Anita18
11-30-2010, 02:54 AM
It can backfire though - infamously, my English major MIL wrote an essay for my husband when he was in high school and studying a book she loved - she asked if she could as she had loved studying in university so much and wanted to see how she'd do. She got a C. :lol:
The other way to keep a check on things is to have students present the papers orally to the class or teacher. Or, just before they are handed in, the teacher could ask students to write a short summary, by hand, on the top page of the paper, covering the major points of their essay.
I'm sure the teachers on FSU have their own thoughts on this, and I'd be interested to hear what they actually do. I'm only going by my own experiences as a student, and later as a manager in the workplace.
The new rotation student jokingly asked me to take a test for her (a test she had been studying for several days at that point) since we looked somewhat alike, and I said, "But I'd fail, and that wouldn't benefit either of us!" :lol:
I like the short summary idea.
Well, I don't get that kind of thing, and I am not told what to do with my classes. However, I have been told that I seem to require an awful lot of work and that students today don't really have the focus required to do such long and involved papers. And that it seems that the point could be made with shorter papers and less research. And that I am wrong to operate from a position of preventing plagiarism because I begin by assuming wrongdoing on the students' part.
But it's not just plagiarism prevention; as you said, part of it is helping them through what is really a complex process that requires a lot of practice. This is particularly true as the quality of research becomes more important; many students are overwhelmed by all the resources available to them now and they need some guidance in working with different materials. In fact, while I talk about plagiarism and do make an issue of it, it's not something that I am deeply concerned about because I don't see a lot of it. I am much more interested in helping them through their research and writing processes than in plagiarism by itself.
When I took design classes at a bona fide art school, what was most interesting to me was that the classes mostly consisted of projects. Three or four was the norm, and you never saw any instructor try to cram in more than six projects in one semester. Each one would typically take a month.
You went head-first into a self-conceived project and had to bring in your work every week to talk about it. Then you went back home and worked on it some more. It wasn't just lecture and talking about how things should look. It involved WORK, and the classes would mostly teach you to put in the hours. There could be no shortcuts - you had to introduce your stuff every week and besides, everyone in class saw the in-progress drafts. I guess you could conceivably BS your way through the drafts, but since there was only that one project which to judge your progress on, all your efforts went into improving it.
Eventually, you'd develop an eye through practice. (The only exception to the project classes was the figure drawing class, where we filled up two sketchbooks with copies from master drawings. There, quantity mattered, and the instructor could tell if you were BSing through it. :lol: )
I probably was educated more in what was pretty much a vocational school than all of high school and most parts of college, when everyone worked on the same project and nobody was truly accountable for what was submitted.
I would think that instead of rote memorization or spewing of class-taught concepts in a paper every week, that putting one's efforts into a few well-accomplished projects would be the way to properly educate a student. After all, real life requires that you work and think well, not be good at regurgitation.
This is the cheating article I was referring to: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/17/cheating
Way down there, the article says, "Research on plagiarism suggests that cutting down on cheating depends not only on punishing it when it happens, but also on explicitly staking out expectations about academic conduct."
I find this to be true. There is an assumption that students know what is and is not acceptable, but many of them don't--hence the plagiarism test my students have to take. We do three exercises before they take the test and I have learned from doing this that students have only the vaguest idea what plagiarism really is.
I also don't think that many students are of the "everyone cheats so there's nothing wrong with it" mentality. They just don't know why plagiarism is wrong, in the world of the Internet and where copying and pasting without citing sources is pretty rampant.
OTOH, I'm not sure what it says about me that I don't think the example cited in the article was really that bad. :shuffle: Desperate students eager to work will find any remotely related study guides to work from. It wasn't like someone broke into the professor's office and stole a copy of the exam to pass around. They inadvertently cheated, and I do think someone should have at least emailed the professor afterwards if they didn't want to raise the issue during the exam.
My college chemistry professors readily provided exams from previous semesters to study from, so it's pretty much expected that they'd have to write new ones every time. I also saw old exams that were kept by students from the previous years, so maybe that's why everyone decided to lay it all out since you can't stop students from doing that. :lol: It was probably also the culture too, since I guess it would also be possible to recollect the exams after passing the grades out...
The other way to keep a check on things is to have students present the papers orally to the class or teacher. Or, just before they are handed in, the teacher could ask students to write a short summary, by hand, on the top page of the paper, covering the major points of their essay.
I'm sure the teachers on FSU have their own thoughts on this, and I'd be interested to hear what they actually do. I'm only going by my own experiences as a student, and later as a manager in the workplace.
The new rotation student jokingly asked me to take a test for her (a test she had been studying for several days at that point) since we looked somewhat alike, and I said, "But I'd fail, and that wouldn't benefit either of us!" :lol:
I like the short summary idea.
Well, I don't get that kind of thing, and I am not told what to do with my classes. However, I have been told that I seem to require an awful lot of work and that students today don't really have the focus required to do such long and involved papers. And that it seems that the point could be made with shorter papers and less research. And that I am wrong to operate from a position of preventing plagiarism because I begin by assuming wrongdoing on the students' part.
But it's not just plagiarism prevention; as you said, part of it is helping them through what is really a complex process that requires a lot of practice. This is particularly true as the quality of research becomes more important; many students are overwhelmed by all the resources available to them now and they need some guidance in working with different materials. In fact, while I talk about plagiarism and do make an issue of it, it's not something that I am deeply concerned about because I don't see a lot of it. I am much more interested in helping them through their research and writing processes than in plagiarism by itself.
When I took design classes at a bona fide art school, what was most interesting to me was that the classes mostly consisted of projects. Three or four was the norm, and you never saw any instructor try to cram in more than six projects in one semester. Each one would typically take a month.
You went head-first into a self-conceived project and had to bring in your work every week to talk about it. Then you went back home and worked on it some more. It wasn't just lecture and talking about how things should look. It involved WORK, and the classes would mostly teach you to put in the hours. There could be no shortcuts - you had to introduce your stuff every week and besides, everyone in class saw the in-progress drafts. I guess you could conceivably BS your way through the drafts, but since there was only that one project which to judge your progress on, all your efforts went into improving it.
Eventually, you'd develop an eye through practice. (The only exception to the project classes was the figure drawing class, where we filled up two sketchbooks with copies from master drawings. There, quantity mattered, and the instructor could tell if you were BSing through it. :lol: )
I probably was educated more in what was pretty much a vocational school than all of high school and most parts of college, when everyone worked on the same project and nobody was truly accountable for what was submitted.
I would think that instead of rote memorization or spewing of class-taught concepts in a paper every week, that putting one's efforts into a few well-accomplished projects would be the way to properly educate a student. After all, real life requires that you work and think well, not be good at regurgitation.
This is the cheating article I was referring to: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/17/cheating
Way down there, the article says, "Research on plagiarism suggests that cutting down on cheating depends not only on punishing it when it happens, but also on explicitly staking out expectations about academic conduct."
I find this to be true. There is an assumption that students know what is and is not acceptable, but many of them don't--hence the plagiarism test my students have to take. We do three exercises before they take the test and I have learned from doing this that students have only the vaguest idea what plagiarism really is.
I also don't think that many students are of the "everyone cheats so there's nothing wrong with it" mentality. They just don't know why plagiarism is wrong, in the world of the Internet and where copying and pasting without citing sources is pretty rampant.
OTOH, I'm not sure what it says about me that I don't think the example cited in the article was really that bad. :shuffle: Desperate students eager to work will find any remotely related study guides to work from. It wasn't like someone broke into the professor's office and stole a copy of the exam to pass around. They inadvertently cheated, and I do think someone should have at least emailed the professor afterwards if they didn't want to raise the issue during the exam.
My college chemistry professors readily provided exams from previous semesters to study from, so it's pretty much expected that they'd have to write new ones every time. I also saw old exams that were kept by students from the previous years, so maybe that's why everyone decided to lay it all out since you can't stop students from doing that. :lol: It was probably also the culture too, since I guess it would also be possible to recollect the exams after passing the grades out...