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

Re:I find opinions like this sad

[Blighten]

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.
Really, I like writing. I think a term paper provides a neat, convenient package by which to express what one has learned over the course of a semester.

Anyone plagiarizing should not be in class (or /. for that matter) anyway!

Oh freakin please...

[Moraelin]

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.

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, ... and so forth.

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.