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.

Comments

One possible idea...

[EvanED]

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.

I See This Already

[CWRUisTakingMyMoney]

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. Whatever papers he writes, he insists on being done in a memorandum format, with no cover pages or in-text cites, and MAYBE something akin to a references page on the end. The focus is much more about getting facts on paper from whatever sources we deem suitable, not doing elaborate research to look impressive.

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)?

Not dead yet.

[AndOne]

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.

Re:My own experience.

[Architect_sasyr]

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).

Also in the UK

[Flying pig]

Nowadays there is a kind of prejudice against exams because men do better at them than women. The move to continuous assessment has caused girls to do better at schools than boys, so it can work both ways. But I came up through the system where the only thing that really mattered was the exam, and I am grateful. I am inherently lazy and will only work if there is a positive outcome at the end, and teacher approval was not a significant positive outcome. In today's world I would probably fail both school and university. On the other hand the present system has benefited my daughters and given them a definite advantage over equally intelligent boys.

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.

Re:My own experience.

[king-manic]

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.

Re:My own experience.

[DudeTheMath]

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!