ethics test 2009

I can't get through this thing without something that trips me up. It's really the thought that the state of Illinois is telling me anything at all about ethics. The state of Illinois? Where the senator pretty clearly bought his seat, Obama's seat?

So anyway, sometimes I get halfway through the test, and I idly take a picture and put it on my desktop. I'm an employee of the state; this is just barely a crime, and in fact I do nothing with it, so, maybe I'm just filling up a state computer, idly, with junk. Nevertheless, like I said, I can't get through the test without at least dangling my foot in the water.

So they have this rule; it infuriates the academics. You're not allowed to finish the test too fast. If you do, they assume you're cheating. B-S, say the academics, if we couldn't speed-read, we wouldn't be where we are today. Actually there's no punishment for missing all the questions on the test. They assume, correctly, that if you actually read the test, you'll try your best, and you'll be mad enough when you miss, to go back and read the right answer. I say, correctly, because I always do, just out of curiosity, and just because, as an academic, I hate missing questions. Actually, I'm not a fast reader, so it's not that much of an issue for me. But I try to be leisurely anyway. I don't want to be accused of reading too fast.

So this year, twenty minutes to twelve (when I swim), and I start the test, which is supposed to take about fifteen minutes. Should be plenty of time. But it's not. A student walks in and needs about twelve minutes of my time. Which means, it's time to swim, and I'm not done with the ethics test.

So I go swimming, leaving the thing on, on my computer. But now I know: if it takes me more than an hour to complete the test, this will be a red flag to them, won't it? They'll say, he deliberately walked away for an hour, so that he could take long enough to finish the test. Maybe they'll accuse me of trying to beat the system.

But they didn't. Apparently it's all computerized. If it's less than ten, you lose. If it's more than ten, you win. Or something like that; if it takes you forever, how is their computer to know? It doesn't flag anyone. At least, not yet.

the role of morality

I've begun to look at plagiarism more and more like the sociologists do. I don't really know sociology that well, though I'm married to a sociologist, and read quite a bit of it due to teaching about such things as crime. So I'm venturing a guess here.

It's not that sociologists aren't interested in morality, but they can't really measure it, so they stick to the things they can measure. In figuring out why people commit any crime, they have to consider the circumstances: what kind of opportunity that person has; what the perceived price of getting caught is; what the perceived likelihood of getting caught is, what the price of not committing the crime is, etc.

Now our students, of course, often have very little awareness that plagiarism is a crime. We do tell them, of course, at the beginning of the term. We emphasize it, even; I stomp around, and try to convey how it's a moral crime here, regardless of what they've been taught in their home countries. Nevertheless, their listening is bad. Their memory is short too: they may not believe me. After all, it happens all the time in their countries, regardless of what their teacher might say. So, they plagiarize.

Let's assume they have some awareness of the seriousness of the crime. They still are weighing the costs and benefits; they know what might happen. They somehow believe everything will be ok. Somehow, in the total balance, it's easier to copy than not to.

So what about morality itself? I'll be the first to say, just because you go to church, doesn't mean you have it. It does mean, though, that if you get caught stealing you'll be that much more humiliated, in front of a community that may matter to you. So in that sense, I think a sociologist would agree- going to church makes it less likely that you'll steal.

What if, all your life, something was ok, then, you move to a new country, and some big fat hairy dude tells you it's not ok? Wouldn't you rather believe your father? Of course. So, deep in your heart, it's hard to get used to a new morality. Morality is not playing much of a role here.

However, if it's plain and clear to you that you'll get a 0 if you get caught, that matters. It's part of the calculation. Let's assume that everyone knows what they're doing. Let's assume, perhaps incorrectly, that they heard me on the first two or three days, saying it over and over: it's not a crime to steal, it's just a crime to put your name on the paper.

Finally, I want to say a word about these weblogs. These posts have a way of staying around forever. I'm pretty bold; I've said some stuff you might not agree with. I'd carve it in stone, but it's a new day; I don't have to. In the old days, if you put something on paper, people tended to read it, and it was very important. That's because they didn't have that much to do, after a long day of hard farming, and they were grateful to read something, anything, to give their minds something to chew on. Today, we're bombarded by information. The smartest of us learn to skim and scan. The vast majority of us will never get this far down on anything anyone has written.

Which is just as well.

update

I have nothing to update. My students still plagiarize; it's more common than ever. One of the most common instances is when they simply use last term's material as this term's homework. This is not plagiarism, really, until they use the exact same writing, and even then, it's theirs, though it may have been worked over by another teacher at some point. I am absolutely unequivocally unbending no matter what. If it's an assignment where you can use last term's material, it's a bad assignment.

One student took a native language article about an interesting topic, crunched it through a babelfish translator, and then wrote a review of it as if he were reading English. Perhaps all English looked like that to him; perhaps he crunches everything through babelfish. Which brings up an interesting question....what if the vast majority of English a person reads is crunched native language? Does this affect their minds? their view of grammar?

This blog is about copying, by whim or copy-paste, little chunks of material, or big, for any reason. Copying is not illegal, but putting your name on the paper after you did it presents some problems. My focus is to get to the bottom of it. How do you make sure people don't want or need to do it? There must be a better way.

Further down in this blog, you'll find a grisly story that, fortunately, nobody cares about much anymore. People don't really read these blogs very carefully anyway, and that is probably good for me, since I'm an uncompromising fanatic in some ways, as I'm sure you've discerned from the above. But it's possible that, to put this positively, the small community of people who actually write their own material is the very same community as those who actually read the stuff. That's certainly true for poetry. I have my poetry blog virtually to myself. But I soldier on; there may be someone checking in, eventually.

Move the other stuff on down, quick, before someone reads it.