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

[Swaroop Rao]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 19:33, Bala Jeyaraman <sodabottle at gmail.com> wrote:

> >>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.
>
That's true. The enwiki community is losing its patience really.


>
> 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.
>
A bit harder to enforce, since academic plagiarism is practised en masse by
many professors themselves (not generalizing, just saying that the problem
goes way deeper than the students).


>
> 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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> Swaroop Rao


Steering Committee member, United States Education Program
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