Academic dishonesty (was "Apologies and responsibility")

[Matt]

No: HPFGUIDX 139391

--- I  wrote:
>> If Harry had gone to the library and found some better 
>> textbook with more modern formulas for the potions, and 
>> then had extrapolated from those -- or simply copied those 
>> down to use in class -- would you think that was dishonest?  

--- Carol replied:
> I don't know about RL science classes, but students who 
> use outside sources in an English class are required to 
> cite them in endnotes and a bibliography. Not to do so is 
> plagiarism, punishable by expulsion on the university level....

Are we talking about writing a paper or doing a practical classroom
exercise?  Even in literature classes, people read plenty of secondary
sources and what they read can inform their thinking without becoming
plagiarism.  (I don't cite anything when I tell my kids that the
yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz was supposed to symbolize a
return to the gold standard, even though I learned about that
symbolism from a high school history teacher who, incidentally, failed
to cite Henry Littlefield's "Parable on Populism" article when he
taught the point.)  

Moving to science, which I agree is the better analogy to Potions,
students simply do not cite anything when doing laboratory exercises.
 Perhaps a lab report would explain the source for unconventional
methods used in the experiment, but the potions exercises don't call
for a report; they are purely practical.  As I said in the prior post,
it does bother me a bit that Harry doesn't disabuse Slughorn of the
misconception that his potionmaking is intuitive, but what is being
taught is the ability to successfully make the potion, not intuition.   

> If a student used his older brother's or sister's 
> annotated copy of a novel to write an interpretive essay, 
> that would also be considered plagiarism .... 

I'm not sure I agree with that conclusion, but let's bring the example
in line with the situation in HBP: Not an older sibling's book, but a
secondhand book with scribbles in the margin.  I used many secondhand
books in my day, and it never would have occurred to me to cite the
unknown author if my reading of the text had been colored by the
marginal notes (any more than I would expect a subsequent owner to
cite my reactions if they influenced him or her), though I suppose my
view might change if it had been some really choice and ingenious
commentary.  (In the RW, in fact, there's considerably more
protectable intellectual property in a pharmaceutical or food formula
than in unpublished literary annotations.)  And when I conduct
classroom discussions, I'm far more concerned with students'
understanding of the ideas they are expounding than with the
originality of those ideas.  

It's that last point that I actually find most provocative in thinking
about Harry's use of the HBP book.  Do the "talented" potionmakers in
the class actually understand what they are doing, or are they simply
following instructions?  Does Harry -- presented with the contrast
between the textbook instructions and Snape's -- understand things any
better than the rest of the class, or is he, too, simply following
instructions?  I'm not a scientist, but I am a cook, and I tend to
assume that there is some talent, some feel, some art involved in
potionmaking, as there is in cooking, but I fear that none of the
students we see has really picked this up.  (Certainly not Hermione,
who insists on slavishly following the recipe.)  One would think the
concept would be attractive to Harry, who tends to perform much better
at instinctive/reactive tasks (flying, sports, duelling) than at book
learning. 

-- Matt