1. This alleged plagiarist’s college convicting him and publicizing the fact that he has been judged a plagiarist by due process, and: 2. A public accusation of plagiarism without process of any kind.

Public attention to a conviction is entirely different from public attention to an accusation. I’m with you if you want convictions by due process of plagiarism in college to be worthy of public attention. I am not in favour of accusations like this to be brandished so enthusiastically.

The flaws of the "court of opinion" are many and worthy of concern, but they shouldn't be used as an excuse to hide any mention of blatant wrong-doing.

This essay isn't a public denouncement, it's merely presenting information. Is this a call to a lynching? "Aaron Kerzner of Boston, I blow my nose at you."

I am only speaking to what we should do in response, namely laugh uproariously at what appears to be a finely crafted piece of work, and use it as a catalysts for serious discussion about where our institutions of higher education are failing, and eschew debating this named person’s crimes or character. I think the essay would be just as thought-provoking if it left the person’s name out, it would still pose difficult and important questions:

How does such an essay get accepted?

If someone cheats and gets a degree, how do they prosper in life? Should there be a correlation between honest work on a degree and success? If not, why do we care about the degree?

How much of submitting an essay is composing the essay, and how much is mechanically rearranging existing ideas into a form that passes the professorial filter?

Is there a Turing Test going on here? If a professor can’t tell the original works apart from the plagiarized ones, is the test flawed, or is there really no distinction between the good and bad students?

I really like the post, it provides much grist for my Olde Mill, which lies just west of the Forest of Runnymede.

In this particular case the evidence seems rather damning, but there can always be plenty we aren't aware of, life is complicated. Personally I hope the accused can recover from this, though in general I think that if more college students realized that the shame of plagiarism could come back and bite them in the ass later in life that would probably be a good thing. College isn't play time. Nor should it be training wheels for adulthood.

You work in tech? You've seen countless idiots who blatantly lie to get jobs? You've seen them get promoted (so they can no longer do harm, or because they're really good at lying) while talented people have to stick around to fix the problems and carry the slack?

Cheats prosper.

Plagiarism is a matter for the plagiarist, their employer or their institution, and the person whose work was copied (at a stretch). It's not the responsibility of a vigilante or a mob to chase up and vilify someone who has made an entirely academic mistake, deliberately or not.

That it's proof enough for you, or me, or anyone in this thread, is irrelevant, unless you're one of the three aforementioned parties involved. What influence do you or I have on their academic conduct? That's the teacher's, tutor's, or lecturer's job.

And since I'm overlooking the fact that plagiarism in itself is a form of copyright infringement, I'll posit this: people are against SOPA because it bypasses due process and presumes guilt, as decided entirely by the self-certified victim. How is a name-and-shame post like this, where the accused has had no opportunity to defend themselves or explain, any better? Were they even made aware of this beforehand?

Does anyone even know under what circumstances this happened either? Because an undergrad copying an article means absolutely nothing compared to a PhD doing the same.

I don’t know if you intended to scare me out of my skin, but I find that phrase chilling. Men have been lynched and hanged without trial given that very same sentiment.

Accusing someone of plagiarism on the Internet and sentencing someone to death are such completely different scenarios that I have a hard time comparing the two.

edit: Upon further reflection, I do think that creating a honeypot essay for the sole purpose of shaming whoever copies it does seem rather malicious to me. However, I'm speaking more about the general case of publicly naming plagiarists than this particular witch-hunt.

Process is always warranted in the case of punishment, but when someone makes the evidence of their wrongdoing public on the internet, it's silly to act like it's some kind of witch-hunt or lynching to point it out.

I'd say the main issue here is not that cheating on a college degree indicates a lack of competence. Rather, it indicates a lack of trustworthiness. This is just as serious of a shortcoming.

The Internet is like a bell, you can't just unring it.

Though someone stated that (not sure if this is fact) there is no statute of limitations on plagiarism, I feel like when it comes to college papers there should be.

Regardless of the fact that legally, college students are adults, they are still very prone to making mistakes. I see no reason to punish this one simply because he had the misfortune of copying a paper from an internet blogger.

How is it that you define wholesale copying of someone else's work and passing it off as your own a "mistake"? You might as well call burglary a "mistake".

"I see no reason to punish this one simply because he had the misfortune of copying a paper from an internet blogger."

Holy chutzpah Batman! He chose of his own free will to copy someone's work rather than do the work himself (which is CLEARLY against the rules). But because the person he copied from is a blogger who has the means to expose his misdeeds, that's unfair?

I can't imagine the circumstances where that's true. In general, you'd have at least a few hours to decide and change your mind. In most cases it wouldn't happen at all unless you actively show your interest in that other person.

Maybe when you're drunk and a lady just throws herself at you out of nowhere? I don't know how I would call such a person though ... lucky bastard?

I don't think it's unethical to cheat if cheating becomes the norm. At some point, it becomes the fault of the system, not the participants, and the schools are higher up the food chain.