[sentdex]

The plagiarism that I personally see is specifically code plagiarism. I am a programming educator on youtube.com/sentdex and pythonprogramming.net

Lately, I have been digging into this, and it's far more rampant than I ever expected (I am still digging, but we're talking in the 10's of thousands of examples that I've found with basic automated searching just in matches to my own personal code). I have found some seriously absurd examples where an entire portfolio consists of my code, and the person got a job from it at a large company.

Compare a student who writes their own code to the student who plagiarizes.

If you're the non-copy-pasta student, you're competing with the fakes for jobs.

If you're an employer, you're tasked with figuring out who is who, and I strongly doubt you would personally want the copy-paster at your business for both legal and productivity reasons.

I think some people confuse plagiarism and innovation, especially when we start to wrap in "intellectual property" into it.

Plagiarism is a shortcut used to fake skills/credentials.

Innovation is a real skill, though could be debated I am sure.

Intellectual property value is up for debate.

People who are cheating/faking their way, lying about their value/skills harms both employers and students.

Just don't let people debating about plagiarism try to sneak in innovation/building-upon as a means of a straw man.

We're talking copy and paste here. Maybe some synonym swaps.

[celeritascelery]

It’s hard to draw the line though. Is using stack overflow’s answers wrong? What about getting an algorithm from a text book? Obviously lifting an entire course is wrong. But nothing is created in a vacuum. Especially code, which feels more like math then English.

[sentdex]

When you take an algorithm from a book, or copy and paste from stack overflow, you put a comment in the code with a link to the source, really no different than how you'd cite a quote in a paper.

To me, it just doesn't seem like it's even remotely challenging to figure out how to do this, or when to do this. If it's not yours, say where you got it.

When in doubt, cite it. What exactly would the harm be if you cited something when you weren't sure if it was necessary, anyway?

[celeritascelery]

> When you take an algorithm from a book, or copy and paste from stack overflow, you put a comment in the code with a link to the source, really no different than how you'd cite a quote in a paper.

You do this? That is very impressive. I have never meant anyone who did that. Myself included.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

I tend to put a link to the SO answer in a comment. That way whoever is looking at it later (mostly me in a few months) can understand what prompted that solution.