Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: > If Fred writes something and Bill copies it without acknowledging > Fred's work, then Bill should be penalized. That much is clear.
The situation is where a student is being examined for skills where it's appropriate to test the student's own skill with a reasonable level of isolation from the relevant work of others. So questions of plagiarism aren't relevant to that aspect. > But why should Fred be punished? What has he done wrong? Fred has, in your example, ignored the requirements to keep his own work on the assignment isolated from Bill. This is harmful to the assessment of both Bill and Fred, since the teacher has a severely lessened ability to determine both Bill's and Fred's individual competence levels at the skill being examined. So, to encourage both Bill and Fred to keep their work isolated and allow their levels of competence to be assessed with confidence, they both need to have disincentive to both copy work and allow their work to be copied. > When it's less clear who copied from whom, I can understand issuing > across-the-board penalties in the interests of fairness (and because > the effort of figuring out who wrote what isn't worth it), but I'd say > it's a compromise for simplicity rather than justifiable punishment on > someone who published code. Sure. Penalising both students – or, more precisely, advertising such penalties from the start – seems like a much more fair and effective measure than relying on the teacher to both detect the machinations of ingenious students and to determine who copied from whom. -- \ “Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take | `\ for granted … but to weigh and consider.” —Francis Bacon | _o__) | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
