On Tue, 03 Apr 2007 12:26:47 +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > "Steve" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> Yes it is [a homework question]. >> >> Where else to ask for help but here. > > That's between you, your teacher, and your teaching institute's > plagiarism guidelines.
Plagiarism is a serious example of fraud, which is not only a crime but is unethical as well. You don't need to be a student or an academic to commit plagiarism. Anybody can commit plagiarism. If we applied the plagiarism guidelines that university students labour under to the rest of us, perhaps we'd be a little less quick to toss accusations of plagiarism around so easily. If it is plagiarism for a student to ask how to detect an empty line, then it is plagiarism for any of us to ask how to do anything. At the point that students are unable to ask for information because they're accused of plagiarism, well, that's "a total collapse of critical reasoning", to quote Professor Steven Dutch of the University of Wisconsin. Citation: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PlagShame.HTM Accessed 2007-04-03. If the Original Poster _accidentally_ sees a newsgroup post that answers his question -- "Oh, so that's how you exit a loop in Python!" -- is that plagiarism? Or is it only plagiarism if he _asks_ for the information first? Does he have to spend the rest of his life as a Python coder giving credit to J. Random Hacker for using "his" technique of "using break to exit a while loop"? None of this is to excuse students who try to have their homework done for them, or well-meaning but foolish people who, in response to a simple question end up providing an entire working piece of code, essentially doing the student's homework for them. Plagiarism does exist, and it is fraud. But I'm sickened and saddened to see how plagiarism has been bastardised by academia, turning it from serious fraud to trivial re-use of phrases and ideas, and even _learning things from anyone someone other than your lecturer_. That's what it has come to. If you ask "how do I detect the user has entered an empty line in raw_input?", you're deemed to be committing fraud. WTF? There's a gulf the size of the Atlantic Ocean between _learning_ and _committing fraud_, and we're so frightened by the thought that somebody might fraudulently claim another person's ideas (which begs the question of whether people can own ideas) that we're prohibiting learning except through a couple of narrowly approved channels. If you think I'm exaggerating, I challenge you to read Professor Dutch's pages on plagiarism: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PlagShame.HTM http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PlagiarNonsense.HTM I challenge you to try to work as a coder, whether professional or amateur, under the same restrictions that we've been placing on students. I can't count the number of times people write to comp.lang.python asking "How do I transmogrify the frombulator?" And let's not even mention copying code snippets posted on Usenet. These things are not fraud. They are learning. This is not a call to turn a blind eye for plagiarism, or to do students homework for them. It's a plea for common-sense. We're not bound by university guidelines, or universities' over-broad definition of plagiarism, and we don't have to live by them. We are ethically bound not to do student's homework for them -- but that doesn't mean we're bound to refuse to answer their reasonable questions, or to treat those who are looking for help as frauds _just because they are a student_. -- Steven D'Aprano -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
