Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Only an honor code can help

Donald L. McCabe gave a talk in Berlin and three in Bielefeld at the beginning of February on his latest research into plagiarism attitudes and the number of people self-reporting plagiarism. The Berlin Tagesspiegel has published a good interview with him about the topic of honor codes.

But the tactic of making the students fear discovery is wrong anyway. Only a a code of honor can help. Such agreements were abolished during the student unrests of the 60s, but are slowly coming back into fashion.

2 comments:

  1. Hmmh, Texas A&M has an honor code, held very high with long tradition. Talk about it often.
    Nevertheless, according to the honor council people, A&M's (known, i.e reported) plag cases are not signif lower than those at other US universities ... maybe A&M people report more and others report less?

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  2. That's interesting - have they published it anywhere? I'd like to try honor codes in Germany, but if they don't work, then we should avoid it.

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