One of the reasons that I respect Hampshire College so much is that they
have no grades and no exams. They give students narrative evaluations.
Grad schools love it.
Once I had a student plagiarize one of my papers. She did not know that
Cordell and Del were the same person. One year I took over for a man who
was professor of the year most years. The students told me that no one
in the class got less than a B. I looked at some of the blue books and
they were incoherent ramblings. I assume that everyone knew.
Also, in some schools I have found that the teacher who finds the
cheating is the villain. Students know this and have thought it thru
better than most faculty. There are also schools that have as their
firs goal filling seats. Several of the 4 year schools around here are
supported by their accelerated and special programs.
Del
Marty Schwartz wrote:
A couple of quick comments:
I think that Mikaila Arthur makes a number of very good points. The
issue is made more simple at my university, which has a rule that you
can set up any policy that you wish on plagiarism, but that it can
only be enforced if it is distributed in writing the first day of
class. Personally, and this is more ideology than informed practice, I
figure that by the time someone becomes an advanced student in a
selective admission university they should know the basic rules of
plagiarism. I just tell them if they are not confident of what this
means, to get on line or hike over to the reference librarian who has
loads of suggestions.
2. Nevertheless, as Del points out, some amazing things happen. I
once had a student copy an entire paper out of a book that our
university library did not hold, but another university in town
did. As I happens, it was my field and I had read the book. When I
failed the student, she complained about me to the dean, who called me
in to hear her complaints. It turns out she claimed that she believed
that this was the way to write papers and that she had always written
them that way. I must have greeted this with a sullen sneer or
something, because she said she would be back in 20 minutes. She
returned with 9 term papers, each of which was obviously copied out of
a book (bad enough when a semi-literate open admissions student sounds
like Saul Bellow, but when she sounds like a Nobel prize winning
chemist ......). Each had no written comments except an A on the
front page, and perhaps a "good job."
3. Aside from graduate seminars, I have given up research
papers. When the university switched our sophomore classes from 35 to
100, and at least in criminology assigned me commonly 40 to 60 student
upper division classes, I quit assigning loads of papers. I can
barely live through essay exams, as long as they also expect me to be
nationally active, work heavily with students and former students,
publish and get grants, etc. Now that I am getting pretty old, I find
that a 70 hour week is all that I can handle, but the university is
still trying to balance the budget by accepting 2000 more students and
cutting the adjunct and graduate assistant budget.
I have found it easiest to assign a large number of small papers, such
as "find three research articles in peer reviewed journals published
since the last time I taught this course, and write an essay that
summarizes them, critiques them, and explains how they treat the
subject as compared to our assigned readings." Not likely to get that
from the web, or to borrow it from their older brother.
Besides, as others have pointed out, in 30 years of teaching in a
variety of environments and six years of chairing a very large
department, I have only seen a very occasional case where a student
was accused of cheating and the dean/judicial board/grievance
committee, etc. did not back the student. I believe in taking extreme
steps to create environments where cheating is not possible, since the
chances of the university backing me up are so slim. Anyway, I hate
scenes!
Marty
Martin D. Schwartz
Professor and Research Scholar
Ohio University
Visiting Fellow, National Institute of Justice
Co-Editor,
Criminal Justice: The International Journal of Policy and Practice
