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:Start with cut and pate speeling

[Eddi3]

I lol'd at that. Its grammar.

Term papers aren't about assesment

[geek]

They are about learning to research, to think, to meet deadlines and about preparing something professional for a critical reviewer. Some subjects require much less of this than others, but to say they aren't valuable or needed at all is ridiculous. I write papers every week (English major) and I couldn't imagine how my subject would possibly work without papers.

Just because some people don't like them doesn't mean they don't have a place and I'm very suspect of anyone who claims cheating is so rampant. I've yet to see anyone cheat and I know of no one who has cheated or been caught.

Re:I had a recent experience with this

[zerocool^]

You are exactly right. It brings up something I've observed...

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.

Re:My own experience.

[The One and Only]

Speaking of which...

There are a limited number of ways to express the same thought in a given sentence or paragraph. While increasing the sources would increase the number of possible phrasings the student reads, these phrasings can't be all that different so long as they convey the same information.

Suppose, for instance, we assign a term paper on the American Civil War to a high school class. Given 30 students per class, two classes per school, 2-5 high schools per city, how many years would it take until, due to lack of material, students end up independently rewriting the same paper? And if we escalate this to the state level? So if we have a database shared between several states, inevitably it will seem like one paper plagiarized another despite the two being written independent of each other.

The solution might not be to check for plagiarism per se, but rather to judge the student's ability against the paper. A skilled teacher should have some idea from past work of what a student is capable of, and if there are sudden discontinuities in the quality of their coursework, they're likely to be cheating. Similarly, if a poor student suddenly submits a great paper, follow-up questions can test the student's knowledge of what's in the paper, allowing us to infer whether it was plagiarized. Just a little bit of extra work on the teacher's part can solve this problem without laborious amounts of textual analysis and comparison.