cshen.ca

Well not really, unless you consider me heretic, which I’m sure many do.

In any case, I was somewhat surprised that The Peak published my response to Lisa Freeman’s All Deserve Respect, which itself is a response to Graham Templeton’s article Religion Never Changes. I was expecting a much more fearful press – like high school papers (which I am all too familiar with) – that tiptoes around anything that might have the slightest chance of being taken as offensive. I guess it was naive of me to think that, judging form the numerous other controversial articles that The Peak publishes. An actually independent press, how wonderful! This is one of the reasons I like university.

With that said, The Peak did make some small edits to sentence structures here and there, which improved the readability in some places, and diminished the flow in others. The content remained untouched (and rightly so). But for anyone interested in reading the original unedited version, it is available from my archive.

Exams

Why is it that every professor gives midterm exams within two weeks of every other professor? As if we’re all enrolled solely in their class and no other. Why are projects and papers all due at the same time as well? What’s so attractive about week twelve?!

Turnitin.com

Because of the aforementioned exams, I took an extended break from Turnitin.com issues. Here is a little update:

• I mentioned earlier that the implied consent constitutes a contract. There is no need to go as far as to qualify the implied consent as such. To begin with, it is already unreasonable to require the wavier of civil liberties and intellectual property rights as a condition of enrolling in a course.

As reported by Forbes, a part of the USA PATRIOT Act have just been struck down.

A federal judge struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act on Thursday, saying investigators must have a court’s approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers.

This is good news, if only a small small step. It does show that at least someone is still concerned about the privacy of individual citizens, and that the executive branch will not be allowed free reign in domestic and international surveillance.

Which brings us to the question, how does it affect Canadians? Well it doesn’t yet, since there is still a lot of powers for any 3 letter agency to spy on international communication, but any change for the better should be welcomed, considering that Canada rips so much of its policies off the States.

Today is the second day of orientation, it was a very relaxed day, with many hours to kill between events. I decided to take advantage of that time and chat a little with Derrick Harder, current president of the Simon Fraser Student Society, who is also on the Senate, the Senate committee on Academic Integrity in Student Learning and Evaluation (SCAISLE), and the Board of Governors. The most relevant of which is SCAISLE, the committee is evaluating SFU’s Turnitin policy.

Of the various things that we discussed, I feel that everyone should know about the advice he gave regarding professors who currently employ Turnitin as an anti-plagiarism measure: If your professor requires its use, talk to him or her and tell them that you do not wish to submit your work to Turnitin.com. If they give you any trouble, refer him or her to Dr. Robert M. Gordon, who is a Professor of Criminology and chair of the SCAISLE.

…and if you do, I’ll sue you, and I’ll win.

That’s what I’ll be telling any professors I might have who require the use of Turnitin.com, and I encourage you to do the same.

Turnitin.com is a plagiarism detection service used by many universities around the world, including in British Columbia: the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria, and the University of Northern British Columbia. In case you didn’t notice, that’s all the universities in the province.

I am not disputing the importance of academic honesty, in fact I agree wholeheartedly that plagiarism is a behaviour which cannot be allowed (honest students suffer from it after all). However using a service like Turnitin is not the proper method of enforcing said academic honesty. The service is built upon (and indeed thrives upon) immorality, hypocrisy, and likely illegality.