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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am with you. Original thought requires that we think, speak, be opinionated. Not many want to risk that when they have $120k debt riding on getting the right answers. I was lucky, I'm in a CS type field, but when I should have gone to college the information that was available has LONG since been lost or deprecated. I know the same or more than college grads now, and I use the Internet as much of my resource. In fact, with experience I know more than college graduates.
There was a time when you had to go to college to garner that information, but now you can join a group on the internet and learn how to design ASIC chips. The information age has surpassed the learning institutional system by leaps and bounds. I no longer feel that a college education means something. My military background and ability to learn from the Internet makes for a strong ME. No class ring required.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Never mind. I don't think I turned what I said into a paper. I did find what I wrote about though. To summarize it though, and I don't claim the following as my own ideas for obvious reason...
There is a grey area with plagiarism. The grey area involves the concept of borrowing ideas. We're bombarded with information on television and other media, whether such information is public knowledge enough brings with it the issue of whether it's cheating to use the information without citing the source because it has been mushed into our minds so much.
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.
OTOH I recall failing a class a few years back for so-called plagiarizing of works.
Turns out I had taken a document, re-written it for my own words and submitted it to a friend for review. The friend suggested that I make it sound more technical than it did, so I proceeded to take my re-write and re-write it. Unfortunately my vocabulary at the time meant that I re-wrote it to sound almost identical to the original source, which in my case was a genuine mistake.
Perhaps I'm just a part of the nth percentile in this, but it begs the question of how many students fail because of similar circumstances.
Incidentally, I'm all for getting rid of the term paper, out here in Australia I have found it to be a useless venture (albeit profitable when co-students pay you for your work).
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
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*)
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
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
Heres a story. When I was in university I had a group of casual friends that I took classes with. 4 out of these 5 guys cheated their asses off. Copying from each other, from internet sources, buying papers, etc.. Myself and one of the other guys refused to do that and went it our own way. Myself and the other guy got okay marks couldn't find a good job and ended up in sales and tech support. The 4 others got good marks and each have a job with a major company (3 of them work for big blue). My anecdotal story high lights that I should teach my children to cheat their asses off because honesty doesn't pay.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Bullshit. That's exactly what a paper is full of, bullshit; 90% of the papers I wrote in college were bullshit. You quote some of the book, you do some research and quote them, and you basically regurgitate what you've read/discussed in class and add in what looks to be an opinion or position if necessary. The only papers I wrote without bullshitting were papers in fields I was actually interested in, philosophy, computer science and history; all the paper teaches you is the skill (yes it is a skill) of bullshitting. Useful if you want to climb that social ladder, but ultimately corrosive to society.
You REALLY want to teach students to set forth their ideas clearly, then you need more in-class discussion and more philosophy (philosophy's grounding point, after all, is debate). You want students to be better decision makers? Put them in charge of something besides themselves, force them to make decisions and deal with the consequences (even that might not knock sense into some people). The paper is simply busywork and bullshittingfor the student; if anything, preparation for the mounds of paperwork they'll need to wade through in their life and all the asshats they'll have to be polite with to climb that all-important social ladder (the last part is sarcasm, if you couldn't tell).
Or another way is to do what my flipped out History teacher did. She made us do creative writing. Was quite the curve ball personally, but certainly set the tone for the class. Damn I never enjoyed history so much since then.
Education is no longer education it is more of a certification. The better grade you get the more stars on your certification. I just started Grad School this year but I had an interview before I could get accepted it seemed that while my GPA was good enough I had a huge variance in my grades A Lot of A's Some C's and Mostly B's. She was mostly wondering about the C Grades. And I told her the classes I got a C in were the ones I learned the most in, and actually worked harder for. The Classes I got an A in were easy classes where I already had a good handle of the information and Bs were in the middle. What I found most curious was the fact this really intreaged her. The problem with education is the relitivly closed mindedness of it. You Grow up spending most of you awake life in school or working for school, then if you choose to be a teacher or a professor. You spend the rest of your professional waking like in school or doing work for school. You spend little time with real world education, realizing the wisdom of some people who are less educated actually know some useful things just because their process was slightly different. As this goes on Education becomes more and more of an inbreed institution. So people who made good grades become the teachers and professors they got good grades because they worked to get good grades and they teach in a way so students can get good grades, Then they get promoted and the demand that all students get these grades. Companies who are looking for the best students to do work for them will look at grades because that is the easiest quantifiable way of getting good student. I would say get rid of grades Make Passing 75% (C) or better. When giving tests give a wider verity of tests and quizzes, Multible Choice, Essay, Short Answer and Personal Interviews. That way you can focus on teaching skills not getting good grades on the test, Students have freedom to experiment with there classes and concepts see how well they hold up.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Mod parent up!
My wife is an English professor and has to deal with this all the time. "But I didn't mean to!" doesn't cut it: she takes class time to explain plagiarism, and then she quizzes them on it, and then keeps the quiz as evidence that the student understands what constitutes plagiarism.
There is always some ding-a-ling who thinks he (and it's usually, although not always, "he") can fool her by pulling pieces from random web sources and vaguely stitching them together. C'mon, she's a literature prof; part of her job is analyzing style in a work. She can spot style changes a mile away.
On the rare occasion she can't actually pull up the source on the web (or, for the enterprising cheater, in the library; and don't bother hiding the book, 'cause there's such a thing as inter-library loan), she can almost always simply fail the paper on grammar/usage errors or on simple factual errors.
We have entertained the notion that those paper mills sell papers with deliberate errors ( only slightly more subtle than "After Hamlet murders Ophelia, ..."), probably written by other English professors for a laugh.
Sure, there are probably students good enough to take diverse sources and make a decent paper out of it with proper transitions, etc.; but if they've done that much work, they were probably better off writing their own paper!
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
When I was in school, we had a class where the exams were basically the professor giving us all a copy of the test, then telling us to drop them off to him in his office (in a different building) in an hour or so. He then left the building and went to his office to read the newspaper or whatever and wait. As you can probably imagine, there was much cheating, apparently a large portion of the class left the building, went to the park, and all sat under a tree and figured out the test together. This apparently was a tradition within the school.
A number of us took the test honestly, it wasn't even particularly difficult. Anyways, a few of the more honest people did mention the fact that this cheating was taking place to the school administration, who did investigate. The majority of the class was found to have cheated. The end result was something to the effect that the test was declared invalid for everyone in the class, instead your grade for that class that semester was to be determined only by your score on the final exam. People who were caught cheating were to be docked a letter grade. Oh, and a different professor taught the class the next year. Pretty weak punishment.
My school was a fairly high ranked institution, well respected, and they certainly made a big deal about honor code and no cheating and whatnot when I got there. But for the most part they did not seem very vigilant about looking for cheating, and when the situation forced them to look for it, they found it so widespread that the proper response would've been extremely destructive to the school in a number of ways. Basically, it's so widespread and common that if they purged out all the guilty parties, they wouldn't have much of a school left. And so they generally ignore it, and when forced to take action, they do the bare minimum that they can.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
"but I find it very difficult to believe that anybody cheated their way through a degree; not an engineering degree anyhow."
I've attended 7 different college level schools. If you honestly believe people can't cheat their way to a degree, you're wearing blinders. Plenty of people do it all the time. I've seen people at every school I've attended do it, with the exception of one, and that was because people were active duty military members and were being paid to be there (and could be put in jail for cheating, not just expelled.)
I informed a professor at one school, during a final, that several students were cheating. I then spoke with him after the class to find out why he didn't investigate and his answer was "it's an undergraduate course, it doesn't matter."
Several of us took it to the Dean of the Engineering School and were told basically they wouldn't investigate unless the professor agreed that there was a need to do so. Obviously he didn't agree or we wouldn't have been there. The people who cheated all got As in the course and generally continued that trend (with As and Bs) to graduate.
Does it really matter in the end? Who knows...I know those people are all getting paid well, and apparently their employers don't mind that they don't have all the knowlege they supposedly should. I think that points the finger more accurately, the fact that most college level courses teach you things (even in engineering) that you will never need on the job. Having a strong basis of theoretical understanding is great, but it isn't really necessary for most jobs.
In the end the cheating didn't really hurt me much though I did get a lower grade as a result of no curve (but it could be said that's my fault for not studying hard enough to do well in the first place) and it apparently hasn't really hurt society. Is it a bad precedent, yes. Is it the end of the world, no.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."