加拿大华人论坛 加拿大生活信息MD, 不爽, 原来加拿大学校里也抄袭成风



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Canada's epidemic of plagiarism The news of Alberta Premier Ralph Klein's adventures in academic misconduct did not come as a surprise to many in the scholarly community. Mr. Klein's reproduction of chunks of text from the Internet for a term paper at Athabasca University is yet another example of the brazen ways that students present other people's work as their own to professors at the end of term. I know this intimately, having completed grading and spot-checking of hundreds of essays over four different courses this year. I shudder whenever I plunk beautifully constructed sentences into search engines and find that students don't believe that professors can distinguish between the words of a 19-year-old student and those of a Nobel Prize winner. What makes these cases fascinating is the total absence of subtlety. Neither Mr. Klein nor the students who make up "Generation F" appear to be actively concealing the nature of their ruse. More than 90 per cent of the students I catch for academic misconduct pull a Klein, cutting batches of text from websites and pasting them into the body of their own work without checking to see if the pieces fit together. These are not accidents or cases of missed citations, but gross reproductions of digitally available text. The premier himself had to know that entering his paper into the public domain would attract the leering eyes of political opponents, interested citizens and scholarly paparazzi like myself. Both he and the 20 to30 students I have caught every year over the course of my young career must realize that Google is free and easy to use for anyone with basic computer literacy. Yet they continue to provide the necessary materials needed to take the express route to the office of the dean of students. I occasionally wish that students would practise plagiarism the old-fashioned way -- with books. At least they would have to put in some time at the library, a place that seems foreign to many of them. There are plenty of reasons why this kind of behaviour occurs. A peek into the worlds of journalism and business these days provides a decent roster of role models. Things like pressure to succeed, organizational deficiencies and personal problems are all plausible explanations. However, the Klein mess shows that underneath all of this is a lack of respect for the institution of the university as a place for learning and reflection. By "lack of respect," I do not just mean that students don't respect professors and vice versa. Fundamentally, it is the students' lack of respect for themselves that is the most disturbing. Academic misconduct is not just a technical matter - those who engage in such behaviour clearly do not have much respect for their own capacities for original thought, critical thinking, and free expression. They don't have respect for the fact that academics is really hard, and that something like doing research, collecting information and presenting it in a clear and cogent fashion is a humbling experience that takes practice and time to develop. Ralph Klein's effort is no different. He apparently has contempt for the process of research that includes critical reflection and original expression, choosing instead to supply anything to complete the job. His verbatim reproduction of work without proper citation represents the idea of the university as a set of procedures, of due dates, and formats needed to get the piece of paper required to move to the next level. Such an attitude is part of the "fee-for-service" ethos that is found among many undergraduate students.Yet by failing to capitalize on the opportunity to accumulate knowledge, test critical thinking skills and practise oral and written communication skills, students waste a lot of money and a lot of time. Mr. Klein's references to socialist policies providing the rationale for Chilean dictatorships, made during a discussion about Alberta's auto insurance system, is an example of the damage that can be caused when the need to get the degree comes at the cost of serious analysis. Respect is one of the key principles upon which universities, always the subject of attack, can stand proudly. Mr. Klein has given those of us in the academic world a poster boy for next year's lectures on academic dishonesty. One wonders if this message will get across, or will languish somewhere in the shadows, to be trotted out once again next semester.

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The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous UtopiaA Novel by Ursula K. Le GuinWinner of Nebula Award in 1974 and Hugo Award in 1975​回复: MD, 不爽, 原来加拿大学校里也抄袭成风是中东人吧?或者说是阿人。在这里的中国人,至少有这个概念如要抄袭,也要修改一下。但我们班的阿人,真是懒都懒的改,至少copy过来了事。

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