Slashdot Log In
Is The Term Paper Dead?
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Apr 04, 2007 12:37 AM
from the drop-and-give-me-5,000-words dept.
from the drop-and-give-me-5,000-words dept.
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.
Related Stories
[+]
Cheating Via the Internet at College 467 comments
Electron Barrage writes, "An anonymous professor writes that last year about half of the seniors at his US university were suspected of cheating, mostly due to the Internet and community sites such as Wikipedia. He guesses that perhaps 25%-30% were actually guilty, a huge increase from earlier levels. According to this professor, it's nearly impossible for the universities to keep up with the new forms of cheating enabled by the Net. Will academic institutions learn to deal with this new reality? It sounds a little dubious from this professor's viewpoint." The article mentions the anti-cheating services Turn It In and iThenticate (while decrying their expense), but expresses worry over the new countermeasure represented by Student of Fortune.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
(That's the problem with the mod system here; the topics I read enough to moderate I also want to post on. I think I've only used
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Plagiarism, of course, is a matter of degree. A quote or a few quotes is not plagiarism. Properly credited quotes can be supporting evidence for a position, although it's often better to write one's own explanation of something with a footnote (or endnote, internal reference, etc) to where the fact was found. It shows much better understanding, and makes a piece of prose flow better since it's written by one author and not assembled like Frankenstein's monster. Quotes should be left to actual speech, firsthand witness reporting, or examples reinforcing a point made in the author's own words as well.
One good way to mitigate the problems of term papers is to require fewer multiple choice and more essay answer tests throughout the term, so the students have a sample of their writing on record already.
A good way to measure student ability without a term paper at all is to have academic projects instead. Students learn much more about a topic from interviewing people on camera or on audio recorder than by searching the web or reading an encyclopedia entry. Interviewing scientific researchers makes science seem much more interesting than reading science-for-laypeople magazines. Interviewing military vets is a very educational experience, too. Science projects are a good idea. Civics projects, in which students for example write letters to government officials or help (maybe even start) nonprofit groups and document their unique experience, are very educational too. History projects for periods with no living survivors are a bit more difficult, as having a whole class approach a handful of historians at the local universities and museums could be overwhelming, especially if the same topic is required of all students. Projects in lieu of papers altogether may not be a solution, but they'd make a nice addition for the students and for those concerned about plagiarism.
Plagiarism is much like any other negative activity, or indeed any activity at all (leaving morality ad ethics out of it for now). If the rewards outweigh the risks, many people are going to choose the rewards. Rewards for plagiarizing a term paper are high: good grade, less time invested, and the paper often makes up an inordinate amount of the grade. The risks are pretty low if there's no time to evaluate someone's writing. Despite what many people think, it's very difficult to determine a person's writing style from his or her speaking style, too. Only a sample of earlier writings really makes it difficult to rip off another's writing. Sifting through millions or billions of other written works to find a match is much less likely to work than to simply find a mismatch between that student's earlier writing and the current project. Making the term paper less important in the overall grade structure creates a smaller incentive to cheat. Evaluating students in a balanced way across papers, projects, quizzes, and large tests make it much more difficult to game the system, and less rewarding to do so.
When I mod, I purposely look for topics interesting enough to read but about which I can resist commenting. That way, not only do i use all my mod points (most times), but I find I'm much more objective. When your first instinct is to rip into some idiot with a post, it's hard not to find a virtual "-1, pinhead" in the moderations list. Likewise, it's far too easy to up-mod a post with which I just want to agree.
I find that with this method, I sometimes mod a post up because the author really did make an insightful post with a good point even if I disagree with their conclusion. I also sometimes mod posts down when I agree with the conclusion but find the argument faulty or trolling. If I'm overwhelmingly drawn to post, I don't think I can be so impartial in my moderation.
Quotes are not plagiarism (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the article concerns itself with the writing itself, and not so much the information per se, which, admittedly, is somewhat akin to flotsam and jetsam.
On the one hand, he writes:
All well and good, right? You take information, construct a thesis, then fashion it into a coherent form. But then he goes on to dismiss the above by saying:
and cites rampant plagiarism as his rationale. Frankly, I don't get it. I'm not sure it even makes sense.
His other argument about students not being able to write another original statement on the subject of Jane Eyre because so many have already done so is somehow supposed to support the assertion that the problem of plagiarism is unsurmountable and we should declare defeat and run away, but I see it as misleading. People write new melodies for pop songs every day. Are we supposed to believe that someday soon we'll be out of new melodies and that pop music as we know it is really dead?
Anyone who has stood in front of a classroom knows that students often surprise you with their ideas and can offer up new ways of looking at things. Some of those same students grow up and write books or do research on subjects that have may already been written about or researched to death, the Brontes or [insert favourite dead person] included.
Plagiarism is a problem. And originality is hard, and possibly increasingly rare. Declaring the term paper "dead" is a solution in search of some other problem.
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Papers are supposed to test the research and argumentation skills of the students. What better way to do this than make them write ten pages on some obscure argument from Aristotle or some random lines from Milton? If I, as an expert in the field, know that it is something obscure, the students aren't going to be able to find anything to copy on the internet.
The problem here is often lazy professors who set the same paper topics every year. Then again, universities are currently set up to pass as many students as possible, rather than work them hard so that their future employers benefit.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Ok class, for your term papers, you have 3 months to turn in a working design for a (select which one applies to your students) working FTL driv
Re:I had a recent experience with this (Score:5, Insightful)
Students who drop out don't tend to contribute much to the university's coffers.
My own experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Turns out I had taken a document, re-written it for my own words and submitted it to a friend for review. The friend suggested that I make it sound more technical than it d
Re:My own experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is generally considered to be plagiarism. It's not just words but ideas that can be plagiarized. If you didn't cite the source of the ideas (the document you paraphrased), then you are effectively claiming its ideas and information as your original work.
Re:My own experience. (Score:4, Informative)
Granted, this is tricky to master---and the details of the case make all the difference. If a student tries to slide by a sophisticated bit of reasoning from the secondary literature, that's going to cause more problems than failing to cite the source for what appears to be (but isn't) a more commonly believed datum.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why a good cheater knows to STFU in class. Might as well sleep through class.
Re:My own experience. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My own experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you know someone is acting against the interests of the group in order to gain an unfair advantage and you do nothing about it, you shouldn't complain about the results.
You know the line about evil needing nothing to succeed but that good men do nothing? It applies to people like you in situations like this.
Countermeasures (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, students have ways to cheat on term papers. Professors have ways to catch cheaters though. If you assign lots of small writing assignments along with a term paper, for instance, you can pick up on your students' writing styles enough to catch a term paper that was clearly not written by them. This of course assumes your TAs can spare the time to analyze writing styles, or are capable of easily recognizing a writing style...
By the way, are the bottom-of-page MOTD's getting most and more surreal or what? Right now I'm getting "Did YOU find a DIGITAL WATCH in YOUR box of VELVEETA?". Didn't Slashdot use to have Knuth quotes and shit down there?
What's with cheating anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:What's with cheating anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, no offense, but that's bloody stupid. The student who thinks that art history and physics don't have any relation to one another, and that there's nothing to be learned outside the immediate confines of one's field of study... well, suffice it to say that they need to adjust their logic.
I have a fairly good reason for saying this, as someone who did a double degree in Theatre and English Lit, but ended up working as an application developer and systems integrator. If it weren't for the fact that I'm omnivorous when it comes to learning, I'd have never made the leap. And don't for a second think that there's no application for what I learned in Theatre in the world of computers, or vice versa.
Incidentally, one of my Theatre term papers was a study of the interaction of Ernst Mach and his contemporary scientists with the Dadaist art movement. And for those of you who don't see the point of such a study, consider that Einstein, Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara (who founded the Dada movement) all lived within spitting distance of one another at one point in time.
Summary: The greatest cost of cheating is borne by the cheater.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Leonard Shlain wrote an intere
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which, in another light, could mean you're punishing her for doing too well. I understand it probably see
I find opinions like this sad (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone plagiarizing should not be in class anyway.
Start with cut and pate speeling (Score:5, Funny)
It will still get caught - it's done to be lazy (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Cut and Pate (Score:3, Funny)
Define:pate in google comes up with this = "liver or meat or fowl finely minced or ground and variously seasoned"
Ahhh... I'm not so sure if Chefs could plagiarize this though...
Re:Cut and Pate (Score:5, Funny)
One possible idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When we turned in o
Re:One possible idea... (Score:4, Informative)
What a good idea. We've been using it in the UK for years, it's called a viva though it's generally reserved for your final, major project in University.
It's not intimidating at all if you've done the work - just a 15 minute or so face to face chat about your work with a lecturer. I imagine cheating would probably be fairly obvious within the first 2 minutes to any lecturer who's even vaguely awake.
I See This Already (Score:5, Interesting)
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)?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
would hate to take a class with that guy (Score:5, Insightful)
>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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Abolish Grades (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Same difference (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Abolish Grades (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Of cour
Not dead yet. (Score:3, Interesting)
have fun down in the mailroom (Score:3, Interesting)
I lead teams of consultants giving advice about information to big organizations (big whoop, but it's usually the personal kind, like medical or financial data that might be personally damaging or hurtful if disclosed). Half the time this work takes the form of technology advice, but just as often it's process and governance advising that borders on legal advice. If I or any of these guys crib an opinion from the Intarwebs, we will be busted. If citations are not properly given, we will be busted. If we don't express a complete chain of reasoning that supports each and every considered opinion, we will be busted. You get the idea. Anything less is disrespectful to the people who pay us good money for finding information, considering it, and making decisions about it. It's exactly the kind of thing for which a term paper is good practice.
The same goes for presentations, articles, books, proposals, sales agreements, and even resumes. If you want to establish a fact, convince someone of a position, or persuade someone else to help you, you *must* be able to express a structured, supported opinion, and know the difference between verbatim quotes, derived ideas, and the rare original thought.
Writing is as important as it ever has been.
Research is as important as it ever has been.
And reasoning is even more important.
I'm sure as hell teaching *my* kids how to do term papers, because I do one for every client every couple of weeks. Some of it may be formulaic drivel, but some of it is really enjoyable stuff worthy of some professional pride. If the unwashed masses don't want to practice for nice jobs in the real world, then fine. Ditch the term papers. And have fun sorting my mail down in the mailroom aspiring to a first-level helpdesk gig, or painting my garage.
J
Re:Less Papers more projects (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Garbage in...garbage out. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a grey area with plagiarism. The grey area involves the
Also in the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
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.