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Wednesday, 21 February 2024

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

 

5 comments:

DiscoveredJoys said...

I was interested to hear about Turnitin which has been available in some guises for some time. If, as Peter Boghossian expects, around 7% or more of Humanities dissertations (especially for * studies) are plagiarised it should shake academia as much as #metoo. Whether the administrators will allow that or merely wave it away remains to be seen. After all some of those administrators CVs and qualifications might not withstand scrutiny...

Sam Vega said...

I think the point made towards the end is the most significant one. The deeper problem is that there are whole fields of studies, whole disciplines, which are fraudulent. It doesn't really matter if second rate or third rate minds are promoted into academe for such programmes. In fact, the worse the professors are, the quicker people are going to realise that whole faculties are pointless tax-drains.

A K Haart said...

DJ - it's one of those issues where so many influential people may be caught in the net that waving it away seems to be the most likely option. Effects may be incremental though, a reluctance to employ certain graduates, fewer students, less media interest, less interest from publishers and so on.

Sam - and there are a number of possibilities which could promote the realisation that whole faculties are pointless tax-drains. One of them could be too few students to keep them viable and it may be that the digital world will push this along. I hope so.

Penseivat said...

Shirley, the general rule is, if you copy from one person, it's plagiarism, but if you copy from several people, it's research?

A K Haart said...

Penseivat - I assume it was word for word copying without attribution, leaving the assumption that it was original.