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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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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.
and. grammer
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If people are too lazy to work out the answer they will often be too lazy to work out whether the thing they have copied is correct or not.
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.
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.
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.
It's a truly fowl practice, among the wurst around. These plagiarists steal the meat of others' writing, and then, when goosed into confessing their crime, spread the blame on others.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.