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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.
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.
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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.
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.
In one class I had that had a large term paper, the teacher required that we turn in 2 drafts throughout the term before we turned in the final version. The drafts were reviewed by her, as well as read and marked up by a fellow student.
When we turned in our final, we also had to submit the drafts with the markups. This was ostensibly to see our progress in editing and revising our papers, but I imagine it also served as a good foil against plagiarism.
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.
As student in computer engineering...
What you say is highly subject-sensitive though. For instance, I had to write a paper (a literature survey) in my computer architecture course on superpipelining. Others in that class did superscalar processors, VLIW/EPIC, etc. Each of these papers went much more in depth in the given topic than anything we did in class. So if not the paper, what should we have done? In any of these cases anything demonstration-line I can think of would have been well beyond the scope of what you can do in a semester, especially in an undergrad class.
As student in computer engineering I have never been asked to write a paper.
What!?!? No reading and composition classes? No literature, history or philosophy? No humanity courses at all? No science classes where you have to write reports? What a shallow education you are getting.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
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.
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."
>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?
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...
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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.
Definitely an emphasis on being able to actually do things is important. However, once you're out in the real world you'll find that being able to clearly communicate is as important as being able to do things. When I was in high school I wrote lots and lots of papers and my teachers (in history and English) would continually tell me how important it was to do this since I would be writing lots of papers in college. When I got to college, studying CS, my experience was similar to yours - I wrote very few papers. The epiphany was when I realized that my high school teachers had not been lying - were I to have majored in English or history the way they did I would have been continually writing papers. They simply didn't realize that their college experience would be different from other majors.
However, my writing skills have been invaluable to me since. Thanks to those endless term papers that I wrote back in high school I can:
Write a technical specification
Write a manual
Write a business plan
Put together a presentation that explains a concept or a product and explain it to another group of engineers or a group of customers or investors.
As a result (and along with my technical abilities) I've been a tech lead, a manager, a vice president and now the CEO of a company (small but growing rapidly). I've worked with a number of engineers along the way who were technically competent but unable to communicate what they were doing to anyone else which is just not useful in a team engineering environment and makes them much less valuable.
Also, when I was in college I remember in my compiler construction class at least one student had someone's compiler from the year before and was passing it off as their own. It's no harder to plagarize code than it is to plagarize a paper. You're only cheating yourself though.
Really, the right way to handle these things would be to have you write the code, then write a paper explaining how it works and the design decisions you made and then have you defend that in front of the class and take questions. That'll separate those who actually did the work from those who did not pretty quickly but it takes a lot of time to do that (which is why it's usually only done for graduate theses)
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.
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 am torn between modding this up or commenting on it, I have obviously decided to do the latter. In nearly every aspect of modern education (at least in the United States) the hands-on application of theory is under emphasized. How many years do we learn math fundamentals before we actually get to practical application of the principles? I think this has the negative outcome of discouraging students from jobs in the hard sciences. It is difficult for a student to see how useful a skill will be without actual application of that skill.
Wouldn't algebra seem a great deal more interesting if it was taught in a basic electronics class? Ohms law is a great way to demonstrate applied algebra. At the very least it shows how math can be useful. Later portions of the class could be taught using computer programming. Fractals could show how imaginary numbers are useful and graphic demos could show how to use trig functions to create cool patterns. This would be something ANYONE could get into, not just geeks. The knowledge must seem useful in order for someone to want to study it.
Which brings us to the fundamental problem; the subject matter is critical but students don't take it seriously. As citizens of a modern world we must exercise a wide variety of skills in order to be successful. Yet, most students don't realize this or make any effort. If students did consider writing important to their success in life then they would write their own research papers. This problem is an exponent of educational culture and I'm not really sure what we can do about it.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
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.