Plagiarism - setting an example

Germany's Defence secretary, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, resigned today. What that has to do with a blog on learning and teaching, you ask? The reason for his resignation was that he plagiarised large parts of his PhD thesis, though he said this was only because he was so busy with his job (MP) and family (two daughters) and he didn't notice that he copied some hundred or so pages. His supervisor (retired) was of course shocked, as he was one of his best students, and he wouldn't have believed any accusations of plagiarism by the so-called "Baron zu Googleberg". There's the old blind trust in 'honourable' people again...

Being a conservative, Guttenberg could count on the support of the conservative press, such as BILD, which ran articles in which it was emphasised that he was a good minister, doing a splendid job for the boys in Afghanistan, and that he shouldn't resign because a couple of academics have lost all sense of proportion and demand his resignation over a piddly little academic infelicity. Those people in their ivory towers, out of touch with the real world of our troops dying in the Hindukush, how dare they ruin the career of this brilliant man... just because of some stupid footnotes!

But he finally resigned; and his PhD was taken away earlier by Bayreuth University, which is none too happy about the PR implications. And now we have a good example that we can show our students: even the powerful can fall if they commit plagiarism! While plagiarism should indeed reason enough to not be fit for public office, Guttenberg himself of course states it was not the only reason... showing that he doesn't seem to bothered about his integrity.

There is also an interesting linguistic side-aspect to this: in English we talk about plagiarism, meaning the process of plagiarising something. In German you talk about the Plagiariat, the product of copying, rather than the process. Of course you can 'verb' it into Er plagiarisierte seine Doktorarbeit, but that sounds rather awkward. The offender, a plagiarist, is also not directly lexicalised in German.

And to end on a happy note, here's a joke I heard on Twitter:
Fragt der Praktikant im Verteidigungsministerium "Wo ist denn der Kopierer?" Antwort: "Auf Truppenbesuch in Afghanistan" (Intern at the ministry of defence asks "where's the copier[*]?" Answer: "Visiting the troops in Afghanistan"). Who says Germans don't have a sense of humour?!




[*] Kopierer in this usage would generally be understood to mean 'photocopier'

Numerical illiteracy

I had a look at our free local newspaper, the Birmingham Mail Extra. In this issue is an article titled "Suburb is now crime hotspot". This article has several problems, which are indicative of the problems of representing what happens 'out there' in the form of a newspaper article.

Quinton had very little burglaries, "averaging just one or two burglaries a month" over the last nine years. But now, crime has "shot up by 29%", more than the rest of Birmingham where crime only rose by 21%.

I find this rather misleading, and I worked through an example with the kids at the dinner table, which illustrates the problem:

Suburb A had 10 burglaries in 2009, and 12 in 2010. That is an increase of 20%.
Suburb B had 4 burglaries in 2009, and 5 in 2010. Increase of 25%.
Suburb C had one burglary in 2009, and two in 2010. A whopping 100% increase.

First lesson: percentage increase is meaningless unless everybody started in the same place. Why do developing economies have higher growth rates than Europe and the US? Because the percentage looks bigger. If you double your output from 100 cars to 200 cars you increase by 100%, but to maintain that rate you will have to produce an additional 200 cars the year after, and then 400, 800 etc.

Second lesson: without a fixed reference point (such as burglaries per 1000 inhabitants) you have no idea whether the risk of your house being burgled is high or low. Everything is relative, but you still need a fixed point to evaluate things.

Third lesson: this is not mentioned, but is that difference between 29% and 21% statistically significant? With "one or two burglaries a month", the variation seems rather high, given those small numbers. So if there was one extra or one fewer burglaries, how would the 29% change?

Final lesson: be careful with calling places "crime hotspot" when your statistics are that shaky.

Now I don't expect a staff reporter at the Birmingham Mail to apply the same rigour as a scientist (or any other, non-science researcher), but the way the article is presented is simply misleading. To me this sounds like a scare story being created out of some random statistics. I don't know whether that is the case, and maybe Quinton is really a crime-ridden area, but I cannot tell from the few facts given to me in the article. The reason for this development given in the paper is that there are now 5 fewer policemen covering Quinton. Is there really such a cast-iron correlation between policemen and crime rate? How about the influence of the recession on crime?

I now have more questions and know less than I did before reading that article!

The cuts start now...

My two elder daughters (who are at primary school) are currently getting free language tuition at a nearby secondary school. That school has specialist status for languages, and provides those additional classes for free as an after-school activity for the younger ones. Apart from teaching the kids Spanish/French/German/... I guess they also benefit themselves through advertising their school. No idea how much the kids actually learn, but it is a fun class, they enjoy it, and if they can speak a few French phrases in addition then that's great. It definitely gets them interested in foreign languages, and that is a bonus given the current attitude to those in England.

However, we yesterday got a letter from the school. The new coalition government has abolished the 'specialist status' scheme, and presumably that means that any funding that was connected to this status is going to disappear. From April onwards, the letter states, the school cannot afford to provide those additional language classes any longer.

This, of course, is not the school's fault. But it is really sad that foreign language classes for primary school kids are disappearing, and it shows that this government got its priorities wrong. I'm not too worried about my own kids, as they get a lot of exposure to other languages, but children from mono-lingual families are now losing out. Not all parents can afford to pay for language classes provided by, eg, Club Français, after school.

In my view, learning foreign languages is vital in the modern global world. Even though many people learn English as a second language it severely limits you if you can only speak one language. And since modern languages are no longer compulsory at A-level, recruitment for modern language departments at English universities has gone down.

Given that the British economy has little manufacturing left, languages are vital if we want to compete on the global market. Cutting down spending in education is the wrong way to move forward. But this cabinet of millionaires does seem to have other priorities.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

The schools secretary, Michael Gove, is quoted in today's Guardian with a comment on tuition fees (arguing that fees are not the barrier to university, it's a fault that lies with schools): "Someone who is working as a postman should not subsidise those who go on to become millionaires."

This is just wrong on so many levels.

Firstly, that also means that a postman should not enable students to train as teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, and any number of necessary careers without which our society would not function. This leads straight on to the second point: a university degree does not make you a millionaire. On the contrary, I would guess that most millionaires do not have a degree, because they spent their time building a successful career in business rather than reading Shakespearian sonnets and analysing the intricacies of subject-verb agreement in different polynesian languages.

I do not have time to investigate the full Sunday Times Rich list (which is hidden behind a paywall in any case), and in some cases it would not help, as some people are already millionaires before they went to university (and soon will have to be...), but here is an unscientific overview of some prominent millionaires and what I could find out about them on Wikipedia:

Richard Branson, had a "poor academic record"; he holds an honorary degree from Loughborough. His first successful business venture started when he was just 16, so he did of course have better things to do than go to uni. Still, he's #212 in Forbes' list of rich people in the world.

Alan Sugar left school at 16. No academic career.

James Dyson: I assumed he started out as an engineer, but in fact he studied interior design at the Royal College of Art before moving into engineering. No mercy for people following in his footsteps with humanities teaching slashed.

Peter Jones, of Dragon's Den fame, ended his academic career after A-levels to become a businessman.

Theo Paphitis, "began his entrepreneurial activities by running his school tuckshop, at the age of 15." Again, no mention of an academic career.

Duncan Bannatyne - was in the navy for a while, but no sign of a university degree.

Rachel Elnaugh wanted to study art history, but was apparently rejected at 5 universities. That didn't stop her from becoming an entrepreneur. Not sure, though, if she still is a millionaire.

Simon Woodroffe went on the road with Rod Stewart etc after acquiring two O-levels.

Doug Richard is actually one of the 'Dragons' who has a degree, a BA in Psychology from University of California at Berkeley and a Juris Doctor at the school of Law, University of California at Los Angeles. (source). But Gove will be pleased to see it was not funded by UK taxpayers.

James Caan left school at the age of 16. His involvement with academia (Harvard Business School) only started after he made his fortune.

Deborah Meaden is the only other academic dragon: she studied business at Brighton Technical College, which is a further education college.


This of course is not a proper sample, but one gets the impression that most of those successful entrepreneurs have been too busy in their early adolescence to pursue degrees.

And finally, as I do not want to turn this into a long rant, with a large number of UK students going into higher education (though I believe Labour's target of 50% university attendance has not been achieved), our country should be awash with millionaires. And working at a university, I should be surrounded by them. Unless my colleagues are hiding something from me, I think I must live on another planet than the one Michael Gove is on...

Browne Sauce with your Cuts?

After a prolonged summer break, I'll kick off the new blogging term with a few comments on the Browne review, which seems to me to do to Higher Education what Beeching did to the railways. I haven't actually read the report, but am basing my comments on a summary from the THES.

The first thing that strikes me is that universities will now supposedly be exposed to the market -- that all-powerful benevolent force which has already just about wrecked our economy and is the root cause for the required cuts in funding. Market? Not quite, though: some subjects will be subsidised. So the market only works for the arts and humanities, where presumably not much is at stake, while all those important 'priority' subjects like maths and medicine will be propped up by taxpayers' money. Of course you can't have a philosopher operating on your kidney. But I guess a medic can still reason about the meaning of life.

This really gets me, how the arts are billed as a huge waste of time and money. But hey, Cameron is an arts student, he did philosophy/politics/economics at Oxford. Clegg studied social anthropology at Cambridge. You can see that those degrees did not equip them with the necessary competence to rule a small island state in Europe.

The arts are not about the luxury of appreciating 18C literature or being able to read Beowulf in the original, they are about general education. This old Humboldtian ideal of the humanist. I think we have too little of that in society and politics, and too much greed and hunger for power.

Removing the fee cap will have a devastating effect on the less affluent, and will turn back the clock a few decades when only the rich could afford to go to university. By the time my three kids are ready to go to university, we will probably have to re-mortgage our house to afford the fees, unless we want them to start off with huge debts, which will make it hard for them to get a mortgage themselves, let alone live a life without being anxious about money all the time.

The basic justification for this massive shake-up is that the students benefit from going to university, and taxpayers should not have to pay for them to have three leisurely years away from home, partying and getting drunk every day. I don't believe that is what student life is like. It wasn't when I was a student. It's a bit like saying that all benefit claimants are basically lazy cheats who buy flat-screen tvs and watch day-time television, while their neighbour works 10 hrs a day and pays for all this: a few spectacular cases make it into the news, while the large majority of students lives a boring life sitting in the library and writing essays.

The real benefit of a well-educated population goes to society in general. This is what's called 'civilisation', and Nick Clegg should have heard that term during his studies of anthropology. It is of course hard to measure and put a price on, and that makes it hard to argue. Somebody has to pay, but it should be society.

And while £4.9bn pounds are cut from Higher Education, the navy get £5bn to build new aircraft carriers. Maybe we can put all our arts students to service here: all those decks will need to be washed, and the shiny planes will need polishing. Even with an arts degree you should be able to do that...

A Publishing Revolution

On Thursday I attended a talk on publishing, mainly intended to give postgrads some information about what to look out for and think about when trying to get their thesis published as a book. However, there were some interesting thoughts about the publishing industry, and how in the 60s and 70s the commercial publishers moved in because they could see profit opportunities there, which are now somewhat on the way out.

Salient points that stuck in my head were the horrendous price hikes on journals (which I already knew about before from attending the library committee meetings) and the smaller print-runs on monographs, which nobody really wants to publish. Also, publishers have somewhat been given a role through the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and its successor, the ominous REF, which they are not comfortable with: by taking decisions based on economic grounds (which books will sell) they cause academic judgments to be made (this is research with high impact). Not good.

There are several relevant issues at stake, but in this post I'll stick to the two most important ones:

a) Peer review. This is one of my favourite pet hates. Many people believe that peer review is what sets us apart from monkeys sitting at typewriters. Peer review is supposedly essential quality control which stops rubbish from getting published (it doesn't) and somewhat guarantees that what you read is the truth (it doesn't). Instead, peer review stifles innovative ideas, as it is inherently conservative and averse to new (and risky) ideas. One counter argument is the unfettered wilderness of the web, where everybody can publish anything, and oh boy, they do. I just today came across some guy claiming that his god had created dinosaurs, probably on day 6 of creation. But, and that is the point, I can judge for myself whether I accept it or not. Nobody has pre-vetted it for me, and it means I have to think myself. Not a bad thing. Do you like Google filtering your search results? No? Thought so. So why are you happy with some random reviewers filtering what academic publications you can read? Quality control? That's a job for copy editors and the free market.

b) Prestigious journals. Publishing in some journals is worth more than in others. Why? I never quite understood that. It's harder to get into those journals, because everybody wants to publish in them, but I have never not read a paper because it was not published in a particular journal. In fact, the only time I look at where something has been published is when I want to check whether our library has a subscription to it (it usually hasn't). With many people putting their publications on their webpages, this is becoming increasingly irrelevant. I typically look for publications by a specific author, not for stuff published in a particular journal. And the run on a select few journals just means that stuff published there is already years old by the time one gets to read it. And ground-breaking research is often published in fringe journals anyway.

Publishers claim they add value to the academic process of disseminating knowledge through peer review and the production process. Peer review we can do without, so the production process remains. Copy editing, mainly. Making sure that what is written can also be understood. But surely there must be an easier way to do this?

Currently, academics write stuff, give it to publishers (mostly for free, or for very little money), these then package it up and sell it to other academics and libraries, in the case of text books also to students. So universities get a double whammy: they pay their staff to do research and write it up, and then they pay publishers so they get a printed copy of the research to put into their library. Why not by-pass the publishers? PhD theses are usually put into libraries (or now increasingly into electronic repositories) without extensive copy-editing by publishers. They are peer-reviewed in the sense that they have been examined, though they do of course have their own particular conventions of style. But are they unreadable? I think not. Maybe not something to read for leisure, but at least they're free.

There is a problem, though, and that is that academic life is so fixated on publications. For any job or project application, you need to submit a list of publications. And if they are all self-published papers on your private website, then you might as well not apply. Prejudice or what? True, there is no guarantee that the publications are any good, but at least they are openly accessible and everybody can read them and judge for themselves, and they are not hidden behind a paywall that means they are only available to the libraries of the richer universities that can afford them.

It will require a change in culture, and to be honest, I don't believe it is going to happen. There is too much at stake. But one can still dream...

The No-Win Situation

As an academic committed to evaluation and feedback of one's teaching (aren't we all?) we frequently end up in no-win situations. This is when we try out a new innovative approach to teaching (or even an old, tried-and-tested one), solicit feedback from the students, and end up being stumped. Unlike the theoretical ideal, student feedback rarely ends up in a bell-shaped curve, where we have a few very positive, a few very negative, and a whole lot of indifferent plus/minus positive or negative bunch in the middle. Depending on whether the mean of that curve is more on the positive side or the negative one, we can judge the teaching innovation as having been a success or failure.

However, it more commonly seems (purely impressionistic non-scientific anecdotal impression) to end up with the 'Valley of Death', where roughly half the students are in favour of it, and the other half against. One such case was in last year's FREDA module, where I got the students to work in groups, and to write a formative essay as a group. Some students felt this was "not the way we work in English", as if group work was only suitable for those pesky science types, whereas others were initially skeptical, but realised that it was great because you'd get to see how others approach the same task and topic from a completely different direction.

So, what to do? The route of least resistance would be to drop the change, as then the negative comments have been taken into account, and the positives don't matter, as long as they don't state they wouldn't want to go back to the situation before the change. This, however, is deeply unsatisfactory, and my non-pc view is that we as qualified educators know better and that our views, based on sound pedagogy, are actually more worthy than those of the students. This attitude is of course not popular in a culture of constant evaluation and league tables, but then, it's a no-win situation anyway. Maybe I should just retrain as a merchant banker.