My students are assessed entirely on the kinds of paper assignments that
Bill describes (below), and like him, I can't imagine any kind of paper for
sale on the internet that would be of any use at all to them. Besides what
Bill writes about revisions in response to comments, the papers also have
class-specific criteria, sometimes modified to address confusions that came
up in class discussion. I'm sure that I have plenty of plagiarism, including
some that I never spot. But I'll bet that I don't have students buying
papers from the internet and submitting them. They'd stand out like a sore
thumb - and they'd get an "unsatisfactory" because they'd fail to meet
criteria.
Also like Bill, I have found that the "lifting" of material is still a
problem, and it's almost always by students who manage to remain unaware
that they have to put material from journal articles into their own words.
Marie Helweg-Larsen wrote
"The most serious limitation of turnitin.com is that it does not check
scientific references - that is journal articles (at least it didn't use
to). I think one common source of plagiarism is lifiting sentences directly
from published articles (that are never cited in the paper)"
If that's still true, then Turnitin.com would be of no use whatsoever in
my situation, as that is not only "one common source", but is certainly the
source of essentially _all_ of the plagiarism that I see.
We do have instruction in "information literacy" in some required
general education writing courses, but many students (including of course
those who transfer in, thus missing those courses) manage to remain
blissfully unaware of the rules for quoting (including what I think is the
most important one: "DON'T quote - put it in your own words"). I do
something like what you'll find on Miguel Roig's site - direct instruction
in the rules for quoting and summarizing - and find that my students
inevitably (1) are very engaged in the topic - they really WANT to know, and
(2) say that they've never had it laid out for them like that before. I
strongly suspect that this is something that they need to hear multiple
times, including in OUR courses, and not just in introductory level courses
detached from our specific requirements.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
Bill Scott wrote:
> Paper assignments are progressive. Students have to submit a topic, then
an
> outline, then a set of drafts (sometimes with peer review in the class,
> which I look at), followed by the final paper. Each step requires them to
> revise their work according to comments. It would be difficult to buy a
> paper that would conform to these steps. If the student were to
ambitiously
> cheat, e.g. buying a paper ahead of time, then rewriting in order to pass
> the steps of the process, it would probably be as educational as writing
the
> paper in the first place.
>
> Plagiarism is something we work on during the process of re-writing the
> drafts, but "lifting" of material is not, in my experience, eliminated by
> these procedures. I would appreciate suggestions about this. I tend to
> believe that a course in "information literacy" would help all of our
> first-year students.
>
> I don't see how any of our students here can learn anything from "Caught
> Cheating" that will help them to short-cut to a better grade, except
maybe
> the secret instant messaging on the cell phones.
>
> BTW. If I give a closed book exam of 60 items in a 50 minute class period,
> they all finish well in time. If I give the exact same exam as an open
book,
> open notes exam, then I get many complaints of not allowing enough time
for
> such a long exam.
>
>
> Bill Scott
>
>
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