[Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail

Sat Nov 12 14:07:23 UTC 2011

Iv used turnitin during my MBA and can say that Iv seen people upload their projects there, note where the software catches them, change the language in that part and re-submit. People will go to any lengths ..

Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:33:12 +0530
From: sodabottle at gmail.com
To: wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot -- #DelayedMail

>>Many of us went through college recently know its not *Some*, its 
*Most*. Anything called assignment and graded will be copy-pasted even 
by the brightest 5% of students in class who would have potential to do 
on their own.

+1.  with Srikanth This is the SINGLE MOST important thing to remember for the future. Lets cut the political correctness and putting the blame everywhere else than where it belongs - the students and faculty involved

In my four years of college, i copy pasted almost every single assignment given to me. I did not know it was wrong and wouldnt have cared if someone from outside pointed it to me. The attitude i saw from the IEP students is exactly the same. Unless the students are penalised for plagiarism by being failed in the course, they are not going to change the behaviour. And how many of your professors in indian education were concerned that you were copy pasting your assignment. (None of mine cared - i can say with confidence that is the same case in 99% of the cases in India now)

So no amount of increasing the number of campus ambassadors, their training, etc would help unless there is a stick involved - How many times did the campus ambassadors tried to tell students not to copy paste?. How many of the students heeded the warning. This issue was raised in Late August. There were two whole months to hammer in the message and it didnt work out. Why? there were no serious implications for the students involved. There is a conversation in Srikanth's en wiki talk page, where a student tries to weasel out of copyvio by giving every excuse in the book - he did not correct his behaviour, but instead tried everything to get the copyvio he added approved.

Those who got blocked weaseled, whined and pleaded for an unblock but in many of the cases reverted to the previous behaviour, when they thought they could get away with it. They are socking and trying to remove cleanup comments from the IEP page !!!!. Without a no-nonsense approach, you will only gets repeats of such behaviour.

So here is what is to be done:

1) Keep the number low - The next round should have less than 50 students. No classwide / collegewide  blanket programs. Make this a "interested students only" program.  We have clearly demonstrated there is no manpower to handle anything more.  We have about exhausted the goodwill of the en wiki community. If this repeats, you are looking at a wholesale blocks for the students and IP addresses. 

2) Penalise those who copy paste  -  either they should be failed by their professors. If the professors dont care, drop the program and stop going back to that institution. Wikipedia is a work in progress, we dont need plagiarism by Indian students to shore it up. We are not that desperate. 

3) The CA to student ratio has to be 5 to 1. Anything more seems to non-workable. Online Ambassadors/mentors are not handholders and error correctors. I signed up to be an online ambassador. But stopped reading the IEP mails that were sent to me after i realised, that the IEP program essentially wanted to me to do the students' work. 

Go back to the drawing board. Dont start with 1000. not even a 100, start with a 50. 

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