So What is New in the World?

Here we have the problem - I can write something that is completely my own work and yet manage to construct a few sentences that match another paper in the field. Once upon a time this wouldn't have been an issue, but with Google around to check every phrase, plus specialist bits of software to assist, it becomes increasingly difficult to write something unique. I could go the way of George W Bush and just make up some new terms that no one else has used before, but somehow I don't think that would be acceptable for a professional science or engineering paper.

An example - discussing the progress of a project with the company COO, I pointed out that "progress is a vector". I subsequently plugged the phrase into Google and sure enough, someone else had already used it, even though I'd not seen it before. The same can be a problem in the patent field, given how many people manage to patent the bleedin' obvious.

congratulations

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34sKccD3bFM&NR=1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Image-Men-J-B-Priestley/dp/0749322969

Well done, rather showed the OU up, I thought they'd have had a bit more spine.

I wouldn't have bothered with the course, I'm afraid I've got no tolerance for BS.

@RW - Management?

When you said this:

"PS: I realized that this paper came from the Indian Institute of Management. Aha, now all is clear: management!"

I was thinking exactly the same thing, except for "management", substitute "India".

@ AC : Hmm

"Anyway, as a result of reading that paper, you have been led to scour the net for further sources of information, reading and understanding them in far greater depth than if they had just been handed to you on a plate and have learned (ok, reinforced your previous knowlege) not to trust the value of something just because someone recommends it."

I'm all for learning stuff yourself and examining your sources carefully, but you would expect higher education to provide you with source information and references that were not only relevant, but also not worded in such a way that gives the impression someone just put a thesaurus through a shredder and taped bits in sequence to pad out their work...

Steven R

Bad can be good

Not surprised at all. At least the plagiarism wasn't directly by your tutor. In my MSc course, I noticed that some of the wording seemed familiar, and found that a rather obscure paper by a work colleague had been seamlessly integrated into the course notes with no attribution.

But it was good that some of the example answers given for past papers had mistakes, because I didn't have the nerve to say so until I had checked everything really well. Took time and effort that I would never have spent otherwise, and I'm sure that improved my mark in the final exam a great deal.

OU - FAIL. Oh how the mighty have fallen....

The OU give you a paper to read that is clearly bollox (technical term). This is within its own terms, without reference to the fact that the reason its bollox is it's been badly copied from elsewhere! The OU's response is simply inadequate, as indeed is the fact they used the paper in the first place. I get the feeling that Verity is somewhat "stooping to conquer".

Disagree with the last A.C.

What are the O.U. doing giving out this gibberish?

Bet Ms. Stob won't be on their Christmas list this year :-)

For what it's worth, I did a few of the O.U. CCI MSc. courses but decided it was a waste of money - the two basic courses were good, as was the HCI one. The rest tended to be 'write 100 line program in language blah', and as we all know, writing 100 line programs in anything is easy but nothing to do with the price of fish.

It does sound like the O.U. has jumped the shark, there wasn't anything that bad in the ones I did.

Not all

I really enjoyed my OU course - which I undertook 15 years ago in pure maths. It was well written by people who understood the subject and led me to research a lot more in the days before the internet.

But I have also taken a 'technology foundation course' which was purely mathless hand-waving - physics for people who can't do sums - and seen some of the computing modules published recently, which are all tosh and woffle.

But so is modern computing tuition - gone are algorithmics, the works of Knuth, Codds Laws, and anything remotely rigourous. Tony Hoare, where are you? What we get now is examples of APIs and IDEs; working through examples of protocols, most of which are neither used nor up to date; and specious "theories" - such as the implimentation of fixed width web content.

The OU has been bullied by the great societies to restrict or tailor it's original free-form ideas on education to suit the job market and it all seems very sad.

@AC: Hmm

Do you work for the OU?

The original paper was in dreadful nebulous, worthless language. Taken at first reading, it should never have been allowed on a course. It's garbage. Let me try to answer some of your questions (I can only speak for myself as if I were in Ms Stob's position):

"Would you rather that they only send you good papers to read?" - yes

"Do you think that would enhance your analytical skills and help you to judge for yourself the merits of what you read [if they had sent you good papers to read]? " - no, if her course was about good, clear writing, where examples of garbled craptitude had merit as counterexamples. However hers was a computer course and the analytical skills required were towards software so the actual answer to you question is, yes.

"If your comments to every text were essentially that the authors are right, how much would you learn?" - pure duplicitous misdirection by you. She wasn't talking about whether the authors claims were right or wrong, just their clarity (and after a while their honesty). Both of which patently sucked. A disgusting attempt at spin, well done you.

"Anyway, as a result of reading that paper, you have been led to scour the net for further sources of information, reading and understanding them in far greater depth than if they had just been handed to you on a plate and have learned (ok, reinforced your previous knowlege) not to trust the value of something just because someone recommends it." - good god, how patronising can you get. And more duplicity too - what she learned was about bureaucratic sloth and impotence, and the inability of the OU to set up its coursework properly. Not software reuse.

I'd recommend to you 'Uses and Abuses of Argument: Critical Thinking and Fallacious Reasoning' (ISBN 076740517X) except that you seem to have read it, digested it and absorbed exactly the wrong lessons from it.

and a note on your xkcd panel...

... <http://xkcd.com/451/> which mentions deconstruction. Chip Morningstar made a genuine attempt to understand it and here's his experience and conclusions:

<http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html>

Well worth a read.

Comp. Sci. and free thinking

"I had previously associated this sort of thing with fashionable humanities, not our own beloved Comp. Sci."

Eh? Have you ever read comments here in ElReg? The [insert hard/software/OS of choice] fanbois are constantly parroting the words of others.

I've done a little teaching here in the BayArea(tm) over the last 25 years, and it's absolutely shocking how few people entering the IT world are capable of having an original thought. They learn by rote, and take exams/tests almost mechanically. It's sad, really.

I tried to shake up my sysadmin/syssecurity class by bringing in an ancient DEC machine running TOPS-10 and a bunch of dumb terminals. My texts were mostly Tannenbaum. Several of the class complained to the administration, and a ruling came down that my "teaching platform was archaic and irrelevant in the modern world". Keep in mind I was trying to teach CONCEPTS, not applications.

I replaced the DEC with donated/salvaged PCs running BSD (servers & routers) and Slackware/KDE (desktops). Didn't cost the school a dime. The same group of students complained. Out went the free system, and in came a Windows based network. The mind absolutely boggles.

What's up with Indians?

Good on you for all you did, Stob. I am not from a CS background, I'm a biologist. And I can tell this is common in our field too. I've seen data that is cut and pasted from part of one figure to another figure in published papers, but with the name of the organism swapped. I wasn't actively looking for it, but it was so obvious that it drew my attention; even the artifacts of image compression were identical from one figure to the other. Falsified data.

Now on to the Indians. I give an evolution and phylogenetics class a couple times a year in the uni here, for a couple of graduate courses on software and algorithms applied to biology. In the four or five years I've done this, twice I have managed to detect cases of academic dishonesty. One was a copy/paste of a couple of paragraphs from some PDF on the web to homework - the idiot didn't even change the number to reflect the exercise itself, and the answer would have been wrong anyway even if he had, because the paragraphs had nothing to do with the question. Easy to detect, because did the stupid PhD (!) student think that nobody would notice that a student does not write like that, and that content? I immediately googled it and there was not even change from the original sentences. Another case was not plagiarism (at least not of the same type), but one student doing the homework, and two other, late (but I let them submit it anyway, because I'm so nice :-), copying the files and all from the one who did the work. The idiots did not notice that the output files included time stamps with the date and time, up to the second, when the program was run. In eight different files. Hehe. They just slightly edited the file names and thought I would not notice.

Anyway, all that to say that they were all Indians. Anecdote, of course. Funny thing is that I was describing these cases to a couple of faculty guys, without giving names or anything. And one of them, director of the center, quickly asked: "were they Indian". That surprised me, but he told that they (the center) has to give them a sort of "ethics in academia and research" or the like when they enter school. The Indians seem to think it is perfectly fine to go around plagiarizing and copying like that, apparently. Seems to be some cultural thing, I guess. I would never had guessed, and thought it was just coincidence that my two instances of dishonesty involved only Indians... Well, keep an eye out for them -- but don't forget the other students either! :-)

I refuse to use the new icons unless they are strictly necessary to clarify something (like joke alert)...

Consider suing

The OU response indicates they are people who seem to be averse to the real world - and quite indifferent to the work you put in to expose this plagiarism, and for which they awarded you a nice -15%.

It is one thing to use freedom of speech to research the bleedin' obvious and hold weird opinions - quite another to justify indifference when faced with having to respond over a teaching methodology, to customers who have paid to be taught something useful. Any judge would take a dim view of that, treating it as symptomatic of negligence. Your mark in any case looks like a simple denial of justice. Scroogle for cases where vapid scholarly bluff and bluster has been called.

The trouble is that the universities, like the politicians, rarely have to account before an independent tribunal. Both know that should the going get tough, they can simply run off to the Privy Council, and have every verdict turned their way. (Practically unlikely, as they ususally succeed in tying up then drowning the opposition in obfuscations).

No surprise there...

My own experiences with the education sector have made me extremely cynical of its fitness for purpose -- particularly at the FE and HE levels.

I've even worked within the education sector and am now well aware that the most important criterion for almost every major institution is money. More students = more money.

It may shock US readers to learn that even their own schools, colleges and universities effectively buy entire courses and curricula from companies based in India. (Yes, you read that right: your own country's very *education* is being outsourced!) Companies such as NIIT. (www.niit.com -- check out their (incomplete) list of clients here: http://www.niit.com/Colleges/Colleges_Index.asp?Section=Colleges&L1=Clients).

The UK's own education sector is, however, not exempt. The OU is presumably not exempt from the same pressures that have made a mockery of the UK's own university sector of late -- particularly in the area of language skills, where someone who can barely speak English can still manage to walk away at the end of the course with a full Bachelors degree from a major British institution.

I, for one, welcome our future Indian and Chinese overlords. I suggest everyone else here does so too, unless you actually intend to do something about it instead of whining on some random website's comment system. (Oh, wait...)

Academia is staffed with cowboys

It is part of the grand con. Any organization can become a university, and hand out little slips of paper. These people are useless on the whole, their information is very suspect, and quite a lot does not really work in the real world.

It is just a business, and of course it relies on people perpetuating the myth, by giving them little slips of paper which they hope to impress other people into giving them slips of paper that have some value.

As far as acquisition of knowledge these places do a very poor job. In IT beware hiring someone with a degree or beyond, better to see they have a library of books with animals on the cover, and check out the OS they are running on their laptop.

Those who can do, those who cannot cowboy teaching.

But you still finished the course.

At the point of entering the first TMA you would have been able to back out and get all your money back. Despite the dreadful start (and unforgivable tutor support) you completed the course and passed. Must have thought it would do something for you.

Did the course as a whole do you any good?

Peer Review

Academic publications are chock full of poor quality and sometimes plagiarised papers and this is something all Phd students quickly learn as part of 'critical analysis' of other peoples' research. Why do people publish such work? Because more publications directly translates to more money and status for the individual and the research facility. Why are the papers accepted? Often because a conference or a journal needs a certain minimal number of papers. Why does Peer Review sometimes fail to weed such papers out? Because Peer Review is yet another time pressure on academics who really just want to get on with their own research. But all is not lost. After all, shredding a published paper can gain you high merit and anyone who recognises a bad paper as such will also be able to avoid other publications that have been based on it - quickly pruning the massive list of papers they need to read in a subject down to something more manageable. My personal favourite paper (in Evolutionary Hardware, an area in which I researched for 5 years) included a beautiful log curve graph showing how an experiment converged on the optimal solution 'as hypothesised'. All very impressive until a quick check of the graph's error bounds showed that, to all intents and purposes, the graph might as well have been a straight line.

Out of the woodwork

Everytime an article comes out pointing out some stupid antics concerning Indians, out come these vicious comments. Sure, i have been read the Register for a long time to understand the good natured joshing regarding nations. However, the comments by some of readers are in bad taste.

To issue the standard disclaimer: i myself found the original articles stupid and IMHO Institutes of managements are nothing but classical gas, more so the IIMs who try to shameless ape the harvard/wharton model.

Academic dishonesty is a problem everywhere, given the killing competition and the mad race for papers and fund.

Yes, an Indian and a PhD student.

Doesn't surprise me

I was unfortunate enough to be sent on the OU MBA course. You wouldn't believe (or maybe you would) the quantity of concentrated bollox that we had to read as part of that course. As an example, try this one from the Managing Learning Module: "Valuing differences: the concept and a model" by Barbara Walker - outstanding!

Question 2?

So what was the question?

Was it so specific as to be about that particular paper?

@Sean Baggaley

You've even worked within the education sector? Well done! Was it higher education or do you mean primary school?

The real money isn't from students, but for research universities, with big funding coming in.

IEEE's getting sloppy...

Sorry you had to read through that.

I must admit, I'm stunned the IEEE hasn't taken the paper down!

I'm pretty sure that if something similar had happened at the University I attended (McGill, in Canada) the professor would've been out the door, along with all students involved!

Plagiarism of any form was so frowned upon and purposely hunted, that very few resorted to it, and even then extremely carefully (to the point that by the time you wrote down your version of things, you'd actually done research without realising). I mean, with so many tools out there to check the individuality of a paper, and electronic submission being the norm (at least at McGill), catching the culprits was a tiny script away. Perhaps the IEEE should look some of those up! I'm sure they're described in a few of their papers anyway...

Once I achieve world domination, I will have to take care of that too....

*scribbles in little black book*

anglosaxonian

"On the third hand, the authors being non-anglosaxon enters into a very very structural problem. Not being a native speaker of (let's call it) high-english relegates you to the amateur league. Top quality scientists can often not get their message across because of this."

Many years ago I was a copy editor, admittedly in a benighted Third World country (the USA), and I can tell you that there are plenty of native speakers of English who cannot write for beans, hell, who'd think they did well to match the prose of Madanmohan and De.

@IEEE's getting sloppy

I understand why the IEEE might not want to take it down, since their review concluded that the technical majority of it is accurate, but realistically, it should be removed from a clarity standpoint, if nothing else.

When I was in uni, back towards the beginning, I was in a fairly low level course (that was phased out the next year due to complaints about how bloody useless it was and how obtuse it was) and had to right a small research paper. Basic "Choose from a list of topics the professor already knows something about" setup, although thankfully the professor handed us a fairly long list to pick from. I did the assignment, cited sources, etc, and handed it in. Pain in the ass, since the topics were still above our heads in terms of what had been taught, but it was one of those "stretch" scenarios.

Next class, I got asked to stay after, and it turned out that I had "plagarised" one of my CITED SOURCES because I made a sentence that used seven of the same words in a row. Only reason it was noticed? The program they run it all through flagged it and wouldn't accept it as not being plagarised. The professor basically told me that I just needed to reword it and resubmit it, and he understood that he was asking almost the impossible- since the words used where a technical definition I was expected to have a fairly weak grasp on at the time, and there were only so many ways to phrase it without going into far more detail than was expected of anyone in the course.

Needless to say, I wasn't the only one this happened to, but for the most part, if it was obvious that you weren't trying to do so, they just pulled you to the side and asked you to change it around. if you were caught intentionally plagarising, though, they chucked you out so hard you bounced on brick walkway. They gave you a fair chance to explain, but unless you had a damned good explanation, you were simply out, and you had to reapply for enrollment a year later if you wanted to come back.

My two pennorth

I've done a number of courses via the OU (although not M885) - completed a PG cert and PGD in computing. Next stop Dissertation and MSc.

My feelings are that generally, the courses are pretty good and well worth the money. The course material is normally well produced (c'mon Verity, this is Post-graduate work, not C.S.E) and the tutors are very helpful and provide a good level of support. Certainly, I feel that I have had the opportunity to develop my skills in a way that would not have been possible through any other institution.

Is the material perfect; of course not. I've found errors in books and in downloadable papers which were reported, and they issue updates on a regular basis to advise people of these.

In a recent survey of student satisfaction in higher education, the OU ranked second out of the whole of the UK - that has to show something.

Would I recommend the OU - absolutely, without a seconds hesitation. I have had a bad experience as well, but that didn't stop me from doing other courses.