Slashdot Mirror
Is The Term Paper Dead?
Reader gyges writes in to tell us that the Washington Post has picked up a piece he wrote about cut-and-paste plagiarism: "Plagiarism today is heavily invested with morality surrounding intellectual honesty. That is laudable. But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent. Did I mean to copy, was it accidental (a trick of memory), was it polygenesis[?] ... Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers." The author argues that in the era we're entering, schools need to rely far less on term papers in assessing students.
My step daughter is taking a class in biology. The first quiz is a bit of a doozy when tasked against my own knowledge, but it did bring out an aspect of this story. Today's kids are tasked with finding answers in what equates to an ocean of information compared to what was available when I was in school. Plagiarism is not good, but in this 'ocean of information' it is difficult to know what that really is. When studying, an answer from wikipedia is as good as one from another paper available on the Internet.
I think it leads to lax standards as to where the answer came from when the point is to find the answer. Term papers and those efforts required of students that require actual personal thought and effort are not dead, they simply need to be pressed with more effort. Finding information is no longer the problem that it used to be. Expressing your own thoughts on the question at hand is a skill that many people never learn, never mind figure out how to express when they are 18-ish.
It is problematic to discuss things in a black and white manner as this story seems to. The issue is not plagiarism or term papers, it is expression of thought, and that is what is endangered most by the 'ocean of information' that is now available to us all.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Yes, students have ways to cheat on term papers. Professors have ways to catch cheaters though. If you assign lots of small writing assignments along with a term paper, for instance, you can pick up on your students' writing styles enough to catch a term paper that was clearly not written by them. This of course assumes your TAs can spare the time to analyze writing styles, or are capable of easily recognizing a writing style...
By the way, are the bottom-of-page MOTD's getting most and more surreal or what? Right now I'm getting "Did YOU find a DIGITAL WATCH in YOUR box of VELVEETA?". Didn't Slashdot use to have Knuth quotes and shit down there?
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Really, I like writing. I think a term paper provides a convenient package by which to express what one has learned over the course of a semester.
Anyone plagiarizing should not be in class anyway.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
and. grammer
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If people are too lazy to work out the answer they will often be too lazy to work out whether the thing they have copied is correct or not.
Education has changed. It used to be difficult to find already answered questions. Not so anymore because of Google. The age of solving problem 1-10 from the book are over and the what of what is what is over.
All that needs to be done to address this is for the teachers to create new unique questions. Students will have pleasure of answering questions not solved by anyone before and also need to adapt all the content they have access to towards a term paper.
Education is sorely lacking behind everything. There is so much intertia in changing anything.
"Reader gyges writes in to tell us that the Washington Post has picked up a piece he wrote about cut-and-pate plagiarism:..."
Define:pate in google comes up with this = "liver or meat or fowl finely minced or ground and variously seasoned"
Ahhh... I'm not so sure if Chefs could plagiarize this though...
Ok, so plagiarism is frequently used in term papers. But what can't be plagiarized? No matter what you assess, there will probably be a standard to replace term papers, and if all the kids are doing the same thing, then what they are doing can still be copying.
That said, I don't really haven a solution, except for the professors to get better at detecting it, which is really what is happening now.
As student in computer engineering I have never been asked to write a paper. I feel that this is the way it should be because someone can talk about a topic all they want and appear to have knowledge on it. However, if they are required to demonstrate the concept, most people will fail. This is probably why all of my classes are based on exams and programming and/or demonstration assignments. Anyone can fake a paper via plagiarism . It is much harder to fake a programming assignment short of copying someones work and making it blatantly obvious you have done so.
"cut-and-pate plagiarism" ... sounds tasty.
I don't think dropping the paper is a good idea, as it's the project-type things that are really the best indicators barring this sort of cheating.
But maybe you could do something like spend 15 minutes with everyone (this would take a while, I know) and ask them questions about what they wrote, or have them give a presentation on the topic. That way even if they cheated on the paper itself, at least you know it wasn't a case of just downloading it and handing it in, and that they actually know the material.
I've thought about this in the context of, say, an intro CS class. I think that a good way to do the evaluations would be to let people work in groups, but then for each assignment randomly choose 5 or 10 people who you ask about their design and implementation, "if the question changed in this way, how would that affect your solution", etc.
But if you drop the paper, what's left? Tests? They aren't really a good indication. Heck, I had a semester-long class in high school that only met formally a few times and effectively had one assigment: write and present a paper.
... is teaching the basics, how to read, write, mathmatics, to properly prepare everyone for their future, be it further education or a career. Too many students are promoted to the next grades, lacking the skills to even complete the grade that they just "completed". Those who struggle with learning, may need to take remedial classes. Today's schools need to update education for today's world, rather than continuing to use the current trends of their teaching.
Anyone who cheats to get good grades is being very inefficient. It is far easier to just use Photoshop/Gimp to make yourself a diploma.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Please check your spelling before posting. I'm surprised this posted!
A site cowboyneal will like http://www.freewebs.com/atpa/
Perhaps you need to sit in class and scribble it out in a composition book, but having a student present his or her learning in a written form is the only way professors are going to know if a student's absorbed the material or not. (I personally cramp up after about a page and a half). Obviously, in Calculus or Physics 101 you can just have a test. But for advanced topics in any field- science, history or literature, you need to see that a student hasn't only absorbed the factual material, but that they can apply a decent amount of analytical thought to the topic.
The advent of cut-and-paste cheating has made the job of professors somewhat more difficult, and colleges should probably make adjustments- smaller class sizes, more TAs, maybe, different grading schedules. But there's no replacement having students write papers, and having professors read them.
Some students are in school to, y'know, learn stuff. Not to get a fancy piece of paper with the name of their school. For them, the term paper is very important, as it provides a substantial task into which they can focus the knowledge and understanding they accumulated over the semester.
Of course, sometimes term papers are painful even for the best. Sometimes students who care about some of their classes cheat in the others. But I'm sure that at almost every university in the US, most of the students do most of their work most of the time.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Another benefit of the memo style over a term paper is that we can't be long-winded. We're given a maximum page length, not a minimum (usually around four to five pages), into which we have to cram 15 or so term-paper-pages' worth of material. It's surprisingly difficult, but (according to him; I'm not yet in the real world full-time) that kind of skill is vastly important and not taught enough. Real-world types: does this sound accurate (and/or wise)?
Those who anthropomorphize science and/or nature already believe in an intelligent designer.
Universites are the new daycare, for young adults. The cost of appropriating/distibuting Information is approaching zero. If an expert can organize the material and the student is willing to read it, then the middle man university is becoming less important much like the MPAA/RIAA, and work experience more important. It will take much longer for universities, however, to change as employers will need new ways to test knowledge and skill. Universities will only be useful in that they generate peer discussion, which doesn't happen as much for drunken undergraduate students anyways.
When a person writes about a topic in isolation from reference material there is absolutely no way that their writing will correlate with that of some other person. OTOH when you write about a topic with your references open-book style in front of you, then you are guaranteed to replicate them if not in word choice then in organization of thoughts and order of presentation.
That being said it's not the students who are making mistakes... it's the teachers and school curriculum boards. I'm certain that the amount of attention paid to Creative writing, ie: original writing, is significantly less than that paid to criteria based editorializing of facts in a standardized format. No wonder the kids don't know how to write without copying someone, they don't know how to write at all. How many of them understand proper grammar, syntax, punctuation, writing style?
There was a real reason that the classics of literature were taught at one point. They were dissected for more than ideas and concepts, they were examples of good writing that could communicate those ideas and concepts, not simply present them in a standardized format.
To return to my first paragraph, there is another problem. The students don't truly understand the material anyways and can't write about the topic without the crutch of reference material or plagiarism of others. If they understood it they wouldn't want to plagiarize. They would want to be very clear that the thoughts and opinions and conclusion they are presenting are theirs and theirs alone. They would go out of their way to pick an approach to the topic that could only be from their own perspective. They would write about what they know and tie in the facts and reference material as needed to support their argument after having laid out a unique narrative, rather than outlining their paper based on the references they've found and attempting to write a narrative into the between spaces.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Get rid of grading altogether. Education shouldn't be some stupid game where students quite legitimately ask, 'Is this going to be on the exam?', because if you're going for high score you don't want to waste a lot of time on stuff that won't score you points. The only exams should be at the start of term to determine if a student possesses the prerequisite knowledge to handle the course material. Fail prereq exams, don't get necessary courses, don't graduate. Anyone who graduates has to have known enough to do so. Beyond that, place emphasis on the aquisition of knowledge -- wouldn't that be revolutionary? Education that emphasized the aquisition of knowledge? What a concept.
As long as it's just a game I really can't get that upset about students gaming the game. As is, it's just bullshit anyway. Get through it any way you can.
Loose lips lose spit.
Now, only if I can find the paper about plagiarism I wrote about in my English 101 class. Back in a while, looking.
Education has changed. It used to be difficult to find already answered questions. Not so anymore because of Google. The age of solving problem 1-10 from the book are over and the what of what is what is over.
All that needs to be done to address this is for the teachers to create new unique questions. Students will have pleasure of answering questions not solved by anyone before and also need to adapt all the content they have access to towards a term paper.
Bingo. The only way that students can really plagiarize their term paper is if the question being asked is so banal that thousands of other students have already beaten it to death.
If you make the question unique, then there's really not much of a way to rip off a paper that you find on the internet. At best, all students will be able to do are copy introductory paragraphs, but the critical stuff will all have to be recreated (making the lifted text stand out against the other writing, but more importantly, retaining the more important parts of the exercise).
Ask dried-up, tired questions, and you'll probably get dried-up, tired term papers. Who'da thunk it?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Now people who will just blindly cut and paste whatever material they can find that is relevant enough to satisfy the content criteria for the research paper are, in fact, cutting themselves out of that learning process, and as someone who has marked college papers for professors before, I can say that it almost invariably shows.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
>Where I go to college, one of my professors (in a social science) has a standing bet with all his students:
>if we ever have to write a term paper for our job in the real world (i.e., not academia), he'll donate $25 to
>the charity of our choice. He's been teaching since the 1970s and has >never had to pay up.
Of course he never has to pay up. But the underlying point he's trying to make is idiotic. There's no such thing as a term paper in business or government. But there are tons of important tasks that draw on exactly that skill set. Should we hire a team of people to redesign our packaging; does the potential added sales justify the expense? What mistakes did we make in our last government bid, and how can they be avoided next time? Why does Sally deserve to get the ax for her abrasive attitude towards people who report to her?
These are all things often handled with the very same writing structure that you learn writing term papers. Much of your potential to reach leadership positions within industry depends on how effectively you can explain, and how persuasively you can argue. Nothing in academia develops these skills like a good, old fashioned, term paper. It's really galling to see somebody within academia who is seemingly oblivious to how important these skills are. The fact is most college students can't write for shit, and if they could, they would be better decision-makers, they would carry greater influence at work, and they would go further in life.
Plus, being able to express yourself clearly is just cool regardless of how it affects your career potential.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
They are about learning to research, to think, to meet deadlines and about preparing something professional for a critical reviewer. Some subjects require much less of this than others, but to say they aren't valuable or needed at all is ridiculous. I write papers every week (English major) and I couldn't imagine how my subject would possibly work without papers.
Just because some people don't like them doesn't mean they don't have a place and I'm very suspect of anyone who claims cheating is so rampant. I've yet to see anyone cheat and I know of no one who has cheated or been caught.
Well, plagiarism today is heavily invested with morality surrounding intellectual honesty. That is laudable. But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent. Did I mean to copy, was it accidental (a trick of memory), was it polygenesis[?] ... Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers.
That's all I have to say about the subject.
I argue that in the era we're entering, schools need to rely far less on term papers in assessing students.
The term paper as such doesn't need to be done away with. What needs to be happening is that over the course of the 3 or 4 weeks the students are writing the paper and researching the paper they should also be giving a series of presentations and/or meeting with the professor at least 1 or 2 times to discuss their progress. Sure, it may sound like babying the student, but status reports are a fact of life. Hell I meet with my adviser(grad school) at least once a week just to touch base and let him know what's happening. Since this is /. as an example when I was taking computer architecture we had to do a paper on some given facet of the field or a specific architecture. Really whatever most interested us at the time. We had to provide references and brief status reports, and give a presentation on the paper at the end. You might be able to fake a paper you turn in but it's much harder to fake the presentation and the status reports if you don't actually know the material. Of course this all presumes the professor cares/has the energy to deal with this level of effort.
I don't care what you say, all I need is my Wumpabet soup.
i agree with everything you said, but i dont think it touches the fact that a student can just go to some website and copy someone else's valued expression of his opinions.
At some point, the term essay is gonna have to become a 3 hour essay behind closed doors, with no electronic equipment. Probably then, the copiers will plagirize someone else's valid excuses as to why that's no good...
Well, I thought I'd chime in one this. My mother is a High School English teacher, and she isn't quiet up on the technology behind cheating. Often times if I'm visiting, I'll help her grade her English Papers, like any good son should. During my mom's first year of teaching at a new High School, the students evidently thought that they could fool the new teacher on a paper about the Crucible. I caught 90% of the students plagiarizing. Most of them were word for word, others were modifications of adjectives, but the prior work shined through.
I suppose you're thinking that the children would have been suspended, or failed for the whole term? Unfortunately, they were all given a slap on the wrist, and my mom was only allowed to give them F's for that single paper. There were no write ups, no detention, no community service, nothing. The schools just refused to buckle down on it, which sickened me. Now, anytime my mother has papers to grade, I make sure she sends me a fax of any suspicious writing, and I do research on it.
More often than not, I catch five percent of her class plagiarizing per paper. This is after she extensively tells them that she had caught her countless before. Some children even have the gall to copy and paste Wikipedia articles word for word. It's sad times that we live in, and the United States government simply isn't proving a means to deal with it.
Depends on what field you're in. In most business roles, I can see the point of what he's saying. (However, I still think that there's value in learning to cite sources; even in relatively informal communications, I do it all the time, usually with mock footnotes [1], and over the years have done well by it.) But I heartily agree with his assessment about the ability to summarize information being much more important than the ability to fill pages.
Banging out six or seven pages on some crummy topic is trivial; in today's world, even the thickest PHB can probably pull up reams of information on whatever they want to know about. It's condensing that information into compact, easily-understandable (but not too dumbed-down) nuggets that's the real challenge. [2] I remember when I wrote my undergraduate thesis, the absolute hardest part of the whole thing wasn't the research, or writing the paper, it was writing the abstract. How do you cram nine months of research and data analysis into a handful of sentences?
As long as your professor isn't neglecting the importance of sources and citations altogether, I don't think there's really anything to be lost by abandoning the silly cruft of academia and making the writing assignments take on the form of things that exist in real life. Depending on the discipline, I could see computer scientists write whitepapers, while physical scientists write journal briefs for the most part, with the occasional formal lab report or lit review, written to actual journal-submission standards. I don't know what you'd want English and other humanities majors to do, because while academics in those fields do end up doing a lot of writing, statistically very few people who major in those areas actually go into academic fields -- most of them end up doing corporate work. But ultimately, it's not really the format that matters so much as the intent. If you're giving minimum page-number requirements, so that your students are fudging with the margins and typing in garbage in order to bulk up, something's wrong. Far more often in the real world, you end up cutting something down to size, not padding it up.
[1] Like this.
[2] Neal Stephenson described intelligence as the act of "condensing fact from the vapor of nuance," a quote that I've always thought was particularly apt.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Let's not misrepresent what papers are either. Term papers are not tests in disguise; they are exercises that hone and shape a mind much as lifting weights tones and strengthens muscles. If a university has any greater purpose than the knowledge or information that is churned out, it is the task of producing fine human minds. The kind that direct the course of our civilization. The internet won't do that for us.
The only real change I see your system adding is a free-ride for the last year of your education, since you won't be graded for doing any work. Unless your statement that "anyone who graduates has to have known enough to do so" means final exams in your last year. Which is still flawed, because someone might drop out without passing, but still have the "1 year university experience" on their resume.
Simple answer; like we've been doing for decades or more here in Denmark: Oral exams, and written (supervised) exams.
The student goes in, and with only the knowledge in his head has to demonstrate knowledge of the subject.
I think it's as fair an assessment as you can get, provided you don't cater to the inevitable proportion with fake "nerves" (if you can't hack it at an oral exam, how the hell are you going to pass a job interview?).
The Term Paper may be dead, but the term: "paper" is still quite useful in referring to those thin, usually-white sheets made of trees that we write and print on.
A term paper is usually not your WHOLE grade; it may be a good chunk of the final grade (25-30% or so) but it's possible to get an A on your term paper and still get a pretty bad grade in the course overall. Why? The other 70-75% of your grade usually rests on maybe a quiz or two, and the midterm and final exams. It's pretty hard to cheat on these.. If you don't have the knowledge required, you WILL get a bad grade on them, and it WILL be reflected in your final course grade. A plagiarized term paper that gets an A+ will help a student's grade, but it will not save it if the student doesn't take the time to learn the course material properly.
And of course, there's also the sad but true fact that if a student decides to plagiarize, they will have learned nothing: They think they're so smart, getting around writing a term paper.. but unfortunately they are only cheating themselves out of valuable knowledge.
-Parallax
I graduated in Electronic Engineering in Italy and there we didn't have term papers besides the 5th year's subjects, where the number of people in specific lectures was anyway down to less than 20. ...at the end only 18% of the students from the first year actually graduated, the ones that actually worked hard and deserved it.
We didn't have multipe choice tests either.
To pass an examination, for most of the subjects, the concept was really simple:
sit down, one, two or three hours to solve problems (solving full problems, not entering checkmarks!) on your own and if you passed the written part you got to a discussion with the professor (or one of his assistants) that in average lasted half an hour.
There were exceptions in some specific subjects though (I can say 10%, not more, lazy professors were there too).
Anyway it was simply not possible to cheat. You knew stuff you passed, you didn't know, bye and see you next time.
Now I'm working for an American company and I believe a big part of my success here is due to the teaching method we had at the University.
Doing away with the term paper is not the answer to plagiarism. The fact is, someone who will turn in work that is not their own is determined not to learn. Test them another way, and they'll still find a way around it. No one can be educated against their will. They can be indoctrinated, but only at the price of creative thought.
Plagiarism is a symptom, not the problem. Tell me how you'll teach students to care, and it won't matter if it's a paper, a test, or a painting they produce; they're the people who will change things in the real world, someday. They'll do what they are inspired to do because someone taught them to think for themselves, and nobody persuaded them otherwise.
I for one do not agree that term papers should be gotten rid of.
However saying that, it is nigh on impossible to avoid plagarism in many subjects. An example, I ha to write a fairly lengthy term paper this last month. i went into the library of the University, which in of itself is not all that great, and grabbed as many books as I could find in my subject area.
On average, each chapter would have roughly two pages of quotations from other authors. To me that is a bit unacceptable, as when you locate the texts quoted in the first book, you find that the previous book is composed of quotations as well.
But then again it may b e my wiishful thinking that I believe scholars should do their own legwork with regards to the data, and then come to their own conclusions.
Wish I could smack one or two of them upside the back of the head though.
I think the parent is showing how important essay skills are in todays world. If this is a proff by bad example, bravo sir.
Bullshit. Bull. Shit. Just because there's a growing ocean of (mis)information and lots of tools to search through the disorganized mess doesn't mean that being lazy is ok, or that taxonomy has lost its usefulness. The same goes for txt-ing fools and 1337-speak d00dz; just because you can doesn't mean you should. (Or that your misapplied, sloppy comunicashunz skilz are worthy of respect.)
I lead teams of consultants giving advice about information to big organizations (big whoop, but it's usually the personal kind, like medical or financial data that might be personally damaging or hurtful if disclosed). Half the time this work takes the form of technology advice, but just as often it's process and governance advising that borders on legal advice. If I or any of these guys crib an opinion from the Intarwebs, we will be busted. If citations are not properly given, we will be busted. If we don't express a complete chain of reasoning that supports each and every considered opinion, we will be busted. You get the idea. Anything less is disrespectful to the people who pay us good money for finding information, considering it, and making decisions about it. It's exactly the kind of thing for which a term paper is good practice.
The same goes for presentations, articles, books, proposals, sales agreements, and even resumes. If you want to establish a fact, convince someone of a position, or persuade someone else to help you, you *must* be able to express a structured, supported opinion, and know the difference between verbatim quotes, derived ideas, and the rare original thought.
Writing is as important as it ever has been.
Research is as important as it ever has been.
And reasoning is even more important.
I'm sure as hell teaching *my* kids how to do term papers, because I do one for every client every couple of weeks. Some of it may be formulaic drivel, but some of it is really enjoyable stuff worthy of some professional pride. If the unwashed masses don't want to practice for nice jobs in the real world, then fine. Ditch the term papers. And have fun sorting my mail down in the mailroom aspiring to a first-level helpdesk gig, or painting my garage.
J
I think not...(*poof*)
First because grading is subjective on these papers a bad professor could equal a bad grade rather than pure merit. Second, a good writer with a vague understanding of the material can always write a good sounding paper and get a good grade. Third, nobody can verify all the citations and references of hundreds of students. Many people just make them up or use something that sounds like it supports their point and then grab choice quotes out of context.
These papers and insane amounts of reading are part of why there is so much burden in getting a degree. It is sad that an award from a supposed institution of higher learning shows nothing more than the ability to persevere and achieve a goal. It also shows that you can make a point that could be easily established in one short paragraph stretch out into any length paper the professor pulled out of a hat.
My 11th grade English teacher would assign essays every week or two that were due at the end of class. No real possibility of plagiarism there. We never had term papers in science classes, either. My physics and chemistry classes had a term project, but that required lab work & demonstration, so again, no possibility of plagiarism. I don't think the teachers operated this way to eliminate plagiarism, per se, but it just wasn't a real problem. Nobody in college really gives a shit; if you are stupid enough to plagiarize and the TA is actually reading the paper for some reason, then there's a whole honesty policy that kicks in. Depending on the professor, it can actually be quite serious.
I've done many exams where the profs didn't care what you brought with you, "so long as it's not breathing". All the books and notes in the world won't help you if you don't understand the material.
Is undergraduate fine arts such a joke now that the profs can't be bothered to determine if the students are providing genuine insight into the material, or are just regurgitating crap? I did History of Warfare courses as my fine arts component - even there, the prof didn't want to mark papers. He'd tell you to research something, and then come in and write a paper in the allotted time based on what you learned.
Seems pretty basic to me. Then again, I didn't see many artsies in the library on Friday night.
..don't panic
At the school that I work at ( I teach maths ) Our take home papers are backed up with a class test that covers the same work with different question. So, if a kid gets help and knows sfa about the topic, they fail. If they have done it themslves, then they can pass. Quite simple really!
There isn't much point with average GPA's going up 0.1/year in HS and colleges, everyone has to be given an A or they will sue the school. A single "B" can mean having to goto community college since everyone else has a 4.0 and there is a 137-way tie for valedictorian. Just write your name on the paper and get your A.
Does it matter if all the jobs you need a 3rd grade education for are all going to Asia? Probably not. And since many of those jobs are in copying/counterfeiting copying that term paper is just practice! *laughs*
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I reassure myself by thinking, having read his biography, that in today's world an Alan Turing would probably have failed to get into Cambridge.
The best thing about sudden-death exams is that they virtually eliminate cheating if they are properly run, at least in subjects where thought is needed. And the experience of Cambridge physics practical - walk into a room where there is a joke piece of apparatus never seen before, a short paper describing what is to be measured and a few equations, and have a day to make something of it - that has benefited me the rest of my life. I only recently thought about it when trying to understand why staff going onto client sites nowadays seemed so much less confident and unable to make decisions than my generation. Then I thought back to those practical exams. The new generation is better at solving problems by googling for relevant data and trying to extract the pattern, but we had to try and wing it from scratch. I'm not saying either is necessarily better or worse, but if I was ever trapped on a desert island I know which group I would rather be with.
Pining for the fjords
in the sense that of our "lets boost the confidence of the children at any cost" mentality, but what about oral exams?
When you see the average American these days being interviewed on television, they simply have no rhetorical skills whatsoever. They may not have a room temperature IQ, but they sure sound like it most of the time. Yah I know some people fear public speaking more than death itself, but public speaking is arguably more important than being able to write clear essays in real world situations.
Also, I am no means an expert on how kids are educated in Europe, but at least in universities I have heard that oral exams are or were a big deal over there. An oral exam is the ultimate shit test for whether you clearly understand the material or not because you are forced to articulate yourself on the topic directly to your audience in an almost ad hoc manner. If you don't know the material, then you better have some wit to pass as filler for content or else you will embarrass yourself incredibly in front of your peers and teachers.
Plus there is a strong dichotomy generally with being able to speak clearly and write clearly. People who find themselves long-winded and off topic when presenting their arguments on paper for on any given topic, will learn quickly when it comes to an oral exam that their audience will start snoring and/or mocking them which will encourage them to become better at communication overall and that is a good thing.
Of course grading an oral exam is highly subjective, but who the hell cares. As long as students are learning the material and becoming better at communicating with each other in ways more sophisticated than spamming emoticons back and forth over IM, then I am all for it.
Essays should of course still exist, but they should be complimentary to the oral exam itself. Kind of like how at academic conferences where people submit papers and then if they are lucky enough they get to personally present the material contained in those papers before an audience of their peers.
The linked article is very poorly argued. The author says he's worked at as an educator for students from the second-grade to college seniors. Does he mean his thesis to apply across all those levels? Is it supposed to apply even to senior level work in one's own major, even where that major is in a humanities or social science field? What about graduate level work?
I've done tests, not papers for intro classes I've taught, but I'd almost certainly do papers, not tests for senior level courses. Context makes a big difference here.
Also, he sometimes speaks very broadly 'the term paper is dead.' Does that mean stop assigning term papers altogether? The arguments provided at best support two much weaker theses:
1) Coherent cutting and pasting is a valuable skill of its own that should perhaps be taught/tested
2) Term papers are relied on more heavily than they should be in grading.
It's a long way from those two to a strong interpretation of 'the term paper is dead.'
Also, he sometimes comes close to outright contradicting himself: "The problem isn't due to a dramatic decline in young people's moral character, nor the rise of the Internet and its endless bounty. The problem is that schools have relied too long and too heavily on the paper as the most significant method of evaluating students. But that's going to have to change."
But why is it going to have to change? The very next sentence seems to answer answer: Because "Internet plagiarism is growing at a rapid pace, according to recent studies and the anecdotal evidence I hear from my former colleagues in education -- and there's no end in sight."
So is the problem the tools made possible by the internet, or isn't it?
Well, not just term papers are plagiarized, solution proprosal documents are too, in the world of IT and business consulting domain. We have written quite a bit of business and solution proposals, and funny thing is, a lot of the so-called "customers" shared them with our competitors (we never understand the reason why). But probably it was some low level clerk who leaked it to people in the competing companies.
.... surprise, surprise, it was the exact proposal we wrote two years ago for another customer. It was almost exactly the same, except the cover page, title, customer's name, date, and copyright info. We pulled out our original document to do a comparison, it's so identical that it's not even funny.
Funnier yet, last year, a guy in a company which is asking for bidding proposals leaked a competitor's document to one of our guys, and
This year, we found two more documents from our competitors which plagiarized on ours, but at least, this time, they did some modifications to the chart and some wordings. But we can see whole paragraphs copied as is.
And the worst part is, you see the big names in the business doing it.
Six years ago I left the software development world for the world of University teaching. I encountered a fair amount of plagiarism in the first year, but very little since. Catch a few and the word gets around.
The biggest problem, by the way, hasn't been the Internet. It has been copying directly out of the textbook on take home and open book exams. The real world me says that such exams are a good thing because we almost always have the ability to look things up when our boss asks us to research something, but the pragmatic professor in me has come to the conclusion that open book tests, in any of their forms, are simply an invitation to copy things out of the book rather than put it in your own words.
The best way to fight plagiarism, in my experience, is to give them papers that will be difficult to copy and paste into. Every semester and every class that I assign term paper projects with distinctive features tied, in general, to my research program. The general research question under the papers makes it unlikely that they'll be able to find a paper to copy from, as I almost always pick under-researched topics or push them to engage content that is too new to have attracted scholarship. Students occasionally try, but it is humorous to read a paper bought from a term paper site that plagiarizes one of my own papers. It is not fun to confront them over it (there is nothing like having a student deny to your face that they plagiarized when you have them dead to rights), but it has to be done.
The second best way is to make the term paper a semester long development project that involves lots of little assignments that have to be accomplished along the way. I do a lot of that too. By the time my students get to actually assembling the term paper, they've already turned most of it in in pieces. Its a good approach, I think, because it draws the student into the task. I usually get strong indicators of the possibility of plagiarism as the due date approaches, moreover, as students start to approach me about changing the topic they've been working on all semester. I don't let them do that, but I have been warned.
Actually, the biggest problem with term papers I encounter is people who simply never turn them in, which is unfortunate, because the research and thinking process associated with writing a term paper is one of the best ways to get students to learn by applying class concepts on their own.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
'But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent.'
That's not the case; plagiarism by definition is presenting idea of someone else as an original idea of your own; whether you do this entirely intentionally and knowingly, or because of sloppy referencing, or sloppy research is entirely immaterial.
In general, I could not agree more.
Unfortunately, society's expectations towards its members do not care about such notions. Society expects its members to efficiently adjust to their tasks of getting jobs, lest their chances of earning their living will be diminished. It's not simply laziness or some blameworthy inclination to take the path of least resistance, it's also society's vital requirements which coerce competing students to resort to methods which are bound to contradict what we might wish to be the essence of education.
To improve the foundation for "real education", society would have to get rid of quite a lot of adverse competitiveness. As things are now, and I think the tendency is that it's continually getting worse, people are more and more obliged to learn what pays, and to learn in a way that pays, not to really learn what would be interesting or valuable to know from an intellectual or even cultural point of view.
I do not see what is new here. Cheating has been going on for centuries in Europe and thousands of years in China (this is probably why Chinese people are better at it). Plagiarism and services to supply papers to students who do not want to do their work have always existed.
The only problem is that teachers are less Net savvy than their students. A google search of random sentences in a paper would allow to the teacher to check if the student composed the paper from documents on the Web or plagiarized an entire text. In fact, I have considered writing a Perl script for this purpose. Such a program would be able to quickly assess the number of and relative similarity to various documents on the Web.
As for evaluating students' performance, is this not a teacher's job? Perhaps term papers could be broken into sections. Each would be approved by the teacher, and the introduction and conclusion, based of course on the content of the written sections, should be composed in the classroom like a test. In this way, the teacher could at least be certain the student understood the material. Plagiarism really is not that bad if the student understands. The real problem is when they copy and do not even read what they submit. I remember lots of students in college who did not understand anything their professors were saying but managed to pass every class.
Obviously, honesty is important, but learning is more important, and students cannot be forced to be honest. Teachers need to prove that students know something. If they got their ideas from other people, they still have those ideas. Testing and knowing the students personally allows teachers to know whether or not the student has received the teachers' instruction. Also, even if students do not plagiarise, they need to use the ideas of others. If they make others' ideas their own, they are doing enough.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
My experience as a student as well as having Taed philosophy and currently Taking math gives me a fair bit of insight into this problem. Here are some points that I think the article doesn't address properly. 1) Cheating is a problem for every sort of assignment be it in class or out of class. If you want to look at how difficult it is to stop cheating look at the art form it has been turned into in some countries. In class assessments are far from a cure to the cheating issue. In fact exactly because in class assessments only allow the students limited resources they are more vulnerable to cheating. If the students aren't allowed to look up a formula or refer back to the text then comparatively small effort (hidden notes, SMS messages) can give a fairly large bonus. 2) It is far from clear that technology has shifted power towards the cheater and away from the professor/TAs in terms of cheating on term papers. For as long as we have had formal schooling one could always pay someone else to write your term paper and back when the only way to catch a cheater was to manually compare two documents it was almost impossible to prove someone was cheating unless someone was stupid enough to turn in the same paper (or sections thereof) to the same professor. TAs and professors usually have a good intuition about who seemed to magically learn to write better on this paper or otherwise turns in a suspicious paper and now we can catch a fair number of them just by googling sentences from the paper. The hard part isn't guessing who is cheating but gathering enough evidence to punish/deter them from doing it. I actually think the internet has shifted the balance away from the cheater as you can no longer count on trying to turn in the same term paper that people at other colleges/classes have turned in as it might be on the internet now. 3) In class assessment on it's own is a remarkably poor way to both teach and assesses student knowledge/ability. In fact if I could do away with in class assesment in mathematics I would. This form of assesment encourages useless memorization of formula at the expense of understanding. In the real world you can always use references/resources and you will naturally start to remember those things you look up repeatedly so concerns over speed are usually unfounded. On the other hand it is very common to have problems that require a great deal of thought and the unfamiliar application of known principles which are almost impossible to test on in class assessments (if it is easy enough to not be mostly about getting lucky it isn't hard enough). I majored in mathematics at caltech and the honor system let us have entirely take home exams and homework and I feel the ability to work at hard problems over long periods of time was extremely useful in learning. The problem is just as bad in philosophy (and likely other humanities). Instead of testing the student's creativity and ability to come up with innovative new ideas in class exams tend to favor memorization of who said what when and shallow analysis of the material. While the ability to engage in dialogue about the subject during class is an important part of philosophy so too is coming up with and developing interesting ideas and arguments and that simply can't be tested in class. Worse some students don't do very well under the time pressure of an exam. In class assessments tend to depend highly on test taking strategy while longer term assignments better mirror what students will encounter in the real world. In short in class assesment doesn't cut it. 4) Clamping down on cheating is often counterproductive. It may be counterintuitive but people are much less likely to cheat and subvert the rules if you demonstrate that you trust and expect them to follow the rules. This is why the honor system worked at caltech (combined with student body makeup). When you show someone you trust them they feel bad about betraying that trust. On the other hand the more you show them that you expect them to cheat by invasively
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Except that the teacher's job is hard enough anyway, I'm not going to support making them spin their wheels thinking up _unique_ topics for term papers that fit the requirements of the class.
Shoot, picking the topic was part of the student's job when I was in high school and college.
The real solution is to simply walk through the thing with the student, including some short essays they have to write, in class, drawing from their research. If you watch them as they write, you know that it's them writing, and you can compare styles. (This, of course, adds to the workload, but if teachers don't have time to do this much they really have class loads that are too big to allow them to teach.)
Ultimately, however, as has been already said once, learning is the student's responsibility. We just have to figure out better ways to motivate kids to use their minds early, while they can still be persuaded. Unfortunately, the easy ways to motivate them all smack of religion, however.
If we can get them motivated, then they aren't really going to be cheating. Even if they borrow or collaborate, they'll be learning as they go, and that's the goal anyway.
When I read the headline, I mistook it as vocabulary related, as in "is the word 'paper' dead", or, "the death of hard copy." Methought I would run into some ebook, cybermarketing gimmick-laced futurismo. That death might have concerned me; this death, not as much.
Let's not forget that plagiarism isn't limited to the intentional copy-and-paste cheating that everyone keeps talking about. Plagiarism is also failure to accurately cite sources, even unintentionally. The most moral of students with the best intentions can still be guilty of plagiarism for something as simple as poor proof-reading.
I thought they were just random quotes from fortune. That one looks like Zippy the Pinhead.
Exams in faraday cages, and don't give me that crap about exam pressure, you either know it or you don't. If I asked you what your cell phone number was you wouldn't break into a cold sweat and complain that I'm putting you under too much pressure. Similarly, when asked a question by your boss, he's not going to accept a multi-page diatribe where you carpet-bomb the issue in the hope of saying the correct answer.
No trees were harmed in the posting of this message. However, a great number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
I say we introduce the death penalty for cut-and-paste plagiarism. The world would be ruined if this ran loose (OH NOES!). On the other hand, for copy-and-paste plagiarism I feel a stern warning is what's necessary.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Though as a professor I should disapprove of cut and pate cheating, I have in the past ignored plagiarism in return for some fois-gras; cut and flash-of-pink plagiarism is even more effective in my class. Is that just me.
> By the way, are the bottom-of-page MOTD's getting most and more surreal or what?
> Right now I'm getting "Did YOU find a DIGITAL WATCH in YOUR box of VELVEETA?".
> Didn't Slashdot use to have Knuth quotes and shit down there?
The truth is, I and many others only read Slashdot for the MOTD quotes. The articles are something I quickly scroll through with my mouse. I like to think of them as sort of 'editorial advertising'. However you are right. Ever since Zippy (I believe that is Zippy the Pinhead) has gone up the rankings my own discourse has deteriorated from urbane wit to CAPS LOCK HUMOR, which can only end up as a career writing Nigerian Spams.
Now in an effort to ward off the impending (-1: Offtopic) I better add something useful to this debate:
The world has changed. Probably for the worse, but changed nonetheless. Can't wind it back. Educators use essays for marking because it's easier and in today's money-making univer$ity degree factories its mass production. But job interviewers don't choose candidates using essays, and maybe neither should teachers. If you want to know if someone knows their stuff, sit down and talk to them. Ask them questions on the fly. If they can't give you an answer or at least how they'd go about determining an answer, they're making it up as they go. Essays aren't all bad: They let the students learn how to do research and write papers. As the OP article says, that's not 'unuseful'(*) either. If the teacher can still interview them about their paper afterwards, and asks them some hard questions, they'll get a better idea. Then (and this is the best part) judge them on their oral argument defending their essay. That way if the essay is (copied and) briliant but their defense lacks, they still lose without the hassle of the teacher having to call them a cheat. And if even by copying and pasting they've learned enough to defend it anyway, then they should pass anyway. It does cost Universities more one-on-one teacher and student time. Maybe that's a good thing?
(*) 'unuseful' was quoted to stave off the Grammar Ninja. You know who you are.
Oh freakin' please... it's that kind of "we're the only important ones" verbal masturbation, followed by nothing more than fallacies and handwaving as "proof", that gets some of us disgusted at a lot of humanities students.
... and so forth.
For starters, it takes some truly brain-dead hand-waving to pick out of a continuous stream of both, only the convenient instances where A came before B, but thoroughly pretend that no cases exist where B came before A, or both were working on it before either went publich with their results. If you plot both inventions and literary milestones along time, you get something more like a random sequence of both intermingled. It's something like B, A, A, B, A, B, B, B, A, B, A, A,
Sure, you can handpick cases where an A came before a B, no matter how unrelated, and proceed to apply the post hoc, ergo propter hoc _fallacy_ to it. I.e., to assume that just because two things happened in a sequence, surely the first _must_ be the cause for the second.
But equally for every A you could pick a B that happened before it, and the same fallacy now says that all artistic progress was caused by scientific breakthroughs that preceded it.
Plus you can see whole cultures and eras where plenty of As happened without any B coming as a result, or viceversa.
In reality, that fallacy doesn't actually prove anything. That's why it's called a fallacy. To actually prove causality, you'll need far more than "well, A happened before B, hence it must be the cause." So that alone would be enough to invalidate the whole bullshit. But it's doubly so when not only it's a fallacy, but it's _also_ based on bogus handpicked data where only the supporting "evidence" is used, and everything else is cheerfully ignored.
In practice, you can see some correlation, in that areas which encouraged being different and thinking for oneself, produced both scientists and artists. Who would have imagined that? But again, you can also see cultures which encouraged only arts or only science, and mostly got only one of the two.
But again, correlation doesn't mean causation. Just because an area had both scientists and artists, it takes some extreme andwaving to say that the scientists appeared because of the artists. Mere correlation doesn't tell you which is the cause of which. It can also be the other way around, or a third factor can be the real cause of both. E.g., as I was saying, a culture which encourages thinking for oneself and thinking outside the box, will, unsurprisingly, produce both.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
> "But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent."
No it isn't. Plagiarism due to failure to adequately research prior work and provide full references to prove the fact is still plagiarism. Presenting someone else's ideas as one's own, no matter what forms the original and the presented work, is plagiarism. Ignorance is no excuse. This is precisely the same mistake people make with regards to prior art research and disclosure in patent applications. Academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct require intent, plagiarism and failure to disclose prior art do not. "Unintentional" plagiarism will get a softer treatment than "intentional", but both still get you busted.
Don't bother to quote the Wiki article on the subject, it's wrong. Having been invited to teach research ethics at the graduate level due to years of studying the subject, someone besides myself considers me an authority.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I can assure the Slashdot community that the term paper is alive and well. It certainly has been for me this week. (winks with eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep...)
My history professor says no.
This would seem a good case for using fastidious grammar.
When a compound noun may cause ambiguity in a sentence, hyphenate it ("term-paper"). Or move the words around.
I would guess that a good 20% of readers misunderstood this title. Starting with all us non-Americans who don't know what a term paper is, exactly.
I can honestly say the term paper killed itself. We have legislation which requires all students complete a certain amount of writing in each college course. We have courses that have a mandatory "do this paper or fail" requirement laid down by a school administration that never had to write that paper. And we have a vastly higher number of people in college or college-level courses than we did in ages past. There's only so many ways you can write a paper before, inevitably, you come close or even exactly like a previous incarnation someone else already wrote. It's not plagiarism, it's a lack of options.
To extend this to another popular source of tension, let's look at the coding world. Those of us who have taken programming classes, or, like me, program for a living, can tell you that there's only a certain number of ways to program something to achieve the same end. Given a project of "code a Linked List of 10 randomly generated integers", chances are that in a class of 100 students, you'll see a lot of programs that look a LOT, if not exactly, alike. There's just really no other option. Sure, you can change the variable names slightly, but even then, you're eventually going to get duplicates.
Term papers didn't die because of "copy and paste an A paper" websites. Term papers died because of overuse and over reliance.
This is old as the pursuit of Natural History!
The term paper, treatise, scientific paper or whatever-should be the object of scientific inquiry should have to cite sources, no matter how several, to mention, into one's conclusions or claims.
Teachers or peers should be the audience to question whatever is posited, be they high-school students or specialised doctors.
We all rest upon the shoulders of giants. And anyone making a new discovery or invention, large or small, should be another tough shoulder to stand on.
what is plagia? Is it writing the exact same words or writing about an idea.
how can you say that your idea first hatched in your mind or in someone else mind, i can come to conclusions about things and get revelation that has already been written about but without any knowledge about it, is this considered plagia if i did not read it first somewhere?
The problem, other than copying something exactly straight out of a book, is there is no way to tell, i mean somewhere there is bound to have someone write the same words in the same order, there is not a million way to say things.
And by acknowledging an idea and writing about it while not mentioning you read it somewhere else are you guilty again?
I think that if no credit is taken for something, then there is no plagia unless proven that the person was seen reading and doing transcript word for word of an entire paper and putting his or her name on it.
Americans already come out of college without any meaningful ability to communicate in writing. Getting rid of the term paper will only make the problem worse.
Nonsense! I use that term all the time.
Folks who "don't give a shit" about information from outside their particular discipline should shut up, go to trade school, and leave those of us who love knowledge of all kinds in peace. Don't go to a university unless you want a university education, get it?
Yeah, yeah. Term paper bad and plagerization undefeatable, so ditch the term paper and go back to having the instructor grade the student on their percieved abilities.
Next month on SlashDot -- Teachers shouldn't be allowed to give subjective grades.
you ain't tryin...
It's not a terrible oppressive burden to ask them to write an essay in the classroom. With paper and pens/pencils. If they're referencing works of literature, you can have it be open book. Give the kids 45 minutes to write a clear, well-worded, academic-style essay and you'll see what they know. Of course, the little darlings will complain about the "stress," but once the flu pandemic hits and we can see what stress really is, the whining will taper off somewhat.
technical writing / development
I dunno, but the one I had to write damn near killed me back in high school. If it is dead, then it's payback!
I have a friend who has a degree from a top-tier institution in another country. I help her with her papers for some classes she's taking here. She's having real trouble (but is improving). The trouble is not with English -- it's with constructing arguments. She has an excellent, world-respected degree. The United States is a rarity in the world for relying so much on papers where you construct arguments. It's a fantastic thing which we should jump up and down and sing about. We don't stress memorization as much as thinking. This makes us better. It also means we do less well on standardized test designed to test memorization.
Yes, plagiarism is bad. Yes. But if they're cutting and pasting paragraphs which make a coherent argument, then even as they cheat, they learn. Catch 'em, good. Don't catch 'em, good. Win, win.
I'm not saying there isn't much we can learn from other schooling traditions, but the papers we make children write are a GOOD thing.
Return to the olden days: Forbid the use of the internet in researching papers (most kids don't know what a book is any more anyway...it'll do em good!). Require an established standard for citation. Teach writing in schools again. The biggest failures of our education system (aside from the Religious Right demanding my tax dollars finance their Christian mudrassas) are that we require too much nonsense in elementary school, when all we shoudl be teaching the basics of reading, arithmetic, and mathematics, and that we don't hold students accountable at all any more (teachers too afraid of being shot, I guess...but parenting failures are a different issue).
The term paper is not dead. Getting to do independent research and writing of a term paper has always forced me to learn a topic in more detail than I would have to otherwise. Why should the fact that other students don't take advantage of this opportunity be the cause to strip it from those that do (assuming the alternative, assignments, would take up the time that I would otherwise spend on the paper). It gives practice in both the reading and writing of scientific papers. Schools should, however, rely less on term papers for the evaluation of students. Combine the term paper with an in-class presentation, and perhaps this would separate those that actually know the material from those that fake it. Having students write an initial proposal with a short literature review will help to prevent plagiarism and will remove some of the weight (evaluation-wise) from the final paper. There are probably other setups that also allow a term paper without giving it undue weight as regards evaluation.
I agree, that was kind of a doozy. Using skill alone as proof of cheating? How condescending! Imagine that in a work environment:
"I need you to calculate these three companies' approximate net current assets by tomorrow." (Heheheh, no way he can possibly do that.)
"Yes sir!"
*next day*
"Here you go, boss, and all the justification for my calculations to a 95% confidence."
"There's no way you could have done this. Obviously you had extra help and disclosed proprietary data to outsiders. You're fired."
"But..."
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
What on earth makes you feel qualified to grade English papers?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
- As an ex-IBMmer, please let me assure you that working at IBM sucks.
- Sales is the highest-paid profession in the world.
- Your 4 cheater friend sounds like they have that "Get It Done" mentality. Even if it means breaking a few rules to get there. You may not like it, but that is something that is rewarded in the business world.
- You took the moral high road and probably feel better about yourself for it. Would you not feel guilty had you cheated your way through school?
- No one gives a hoot about your college grades except for your first employer out of college. The only thing holding you back now is your own workplace achievements.
- Your GPA was probably higher than mine was.
- You don't get far in the business world taking credit for work that was not your own. You will look like a horse's ass sooner or later when you get called on it.
- I would never think of teaching my kids that it's advisable to cheat.
Good luck with your career!They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Assign the paper in class.
Allow the class period to develop a thesis in blue books.
Allow open discussion by the students to spark ideas.
Take up the blue books and note the contents.
Pass them out next class to allow another hour (or 1.5 hours) of development.
Now- give them a week to develop the term paper from that basis.
The final paper must be recognizably based on that material.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
One of the best computer scientists I know was a linguistics major in college.
At any rate, I really enjoyed my liberal arts courses when I was in school. They got me thinking about something other than 1s and 0s for a while, and they were super easy.
Take a philosophy course. Take a music course. Take a history course about the Incas. This is what college is about.
If you want vocational training, go to DeVry. Don't waste a university seat.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Actually it's pretty easy to catch kids cheating now on papers. Select a paragraph that you think might be copied. Put the first sentence verbatim in Google's seach engine with quotes around it and hit search. Phrases will also work but will get you a larger data set to sort through. Find the site with the closest quote and then read the site comparing it with the suspect paper.
The thing is kids think adults are stupid. While that might be the case some of the time, a writing style that flows from paragraph to paragraph with different sentence structure, different syllable count is very difficult to read. If it's outside of a student's normal performance zone, then it needs to go in the suspect stack.
The teachers in my family Google suspect papers. Good for research - better for us to find you cheating!
With all the talk about "Term Papers" and plagiarism, I believe everyone is forgetting something fundamental. The idea of Educational Institutions themselves is to provide Knowledge and Information. This, is supposed to be used as a tool by a student or a professional to solve hypothetical or real world problems or both. MIT provides a good quantum of course material (that one can read and use) online.
Fundamentally, if I were to repeat Galileo's equations or Newton's Laws or Kepler's laws (and the list goes on and on) verbatim as they had written it; does that constitute plagiarism? I was under the impression that the Internet (rather the Worldwide Web) was to facilitate increased flow of information and act as a medium through which people could "access" information much faster.
If you had to go to a library to read through an Encyclopaedia (I've done this in school), it roughly takes about 15 minutes to locate the topic, and then if you want to follow a trail of information, it involves physically perusing volumes of information. I believe this is where the Internet has changed things making it simpler and easier to follow a trail of information. If one could consider textbooks, dictionaries and technical reference material in a library as valid and trusted sources of information, then I don't see why we can't have Digital versions of the same available on the Internet to facilitate ease of access. Wikipedia was indeed a very strong attempt for easy access to the tip of the iceberg on many topics. I don't see people quoting 10 other websites having "valid and trusted" information. One could raise a Platonic argument on what exactly is trusted information?
Secondly, if a student were to complete a "Term Paper" or an Assignment based on information found in an Encyclopaedia in a Library, how is that not plagiarism? Reciting a verse from the Bible or a Poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson does not constitute plagiarism. I see no reason why plagiarism is considered a major issue. If the goal of learning is only to "present" information in different forms, then there is something seriously wrong with the education system. The goal of learning is to understand how knowledge, method and prior invention can be used to solve new problems; and further creatively find entirely new solutions to problems.
If Teachers and Lecturers cannot present new problems to their students, then older solutions will inevitably reappear (either by intent plagiarism or by co-incidence.) I believe the problem is not plagiarism, but choosing the right methods of teaching that have to be revisited. Using the same technique of teaching everywhere (by standardising it) and then calling those who try and simplify their solutions under the system is the problem. To quote something, Differential Calculus was simultaneously invented by Newton and Laplace to solve the same problem. No one shouted "Plagiarism" then. Following a 3 century old education system without being able to improve heavily, now that we are past the jet age into the electronic/information/bionic age, is where we need to improvise. There has been no fundamental change in education systems though one could quote many reforms through the years to modify what has been there for ages.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
There are two solutions on the meta level...
#1 is more focus on Portfolio's of work that on tests, etc.
It's not wrong to use someone else's words, it's only wrong not to quote them...
#2 is better tools for quoting. When you cut and paste from the web to "your term paper" the cut and paste should include META data, about where you got the "data/words" from and should automatically create a "academically acceptable attribution."
When the issue is that you have copied an entire paper or sections of someone else's work, there is nothing technology can do, per se, this is a moral or ethnical issue; when you had to pay $$ and order a paper through the mail, this probably was a bit of a natural barrier to this behavior. But now that it's online its only human nature to "cheat."
http://www.hawknest.com/
Actually that could be father from the truth. The reason why most classes are hard is not because they want you to drop out but because the subject itself is hard. Any one of my EE courses can qualify under the scare the heck out of you clause.
Not true. I had a discussion with one of the Deans of Engineering at my college. They actually raised the standards for engineering accreditation by making all engineering students have to take a capstone which involves designing and building something. I don't know when this happened but since you would think with the "engineering shortage" they would have dropped this as a requirement.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
The purpose of most university programs is to control the rate of entry for people entering a given profession. The American Medical Association is very blunt and obvious about this, by only certifying select schools and controlling the number of graduates that are produced.
Oh, so if we let all the folks who COULD be good doctors actually become doctors, and there were more docs per capita, then maybe health care rates would go down? Or the prestige of being a doctor would wane, and then the rich folks would have to move into another field to keep the masses out of the good golf clubs? Interesting theory.
My own suggestion for the problem of the term paper, to get back on topic, would be to do what my AP English class had to do - write them in class. You get one hour to expound intelligently on a subject you should have been reading up on for the past few weeks. If some kid wants to memorize (or try to smuggle in) someone else's paper, good luck. Otherwise, I'd say it's a pretty accurate way to test those thinking/arguing/writing skills.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
then consider that the Officers (who own your ass) will likely still follow the Honor Code, so you'd best pay attention to it.
If you want to learn writing, take a writing class. Or, better yet, go back to high school. This was a social science class, not a writing class. It wasn't his job to teach writing. The worst professors are the ones who think that theirs is the only class you are taking, and that you can devote 40 hours a week to it. The syllabus should be lean and mean and focused on the course topic. This is often caused by OVERLAP, in which each professor padded the course work with extra stuff because "oh, you should learn about that, too". Of the 9 main core courses I took, the ninth one added nothing because it overlapped the previous 8. The result was that each semester we were overloaded with too much work. One teacher in particular, freshly-minted doctorate in hand, turned a simple software project into a "let's write a research paper suitable for journal publication" adventure.
I, for one, still use the term "paper" quite often.
On my mechatronics course, there was one particular joker who blatantly copied everyone else's work. It was galling, to say the least, but he was incorrigible. The final straw came when I finished a programming exercise, tested it on the device, and had no sooner said, "Yesss!" than he had a floppy in my PC stealing it. Right. You're coming down, bitch.
A few weeks later, we were programming a CNC milling machine. I rattled through the coding as quickly as I could, made some subtle changes, then wandered off in the direction of the coffee machine, letting it be known that I was done. The guy was right in there, quick as a flash, stealing my work. Hee hee, I thought, clicking Undo and sipping sewage-coffee as the lecturer set up the machine with a fresh block of steel.
It all went swimmingly at first - the feed rates, rpm, etc. were spot-on, and the bit followed the correct path. It lifted out ready to start the second cut... wound up to 3000rpm, and smashed down hard. BANG! - followed by the tinkling of bit-bits that had made it over the safety guards and half way across the room. I hadn't expected that! My victim couldn't do anything except stammer. Desperate to deflect the wrath of the lecturer (who had turned a very interesting shade of beetroot), he blurted out: "But.. but I didn't write it!"
I'd wanted to have the thing carve "I am a cheating c***", but that would have been too many coordinate pairs.
Plagiarism today is heavily invested with morality surrounding intellectual honesty. That is laudable. But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent. Did I mean to copy, was it accidental (a trick of memory), was it polygenesis? Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers.
In case you didn't even RTFS (RTF summary), the above is a copy of the summary.
You ask is the term "paper" dead? That's stupid! Boy, Gyes, you sure do ask a lot of stupid questions for a user on slashdot. I say "paper" almost every day. I load paper into the printer. I write notes on pieces of paper. Sometimes I like to do the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. Though usually only the Monday's and Tuesday's because have you ever noticed how they start to just get stupid as the week goes on and it seems like they're just making words up. Oh yeah, and sometimes I like to do paper-maché. And you can't spell "paper-maché" without the term "paper"! Well, I guess if you spell it "papier-mâché"... Where was I? Oh yes, it's just stupid to say that the term "paper" might be dead. When I went to the doctor he made me sit on a sheet of paper right before he checked out that weird rash that had been spreading for the last month or so and wouldn't you know it turned out to be a fungus, which makes sense because it kind of smelled like cheese. I challenge you to go through one day without saying "paper." Just because you people weren't born before everyone was using computers doesn't-
What? Oh, I see.
Never mind.
I was stealing from Wikipedia, but the 4-page GFDL statement was too much of a giveaway.
"even allow students to post questions and pay for answers" ah, an excellent skill for upper level executives, put your kid on the fast track today!
Hmm... the entirety of my career over the last eight years or so has been "writing term papers". I'm rather well known for it, even, albeit only in certain programming language areas.
When I write CS/programming articles for IBM, Intel, O'Reilly and the like, there are indeed a few differences in citation style and organization; but it's pretty darn close to the same skills that go into making a term paper. I argue points. I do research. I cite sources. I stick to a word limit. I try to make the language flow as smoothly and clearly as possible.
Too bad I wasn't at this unnammed (and fictional, obviously--I don't actually believe the anecdote)--school. The professor would owe me somewhere around $10k. (Even the consulting and employment I've done other than writing per se has mostly involved documentation, research, verbal composition, etc; though only as part of the work).
Buy Text Processing in Python
At any rate, why focus on art history? Take an econ class (last I checked, math is required). Take a physics class. But, yes dear undergrad, most schools require you to be a little more well-rounded than "me take math class. all other course useless."Try learning to do research.
Perhaps if you were a little better rounded, your research for an undergraduate program might have landed you someplace like here. I'm pretty sure you would have had little difficulty being admitted to graduate school as a UVA Echols Scholar. Not sure you would have been admitted, however, since you sound a bit dim and closed-minded.
Someone like you would really benefit from taking courses outside of your major. It will teach you how to think.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Papers are the ideal way to test the writers skill at synthesis of existing ideas and facts. It is the only to way to measure original thought and ability. For disciplines like History, Literature, Law, Philosophy and many others it is the only way to present research or test students.
Writing improves writing and verbal skills. For most people the only time they truly write is school papers.
Yet another dumbing down of the education system.
Also, you might enjoy following the link in my previous post. It's to a special program offered at the University of Virginia. Participants in the program are free to take whatever class the university offers. There are no degree requirements, no breadth or depth requirements, and no prerequisites. In addition, Echols Scholars register for courses first (before athletes, before fourth years... rumor has it only the Lord our God can register before Echols).
There are programs out there to meet just about anyone's needs. Even those who think that they have their lives already planned out.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
On the one hand, the point of paper writing is to teach young people a valuable real world skill. If they plagiarize, eventually it will catch up with them.
On the other hand, teachers are faced with additional hurdles if they truly care about helping their students learn. One solution might be to rely more on in class work. Take the students to the library for a week to research a topic. Have them record notes from their research on 3x5 cards. The next week, have them use 1 hour per day to write a paper on their research. The deal is, the note cards and writing remains in the classroom. All the work is done in the classroom.
The finished product may not be as refined as a traditional paper, but it would force the children to do the work and think for themselves. If the materials remain in the classroom, then a subsequent lesson could have the students edit their papers for clarity and readability.
Allow two months to pass so the material is no longer fresh in their minds, and have the students read their papers a 3rd time, writing down all the unanswered questions or improvements they can now see their paper needs.
The next week take them back to the library and have them conduct further research and rewrite their papers once more.
Voila! A finished paper, and hopefully a valuable lesson.
A properly credited quote is never plagiarism. The essence of plagiarism is fraud; misrepresenting somebody else's work or ideas as your own. It is not not a matter of degree, but of intent. But the more you do it, the more likely it is that you will be caught. It tends to be a slippery slope--the more you rely upon other people's words, the less practice you get at saying things in your own words, and the more you feel the need to steal.
Overuse of quotations may be lazy writing or bad writing, and will not necessarily net you a good grade on an essay, but it is never plagiarism.
As a sad university student I would have to disagree, much to my dismay the term paper is still thriving. However it is far less common than it was in the past. The internet is a huge "ocean of information" so for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction, in other words for every site that helps lazy students cheat themselves out of an education there are legitimate websites available to help their peers as well. Besides the Instructors who do assign term essays have been around the block before, and they are crafty asking the most bizarre and random essay topics that only someone who sat through the lecture could answer. Many of the survey and intro courses are now being taught by either super young professors or Doctoral students who know how the "plagiarism game" works. But, not all students are lazy slackers looking for an easy "A" a vast majority actually do the work and reap its rewards.
Neat, I didn't know there was a name for it. It's just something I'd seen used a lot as a way of inserting footnotes into plain ASCII that I thought was reasonably elegant.
A lot of the common "plaintext markup" (not necessarily IEEE style) that I've always tried to use in text documents has been de facto formalized by the Markdown text-to-XHTML converter, which I think is the slickest thing since sliced bread. (Except, perhaps, for MultiMarkDown, which adds support for metadata and some other neat features, all while remaining reasonably painless to read in its plain-text form.)
As a slight digression, I think the rise and formalization of these lightweight markup 'languages' (not really languages...conventions?) is interesting to watch, because I remember when HTML was mostly used as a lightweight text-markup language. Somewhere along the line, HTML became a Turing-complete programming language for producing the glue code for web applications, and if all you want to do is write a document with headers, links, and basic formatting, you're better off going to something higher-level and processing it down later.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As a temporary instructor at Seattle Central Community College, which was rated the top community college in the nation a few years ago for its innovative use of learning communities, I observed instructors spreading misinformation about plagiarism. I also observed what happens when students go through years of cookie-cutter education where originality and independent thought are actively discouraged, and students emerge with no sense of the master text that forms the basis of our civilization.
The "problem" of plagiarism exists because:
1. Schools conflate plagiarism issues with intellectual property law (copyright, trademark, patent) issues.
Plagiarism is a concept that is unique to academia - it says that you can freely leverage other people's work, but you must cite your sources. Intellecutal property law, on the other hand, says that your ability to leverage other people's work is limited, but if you purchase a license to use intellectual property, you can use it without citing your source. So, the two concepts are diametrically opposed. Think about it: students who plagiarize (claim someone else's work as their own) by buying papers are NOT violating copyright (an exclusive power to control the use of a work) - they are actively supporting it. Yet these two opposing concepts are always, always presented together as if they are the same thing. It's unbelievable how many times I've sat through a presentation on "plagiarism" that is an incomplete, inaccurate presentation of copyright law, sprinkled with vague moralistic precepts about not stealing, coupled with a lot of grinding, low-level bullshit about how to write citations in the MLS style - as if using the wrong punctuation in a citation makes it ethically suspect. Any student not asleep at the end of these presentations is likely to be more confused about plagiarism than when they started.
2. Schools don't acknowledge that plagiarism is only relevant to academia.
Plagiarism is a non-issue outside of academia. In the real world, ideas can be (legally) and are (routinely) stolen (copyright governs the use of concrete expressions of ideas, patents the implementation of ideas, not ideas themselves). In the non-academic art world, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." Lawyers are required to copy forms and case law verbatim without acknowledgement (even in school). In business, plagiarism (using someone else's ideas, words or other work without acknowledgement) is also required. Plagiarism is only bad when many people with diverse views and goals need to build a collaborative, well-documented, self-maintaining system of thought over long periods of time. That's what academia is for, so plagiarism is a legitimate concern in the real world of the ivory tower research. Outside the ivory tower, plagiarism devolves into a vague moral concept that is systematically and productively violated.
3. Prior to graduate school, few students are given the opportunity to contribute to the great tree of knowledge.
This may sound pretentious, but really the whole point of the concept of plagiarism is to guide people who are doing original work based on preexisting academic literature, original sources, etc. If you never get a chance to add your own original work to the master text, you will never genuinely care about plagiarism. For the vast majority of pre-grad school students, the "term paper" requires zero original work. In fact, original work is generally discouraged. I went to college at Princeton, a school with mandatory original research papers starting in the Junior year, and yet I knew people who were accused of plagiarism because their papers were too original, and thus had interesting, complex, even groundbreaking ideas that were not cited from a source. These students were vindicated, of course, but the experience had a chilling effect on their later work. A more subtle form of this is the assertion that students don't have enough time or knowledge to say anything truly original in a term paper,
What I find to be most distressing about writing a major paper is that I know just how nitpicky some professor's can be. When I am given a topic to research, I use notecards to jot down notes and citations from internet and book sources. I then assemble them in a logical sequence, and write the paper. The thoughts are mine, which I develop from analyzing the information I gathered. When I use a direct quote or a fact that's not common knowledge, I of course cite my sources. So in theory, I should have nothing to worry about. The problem for me, unfortunately, is that I have an excellent memory for words. All too often I write a sentence pulled from my own bank of thoughts, only to realize that the sentence appears in almost exactly the same form in a source which I had read. I simply think about what a certain idea may mean, write down what I think about it, and sometimes unknowingly pull the sentence from my memory banks. I'm not terribly worried about this, since the rest of the paper is written in my own style and I cite my sources well. However, there's always a worry in the back of my mind that an extremely nitpicky professor who's blinded by the search to catch plagiarizers will pick one of those sentences and discredit my entire paper. As unbelievable as it sounds, university professors are not always the most intelligent people around, although most are well educated.
As a third year law student, I wrote 3 papers for this semester, totaling approximately 100 pages. The term paper is not dead, all that needs to be done is make sure there are citations (whether it is footnotes/endnotes or a bibliography) to show where they got the information from.
Are papers dead? Definitely Not.
MEF
Why would you say that the gov isn't proving a means to deal with it?!?!?
It isn't the government's job to deal with it. Character comes from morals which are a set of personal beliefs and values. These come from home, typically from parental upbringing, not from the government or State.
This is not to mention that the government shouldn't be in the business of education anyway.
Please quit blaming the government for any societal downfalls that exist. The government is NOT our nanny!
Libertas in infinitum
Perhaps stiffer penalties would help. In class essay writing tests would be valuable for comparison against papers written during the semester.
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Ummmmm.... Your "scenario" doesn't make any sense. Capstone class became an requirment for all engineering colleges under ABET requirments not just my college. Essentially the colleges that didn't have any class like that had to add it. No way around it because I straight out asked him that all accredited engineering colleges had to offer it. He answer was yes which surprised me because like you I was going with the assumption that it was just stricter requirments being offered at my university. Now mind you the quality of education will be different from college to college but it does ensure a minimum standard of education in that everyone should be teaching the same thing.
I doubt it has to do with luck more than I actually learned what was going on in class. Also, you can't fuck around with test grades when the class is related engineering. The only way you can do that is if you decide to ignore whether or not the person got the right answer or if everyone does well grade on a bell curve. Neither has happened yet.
In my three years of college I've only had one teacher were it was a slight problem. The person spoke with a slight Russian accent though I do agree that it can be a problem.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.