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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.
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.
"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...
I know what you mean.
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.
Well, it's social science after all - a post-graduation food-service career doesn't require a lot of writing.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I agree, next English 101 assignment: relate Einstein's famous E=MC**2 to the concept of a positively curved space-time and discuss how the interaction of the two concepts could relate to common sub-texts of beat generation poetry... yeah, let them try and plagiarize with that! Heh heh heh....
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Or you could get them to do something that hasn't been done before. That way they can't copy it from elsewhere.
"Ok class, for your term papers, you have 3 months to turn in a working design for a (select which one applies to your students) working FTL drive, self replicating nanomachine, self-aware AI, generic cancer cure, flying car, functional economy. Now get to work."
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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