crept, word for word, into the graduate student’s dissertation.) Here’s what I wrote about that case:

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#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging”.

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Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
This was sort of an odd session for me — not so much because of the topics taken up by session leaders Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette, but because of my own sense of ambivalence about a lot of “entertainment” these days.
The session itself had lots of interesting glimpses of the work scientists are doing to help support filmmakers (and television producers, and game designers, and producers of other kinds of entertainment) who want to get the science right in the stories they’re trying to tell. We heard about the efforts of the Science & Entertainment Exchange to connect makers of entertainment with scientists and engineers “to help bring the reality of cutting-edge science to creative and engaging storylines”. We saw the Routes website, produced in association with the Wellcome Trust, which included “a set of minigames, a documentary and a murder mystery which explore the fascinating world of genetics.” (In one of those minigames, you get to be the virus and move to the next level by infecting the target proportion of potential carriers — but you get just one sneeze per level to make that happen!) We learned that the drive to add “extras” when movies are released on DVD is creating something like a demand for real science content to complement science fiction.
In other words, it sounded like producers of entertainment were aware that a science-y angle can hold appeal for the audiences they are trying to reach, and were generally enthusiastic about (or at least open to) the idea of drawing on the expertise of actual scientists.
Of course, there were caveats.

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#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM”.

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Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
One of the things I found interesting about this session was that the session leaders’ approach to the broad issue of promoting gender and ethnic diversity in science, engineering, technology, and M [mathematics here? I get the impression that sometimes the M in STEM is math and sometimes it’s medicine, but I’m happy to set this taxonomic issue aside] was to look at particular initiatives, activities, or responses from smaller communities within the STEM galaxy.

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