From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: Homework problems
Date: 27 Aug 92 07:20:10 GMT
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia

In article <7333@skye.ed.ac.uk>, ken@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Ken Johnson) writes:
> And thirdly, what is the difference in principle between asking the Net
> and asking you, or a librarian, to find a solution in the literature?
> Are you saying that if Richard OKeefe, say, publishes a solution in a
> textbook and I read it there, that's fair and fine, but if the same
> author mails the same solution to the same student that's cheating,
> plagiarism and aiding and abetting? Surely you wouldn't discourage a
> student who was experiencing difficulties from going to the library?

Since my name has been brought into it:
(1) Let me remind people of the "Ask Dr Strabismus" service I am still
    offering.

(2) Let me point out that there _is_ something special about the net.
    Suppose a student at RMIT goes to RMIT's library to ask for help.
    (I wish more did.)  The library and the library staff are funded
    precisely to help RMIT students; RMIT tries to make informed
    descisions about what level of funding is available and appropriate.
    But if the student asks on the net, then the cost is borne by many
    other sites who are _not_ funded to support that student, and did
    _not_ have the opportunity to decide whether they wanted to.  It
    really is not a good idea to go first to the net and leave local
    resources languishing.  (Leaving local resources unused is one way
    to get them cut back.)

(3) Let me also point out that going to the net first deprives the student
    him/herself of an opportunity to learn something else.  As it happens,
    if students in any of my courses have trouble with one of my assignments,
    and they come to see me, I spend so much time explaining things to them
    that it is hard to avoid giving the answer.  In any case, they learn
    things they _wouldn't_ learn by getting the answer on a plate.  (Even a
    student who looks in a book may find interesting things there s/he was
    not expecting.)  There was someone recently who asked on the net about
    doing something in Quintus Prolog, when an entire section of the manual
    is devoted to that subject (it's listed in the table of contents and
    there is a tab sticking out on the right clearly labelled; you don't
    even have to _open_ the manual to find that topic).  If we'd provided
    an answer on the net, instead of pointing to the manual, that enquirer
    would have missed the chance to learn to look at the table of contents
    of a manual, and would have missed the chance to find out that the job
    has already been _done_.  It's the same with students; if you give them
    the answers to homework problems, that's not so bad, but you are
    depriving them of getting the explanation of _why_ that's the answer in
    terms that their lecturer will be happy to see in the final examination.

And of course getting answers from the net rather than libraries has the
same problem as copying answers from another student:  the answers may be
wrong.  At least textbooks are usually reviewed and copy-edited.

-- 
You can lie with statistics ... but not to a statistician.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog