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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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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!
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?
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.
This is presuming that the purpose of a college education (especially a "liberal arts" education) is to acquire knowledge and critical thinking skills. And to discover a diversity of viewpoints.
While these are all laudable goals, it is so far from the truth about what higher education is all about that if you really believe any of these points above... see a local psychiatrist, or at least a competent educational counselor.
The real truth of the matter is that a college degree (particularly the B.S., but the grad degrees as well) are really a form of the classic "guild certification" or "union card", but applied to professional occupations. Some professions require things like a Juris Doctorate or some other specialized degree, but a bachelor's degree is pretty typical... especially for things like engineers.
And of course you need the PhD if you want to be involved with teaching at a university.
While it is a good idea to try and pick up some knowledge while you are going through the meat grinder of a college education, you should keep foremost that the knowledge is not the point. The real point is to "punch the ticket", build up credits in required courses, and get the best grades you can. How you can talk the instructors into getting those grades is of course a matter of style and attitude, with demonstration of knowledge being but one of the ways you can do that.
And keep in mind that most university programs are not designed to give you knowledge either. If they were, they wouldn't be having Computer Science instructors with accents so thick that they might as well be speaking a foreign language. Or in some cases they are, but somehow got past the dean of the college and got hired anyway and speak a dialect of Klingon, with Esperanto as their second language.
The purpose of most university programs is to control the rate of entry for people entering a given profession. The American Medical Association is very blunt and obvious about this, by only certifying select schools and controlling the number of graduates that are produced. If one million students with the same skills (or better!) as the last recipient of the Nobel prize in Medicine applied to med school, the number of students actually graduating would still be largely the same. The standards for graduation would merely be raised to nearly impossible standards to control the rate of graduation. And if there is a shortfall in the number of doctors, those standards will be lowered to permit more to graduate. There may be problems with specific specialities, but the over all number of medical doctors will be maintained.
The same could be said about lawyers (and the bar exam) as well as other professions. Many of the classes are designed explicitly to scare the heck out of you to ever enter into a given profession and consider an alternative path in life, and certainly act as a way to "weed" students out who don't have views of society that meshes with those of the faculty. If you stick up like a rusty nail in a board, prepare to get wacked and beaten down. And never, ever, try to show that you know more about the subject than your instructor. While it is fun to be cocky and show off that you've been a Linux hacker since you were 12 and have contributed over 40,000 lines into the Linux kernel by the time you graduated from High School, don't you ever dare let your professor know that was the case. You will be surely marked for heresy and doomed to drop out of college. They will make it a point to see you get flushed out in one way or another.
Oh, there are some professors and a few (very few) college/universty environments that actually do care about their students and go against this orthodoxy, but I am telling you and anybody else reading this that this is a rare exception and not the general rule. Some colleges even brag about a 30% graduation rate.... to show just how successful they are at telling students where to go and scare them out of trying to finish the programs.
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