This is an article that I wrote with some help from my pal, RVSS in the Royalshippies.tk site. It tries to find a solution for the problem of plagarising, ie, submitting assignments taken directly from the online repository.
Read on:
Many a times, I've been asked about the problem of plagiarism aka "copy paste". Especially as this is a students portal and we have an online repository, won't it cause future shippies to submit assignments that are taken directly from here, without doing any work? Further, won't this ease of copying assignments due to this site cause friction between Faculty and students? I will attempt to answer these questions here.
First of all, I need to tell you that Online Repository are THE future. Almost every material on this earth is on the process of being digitized; from art works like Mona Lisa to Shakespeare Works to Human DNA Genome Maps to Mars topography, everything. Google is even digitizing all old books in their Google Books project. So is Project Gutenburg.
The aim of these activities are to encourage sharing of knowledge. For using the available resources and build on top of it. Imagine, if the first wheel maker hid his product so that nobody would copy it! ;-) You see, the world has reached where it is now by sharing knowledge, by learning from past (both past mistakes and past victories), by building on top of what already exists.
So, what I'm saying is that online repositories cannot be and should not be stopped or banned just cause it encourages "copy paste" . What we, as early adopters of such cutting edge technology, must do, is to find solutions for this problem.
So what we urge is to go through the data and build up on it.That way the standard of the information presented to the prof/teacher will increase and you will also get a sound understanding of what you are talking about.
On the other side, the professors can give assignments that are basically unplagarisable. ie, assignments that are new/unique/innovative/creative/etc. Again, the use of an assignment is to increase ur knowledge. So Profs can do Viva to check whether you understood what you've written (don't beat me up over this).Further, this repository is visible to them also, so they can also check if the assignment is orginal or plagarized.
Again, what a professor who understands the reality should do is that he should give assignments that build up on old ones. For eg. "last years CASD program was to find Bonjeans from Lines pan. This year, update that program to do Hydros". Such activities, although not easy like "copy paste" will increase the standard and the knowledge of the Shippies.
Finally, the best solution is to have a frank discussion with the teachers about how we can utilize this resource and not misuse it.The 21st century shippies should be what the predecessors were, true seekers and warriors. Not just the copy paste and forget the base engineers. We need to improve our knowledge level so that we can face technology with technology and crap with crap
RS Team
2 comments:
well you got some points in there. nowadays everybody has licences on their work which clearly specifies on how they can use somebody else's work. there is this creative commons licence thing which has laid down rules and which are legal bound. it can be set like "do not copy without prior permission from author" or "give credit where applicable" .
Yes, I know about cc, and the different types of attributions. Also for softwares, there are the GPL v2 and v3. Also the copyleft movement is valid. But, the problem is enforcing and implementing. Just like having a copyright sign doesn't stop us from stealing, we cant stop anyone from plagiarizing. Unless we go for courts, suing, etc. That is nonesense.
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