Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

If you screw up parallel parking while taking a driver’s test, you won’t pass. You won’t get a driver’s license. It’s a very harsh treatment. By contrast if you screw up parallel parking in the real world, the police (probably) won’t arrest you and take you to jail for messing up on your first few tries. There’s a reason for this, and it’s related to the reason we have very different standards at the undergraduate and professional levels.

View on HN

By comparison, if you steal as an infant, you get off easy. If you steal as an adult, you don't. Screwing up parallel parking is a mistake, plagiarism is not.

Based on the definition of plagiarism in the article, I'm not 100% convinced that only intentional plagiarism counts as plagiarism - it seems like omitting proper markings around something intended to be a quote, or dropping a \cite line under a section rephrasing an idea mentioned in another paper could be enough to be considered a mild form of plagiarism, to be punished with a "light" punishment that "only" derails your academic career for half a year.

Given the concept of "self-plagiarism" and given the treatment I've seen honest students (at a different university) receive for alleged plagiarism (turns out there are only so many unique ways to implement a fizzbuzz-level piece of homework), I'm not willing to blindly assume common sense here.

Don't be silly. If I write a sentence in a paper that happens to be identical to a sentence someone else wrote, I've now committed plagiarism even if I had no way of knowing that sentence even existed!

This isn’t stealing. Using a meaningless sentence isn’t a very big deal. In academia we care about plagiarism because we care very deeply about the misattribution of academic credit. In practice this does not mean borrowing a sentence in an acknowledgements section, which is sad and embarrassing. It means stealing full ideas and written sections to take credit for them. We treat this much more harshly at the early student level to dissuade serious violations later in life. We do this for the same reason we demand exceptional performance on the parking section of the driving test, even though many licensed adult drivers are terrible at parking and society survives just fine.

Stealing full ideas and written sections to take credit for them is the accusation against Gay. This article has examples with visualizations.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/this-is-definitely-plagiarism-...

In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their "decrease" to "increase" because she was studying a different set of data.

Gay’s 1993 essay, "Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations," lifts sentences and historical details from two scholars, David Covin and George Reid Andrews, with just a few words dropped or modified. Covin is not cited anywhere in the essay.

And here are more examples

https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1733977126020481266

And if you'd read the article you'd know it starts by saying, "What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive."

The analogy is inapt. It's not illegal to fail at parallel parking. Even if it was, it's not the type of offense that would get you arrested. You say the standards are different, and they are, but then you conflate the two contexts by treating both consequences as punishments. Failing a test is not a punishment. Failing at parallel parking is not legally or morally blameworthy.

It’s not illegal to misattribute small portions of a sentence either. There is literally no law against it. We harshly dissuade it at the grade school, high school, and undergraduate levels (meaning, we will give you a bad grade) because we are trying to teach young students not to misuse even a fragment of text with extremely harsh punishments outside of the legal system. We don’t apply the same level of punishment in real life and certainly not through the legal system because it’s not that serious to borrow a few words in the acknowledgement of a thesis. It’s just embarrassing and bad, as long as the concepts are original.

ETA: I say this as someone who has had both scientific contributions and entire introductory sections copied verbatim into other paper. That’s plagiarism. A meaningless sentence copied from my work has as much relationship to serious plagiarism as a fart in a car has to a Sarin gas attack.

You're using a different definition of plagiarism than Harvard uses. I also think Harvard's definition is overly broad, but that's not the point. The point is that a student would be punished for engaging in the same conduct that's at issue here. The double standard is the problem. The president of Harvard has broken the same rules she has enforced against the University's students. For them, the consequences are serious.

The reason is that those are two different organizations with different rules.

Also, this is not true? If you screw up parallel parking you're docked points. Lots of people pass with screwing it up, it's the most commonly missed part of the test

Reply on news.ycombinator.com