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I'd want to get perspective on what I feel is an unjustified case of academic misconduct.

I am taking a mathematics subject and part of my assignment was to submit answers to questions given.

One of the questions I was unsure of what method I should apply, I searched on youtube and found tutorials on how to solve this problem. I should make it explicit the direct answer was not part of the video, however, using the same method I could substitute my values and get the correct answer.

I may be accused of plagiarism and apparently, my use of the video was unfair and plagiarism. I suspect it's because I used the same symbols which in retrospect I could have, should have changed however I still feel this is unjustified and comparable to applying the chain rule or any other mathematical principle taught through the increasingly powerful use of the internet.

Do you think there are ground to challenge this? I thought I was doing my due diligence sourcing methods, not direct answers.

Do you think this fair?

D.W.
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Goofer
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    Welcome to Academia.SE. Whether we think this is fair seems less important. What policies for the course were in place? At my undergraduate institution, what you did would have been find as long as we cited the YouTube video and how it helped us. Could you clarify whether or not there were course policies at play here? Was this a take-home test or homework? – SecretAgentMan Oct 17 '18 at 14:30
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    Is there such a thing as justified academic misconduct? ;-) – Flyto Oct 17 '18 at 14:56
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    Would it be possible that another student, or several, watched the same video, and followed along plugging in the same parameters? –  Oct 17 '18 at 16:55
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    Have you actually been accused of academic misconduct, or are you talking about hypotheticals here? – Bryan Krause Oct 17 '18 at 16:59
  • As the title changes it sounds more and more like you have been accused of breaking rules. If that is the case, then what is the rule you were accused of breaking and was it explicit? – Buffy Oct 17 '18 at 22:41
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    @Flyto Maybe, suppose you are taking a medical course and during the exam which includes a question on how to respond to a certain medical emergency that emergency actually happens to the person next to you and your mind blanking you quickly use forbidden materials in your backpack (Google, a textbook etc.) to look up what to do and save a life. – Michael Oct 17 '18 at 23:36
  • Doing research, whether on-line or from books, is one thing. Trusting a YouTube video is something else entirely. – jamesqf Oct 18 '18 at 02:27
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    @jamesqf Why? There are thousands of high quality videos that provide instruction on all sorts of topics. I wouldn't blindly trust a YouTube video any more than I'd blindly trust a website, but there are a lot of useful videos that demonstrate math techniques (say, finding eigenvalues) that come from anybody from major universities to organizations like Khan Academy to individual professors making their own videos to random people. – Zach Lipton Oct 18 '18 at 05:18
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    Sometimes this is even a good solution to a assignment. I once had a assignment to find any good approximation to compute a formula in a faster way. Students found many different approximations, but any approximation which worked good enough was a valid solution. Another time I was surprised when the professor later announced that finding some parameter by a brute-force search (for a smaller problem) is a good solution. Now I know, that you later often will use "anything that works". In the end, knowing where and how to look for a solution is one of the things you should learn at university. – allo Oct 18 '18 at 09:17
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    @jamesqf Lawrence Lessig is a professor and copyright scholar. He makes YouTube videos on copyright that I thoroughly trust. There are many books discussing copyright by journalists and other non-specialists that contain glaring errors. Remember that the platform or media is not the same as the source. – TimothyAWiseman Oct 18 '18 at 16:44
  • A possible assignment could be "Find $\lim_{x\to0}\frac{\sin x}x$". Some Youtube video will show how to solve this with l'Hôpital as $\frac{\cos 0}1=1$. However, in your actual course, this exercise was perhaps intended to find out that $\sin'=\cos$ in the first place ... in that case you have introduced circularity. – Hagen von Eitzen Oct 18 '18 at 18:11
  • @Flyto Presumably, the OP meant something along the lines of "unjustified accusation of academic misconduct". – Acccumulation Oct 18 '18 at 19:25
  • Presumably you referenced the video in your answer. In which case, it's not plagiarism. – Strawberry Oct 19 '18 at 08:16
  • A great piece of advice of one of my profesors: Feel free to search online or in books for methods to solve the problem, but after you read something, close the book, and wait an hour or two before solving it. – technical_difficulty Oct 19 '18 at 16:04
  • @TimothyAWiseman: Why in the world would he, or anyone serious, waste time making videos when the information could be conveyed better, faster, and cheaper in writing? – jamesqf Oct 19 '18 at 16:45

4 Answers4

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Whatever it was, it wasn't plagiarism. Whether it was within the rules set by your professor is another question. But, assuming that the rules permitted online research to answer the question, then that is all you did. You will have to judge conformance to the rules of your course.

If someone has accused you of plagiarism they are probably using the word incorrectly. That doesn't mean, of course, that you aren't without fault. That is for you and others to judge.

Using the same symbols in mathematics can hardly be faulted in any case, as many of them are standardized and used in the same way throughout mathematics. They might, however, have been a tip-off that you went outside the allowed bounds.

But, for your own educational progress, I hope you don't go to the web too soon to get such questions answered. Struggling with a problem expands your mind in a way very different from finding a solution or a solution framework. If you want to be a mathematician, you need to develop that skill.

Note that exercises given in almost every course, aren't given for the purpose of finding an answer. The professor already has the answer. The purpose is to help you grow your mental abilities. Work on the hard problems. If you want to learn more, work on harder problems.

Buffy
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    It is unclear whether the OP went "to the web too soon." It seems like they studied a method to solve the problem on the web. – user2768 Oct 17 '18 at 14:06
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    @user2768, I didn't make a claim that they did. I recommend that students don't. – Buffy Oct 17 '18 at 14:08
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    I did not jump on the web immediately to attempt to solve the problem. I did reflect on my lecture content, looked at my tutorial discussions and did try to formulate steps to the final answer. In the end I used the internet as an outlet to try and understand how a problem like this can be solved but I do admit I didn't linger on this question for hours wondering, thinking. Perhaps I moved on too quickly, I still don't think this justifies this punishment. – Goofer Oct 17 '18 at 14:08
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    @Buffy Your phrasing includes "your [educational progress]" and "[I hope] you" which is somewhat suggestive of fault on the OP's part, a minor edit should clarify – user2768 Oct 17 '18 at 14:11
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    This started out as an answer and ended with a tangential lecture – Clay07g Oct 17 '18 at 17:03
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    Regarding the struggle on your own part: We are in 2018. After confirming that you don't know the right method, the first step SHOULD be to check the web. Of course, one should be critical of web sources, but that is beside the point - society today is moving towards "cloud knowledge". While I also encourage self study, using "the cloud" (wisely) is the most efficient way to solve problems... – Stian Oct 18 '18 at 11:02
  • @StianYttervik In the short term perhaps but Buffy's right to point out that this trend is also producing reams of would-be scientists and mathematicians with no critical thinking skills of their own. Cloud knowledge doesn't mean "everyone's knowledge except my own", and a mathematics course is almost certainly expecting the student to apply some of their own thinking rather than just look up the answer someplace else. Admittedly this is a very difficult and blurry line in general - after all, research ability is also important (OP did this part well) and arguably more useful day-to-day. – Lightness Races in Orbit Oct 19 '18 at 10:31
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...I was unsure of what method I should apply, I searched on youtube and found tutorials on how to solve this problem...using the same method I could substitute my values and get the correct answer.

That is not plagiarism, that is learning: You were given a problem, you found a method that could be used to solve your problem, and you applied the method to your problem. That's exactly how we learn.

By analogy, suppose I'm asked to find the area of a circle, but I don't know how. So, I search the internet and discover that the area of a circle is π·r2. Now I'm able to apply what I've learnt to solve the problem (assuming I know the radius r or diameter 2·r). That's how we learn, that's not plagiarism.

Buffy
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user2768
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    Also, basic techniques like these don't normally need to be cited. If you use some obscure, advanced theorem that came out last year, then you should cite that, even in homework. For some techniques, it helps to name the rule (e.g. step 5: use L'Hopital's rule [work]), but you wouldn't need a formal bibliographic citation. – Robert Columbia Oct 17 '18 at 15:29
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    I agree with all of this, but it is worth noting that many courses, especially in mathematics and related fields, discourage use of materials from outside the course because they want the students to learn the methods as presented. This especially makes sense in an area like PDE. Many homework problems have trivial solutions if any technique is allowed but the professor wants to force you to use techniques that are more difficult to learn that technique. – TimothyAWiseman Oct 18 '18 at 00:03
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    Rote learning an equation without understanding it (or how to derive it) is arguably the most basic form of learning, if at all. That said, it’s probably the norm so it’s hardly unethical and definitely not misconduct. – Konrad Rudolph Oct 18 '18 at 01:11
  • @TimothyAWiseman "many courses...discourage use of materials from outside the course," wow! That surprises me. A significant amount of what I've learnt was outside of my courses – user2768 Oct 18 '18 at 07:21
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    @user2768 Agreed, I remember specifically being told "if you learn only what's displayed here, you will get a C - higher grades require learning outside of the course materials" – Bilkokuya Oct 18 '18 at 10:25
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    @user2768 It often makes sense in context. Professors often want to use relatively simple problems to teach advanced techniques rather than constructing complex problems that can only be solved with the advanced technique. The simple problems often have trivial solutions if the techniques available aren't limited. This comes up a lot with partial differential equations for example. – TimothyAWiseman Oct 18 '18 at 16:40
  • @TimothyAWiseman Understood, that makes sense. – user2768 Oct 19 '18 at 07:08
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    Seems to me the professor was expecting the students to come up with their own method, not use someone else's. Whether that's sensible or not is by the by, although whether the professor should have made this clearer is more pertinent, particularly if sanctions are now threatened as a result. – Lightness Races in Orbit Oct 19 '18 at 10:32
  • @LightnessRacesinOrbit I didn't get that from the OP's question, but your point is valid – user2768 Oct 19 '18 at 11:49
  • @user2768 I deduced it from (a) the plagiarism accusation, and (b) the purpose of schools – Lightness Races in Orbit Oct 19 '18 at 12:00
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I concur with @user2768 's answer. What you did was fine, unless the assignment specified "don't look anything up".

I think what you should have done was include in your submission exactly what you told us here:

I was unsure of what method I should apply, I searched on youtube and found tutorials on how to solve this problem.

with a reference to the link that helped you.

Had you done so the worst case would be an accusation that you misinterpreted the rules (which may not have been clearly stated), not that you cheated in any way.

This is what I provide my students for guidance: https://www.cs.umb.edu/~eb/honesty/

Ethan Bolker
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    I like the guidance you provide to your students. What made you compose it? Were university policies insufficient? –  Oct 17 '18 at 22:03
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    @St.Inkbug University policies were OK as far as they went, but they focused on the "don'ts". I wanted to use the opportunity to encourage exploring. I usually asked students to summarize this piece in the first assignment, so I could later remind them that they'd read it. Sadly, many paraphrased the don'ts and skipped the dos. – Ethan Bolker Oct 17 '18 at 23:46
  • well done indeed. –  Oct 17 '18 at 23:51
  • @St.Inkbug Thank you. If you want to continue the conversation offline you can find my email address in my profile and on my web page. – Ethan Bolker Oct 17 '18 at 23:53
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I suspect it's because I used the same symbols which in retrospect I could have, should have changed

This may well be the case. And I can understand the attitude behind it.

It is one thing to find an alternative source to teach you what you need, learn from it and apply what you've learned to a given task. This is perfectly fine (most of the time).

However, looking up the solution to your task, copying it, only putting in different numbers, and handing that in as your own work will look much more inacceptable.

No, you should not have just changed the symbols! That can be seen as an attempt to cover your 'plagiarism'.

What you should do in the future is:

If you find (part of) a solution to your task in some literature, pick it up and understand it. (That's not to memorize it!) Then put aside that literature and with your acquired understanding solve the task manually. This will help you avoid the accusations of plagiarism (no guarantee, depending on how much the source's solution differs from what you're expected to provide) and at the same time help you learn the required/requested skills and prove that you've done so.

JimmyB
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