He’s not done yet.
In a new blog entry, fired Florida adjunct Loye Young has made a “game theory” argument that even the threat of expulsion from college is “no deterrent at all” in cases of plagiarism, and that his policy of publicly shaming ostensible plagiarists is thus the only effective response to the problem.
His post takes eleven paragraphs to get where it’s going, but its premise can be summed up in a single sentence: If a student has no way of passing a course except through plagiarism, and if he or she cannot graduate without taking that specific course, then it’s in his or her interest to plagiarize, even in the face of harsh academic penalties.
That’s it. That’s the whole of his argument that “plagiarizing really does pay if the only penalties are altering the grade and/or expulsion.” There’s nothing else.
Do you think Young’s former superiors at Texas A&M International University are more pleased with themselves right now for getting him out of the classroom, or embarrassed that they put him there in the first place?

1 comment
Comments feed for this article
November 27, 2008 at 10:53 pm
WeHa
Well, there is also the brutality factor. When you try to punish a law-breaker harshly with the intend to scare other people, it can turn on yourself and make people more ‘challenged’ to break the law.
Exchange theory of sociology, if the reward of plagiarism (pass the class) is considered to be better than the punishment (expelled), of course the student will choose to plagiarize.