On Fri, 7 Oct 2016 03:00 am, Chris Angelico wrote: > You are asking > for assistance with something that was assigned to you *as a > recruitment task*. Were you told that asking for help was a legitimate > solution?
Why should he need to be told that? Asking for help *is* a legitimate solution, just as legitimate as Reading The Fine Manual, searching on Google, asking your work peers for mentoring, or doing a training course. What's next? Are we going to start dumping on people for reading the manual? "If you can't intuit the right method calls, you're cheating"? "What, you had to *study* to learn the language? With a teacher and everything? Cheater!" Asking questions and sharing expertise is what we're here for, and it is an absolutely critical part of open-source communities. The idea that people cannot ask for help because they are working, or being interviewed for work, should be anathema to us all. Schooling is slightly different in that (1) whether we like it or not, many schools enforce ridiculously stupid and strict rules against plagiarism, so bizarrely the best way we can help students is to refuse to help them[1]; and (2) when people are learning, making their own mistakes and wrong turns is often a good learning exercise. For students, it is the learning process itself which is more important than the solution -- and the less experienced the student, the more that is the case. But heaven forbid that students copy recipes from the documentation, from the ActiveState Cookbook, or Stackoverflow without attribution like professionals do. The current anti-plagiarism (so-called plagiarism) climate goes directly against the principles of free and open code and information. Requiring every trivial thought and phrase to be wholly original[2] or else paid for (whether paid for in money or in credit/ reputation points) is a direct assault against the intellectual Commons. [1] The negative effects of an accusation of plagiarism for few lines of allegedly copied code or text may be far, far worse than if the student actually learns nothing. If you learn nothing, there's at least a chance that your teacher will grade on a curve and you'll squeeze in a passing grade, but allegedly plagiarise, even *your own work*[3] and you may lose all your academic future. [2] An impossibility. [3] Quite possibly the stupidest thing that has come out of academia since post-modernism. -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
