..or however that goes.<\/p>\n
What with two sons in college, twenty-plus years after I was there, in the days before the internet, one of the things I’m always interested in is how professors are dealing with the threat and fact of internet plagiarism – buying papers off the internet, and so on.<\/p>\n
Last semester, one of my sons knew a girl who paid a guy almost two hundred dollars to write a paper for her. He gives her a finished paper, she turns it in, the professor notes some rather elevated language, Googles one sentence of the paper, and there it is – originally written by a guy from Northwestern.<\/p>\n
(So, the guy she paid, just turned around, spent probably thirty bucks, downloaded the paper, and pocketed the rest)<\/p>\n
(And yes, there are programs, that many universities are using that do this systematically, I believe)<\/p>\n
Busted. With consequences, never fear.<\/p>\n
This semester, same son was telling me about the requirements for another class – he had to buy two biographies, one of Napoleon, the other of Lenin (among other texts). I couldn’t quite figure out why, because this is not an upper-level class. Then he tells me about the paper – write a comparison\/contrast of the two figures. Paper must include (although is not limited to), citations and quotes from both books. My first reaction was – well, that’s kind of strange, but then I decided the professor must be doing this, once again, as a way of diminishing the chances of internet plagiarism.<\/p>\n
(Last year, when my middle son was still in high school, one of his teachers gave over chunks of class time – this was block schedule, so there was lots of it – to make kids work on their research papers right there in class in front of her. She openly said it was to make internet plagiarism more difficult. Honors class, I might add.)<\/p>\n
Teaching is difficult in so many ways, and always has been, but it seems as if this kind of technology is making real teaching and education even more so. . In a way, I would hate it, but in a way, it intrigues me, not just as a challenge to more creative teaching, but as a game I’d be absolutely determined to win. Outfox me? Hah!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
..or however that goes. What with two sons in college, twenty-plus years after I was there, in the days before the internet, one of the things I’m always interested in is how professors are dealing with the threat and fact of internet plagiarism – buying papers off the internet, and so on. Last semester, one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n