I graduated from college in the 70s but even then I learned the following axiom: Copying from one book is plagiarism. Copying from five books is scholarly research. Nothing really changes, except the invention of the search engine.
By mike | Mar 24, 2007 7:17:18 PM | Request Removal
Mr. Johnsons point seems to be that, because workers in businesses receive rewards for stealing the thoughts and words of others, educators should eliminate the assignment of term papers that, when researched and written honestly, lead to the development of thoughtful analysis, syenthesis and communication skills. No wonder that our society suffers from the lack of thought and reason. Mr. Johnspns premise does nothing more than continue the the delcline and fall of the members of our society -- the dumbing down of Americans. Mr. Johnson,. furthermore, perpetuates the notion that the purpose of education is only to prepare students for employment in the workplace. Although that is one of the purposes, the more important one is to help students become thinking members of a democratic society. This purposes leads to the need for citizens prepared to thoughtfully engage in problem solving and decisin-making, both of which are based on the ability to think rationally. That was the major reason I, as an educator, assigned term papers. And I usually knew when students plagairized, because I crafted my assignments to reflect an approporate degree of original thought. Mr. Johnsons argument is ulitlitarian at best, but it does not address the complex needs of a society.
By marmac5 | Mar 24, 2007 8:22:58 PM | Request Removal
Sigh... Great point, the only thing the author misses is that its not the teacher who suffers when a student plagiarizes, its the student. Homework exercises such as the term paper are designed to help the student learn how to research, synthesize, and process ideas and information -- in short to learn. Why a student chooses to spend thousands of dollars a year to attend a university and then shortchanges their education by not doing the work which is a vital part of the learning effort is beyond me. Dan Simon Adjunct Faculty, East Stroudsburg University, Adjunct Faculty, Drexel University
By dansimon123 | Mar 24, 2007 8:56:55 PM | Request Removal
Professors plagiarize so much that Russia keeps files on it. This started in 1925. Kapitza was Rutherfords assistant and Fowler was his son-in law. Fowler and Dirac plagiarized Dirac, Fermi, and to some extent Pauli. Bohr was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1926 by Rutherford who was President to keep him quiet. They told the Rockefeller Foundation to give Bohr money and they did. Then in 1944, Kapitza sent a letter to Bohr in London at the Soviety embassy from Moscow. Bohr met with Churchill to ask Churchill to give the bomb secret to Russia. Lindemann told Churchill the whole story and Churchill threatened Bohr with prison and called up FDR and told him to ignore Bohr on giving the bomb to Russia, that they had this on him. And its continued since then. Profs at Moscow State University track current episodes. The above is speculation.
By OldAtlantic | Mar 24, 2007 9:42:22 PM | Request Removal
And why would we expect high school students to have anything, original or not, about Jane Eyre? The author is right: the term paper is dead. So we teachers need to find a new way to pick our students brains, something they cannot download. It will take ingenuity, but it has to be done! I remember 40 years ago, teaching an undergraduate English class on English literature, I came across a *brilliant* student paper on Middletons *The Changeling.* Odd topic, easily researched, especially so since I had just written about the play in my thesis. So I went to the college library, and found the book on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama the student had used, and checked out in his name, with the offending passages underlined. It is not so easy now!
By thrh | Mar 24, 2007 11:05:42 PM | Request Removal
On the other hand, these days I teach in a law school, where originality is a punishable sin! And I encourage my students to plagiarize, profigately. If there is a statute, quote it. Verbatim. If someone had a winning argument on this point, use it! We are not looking for original thought, here. We are looking for precedent. It is largely a question of what the teacher wants what the aims of the class are.
By thrh | Mar 24, 2007 11:12:38 PM | Request Removal
A curse upon this site [apostrophe] s lack of punctuation [exclamation point]
By thrh | Mar 24, 2007 11:14:46 PM | Request Removal
The author has the correct premise unfortunately, he leaves the solution open-ended. The point is not to reward plagiarism, the point is to find a medium that is not easily conducive to such. I am currently a grad student in the technology program that is also a distance-learning program. I have had to term papers in some courses in others, I have had to create slide presentations a la PowerPoint, complete with audio and webcast. While you can still cut-and-paste text, the end-product will not reflect the proper dynamics of a slide presentation. This is only one example the point is, when the students are more adept at using technology than the teachers, the teachers will need to find new ways to properly challenge and assess the students.
By chris | Mar 24, 2007 11:15:10 PM | Request Removal
The real problem is, given the pervasiveness of the internet and the instant answer, how many students are going to give an honest opinion, and how many are going to Wikipedia to get somebody else [apostrophe]s best guess?
By thrh | Mar 24, 2007 11:17:29 PM | Request Removal
Russia may have used plagiarism files relating to MIT and Harvard econ profs to try to pressure low interest rate IMF loans from Clinton econ profs Larry Summers and Stanley Fischer. This may have been concealed from USAO Mass investigation of Harvard from 1997 to 2005. Bush profs John Yoo and Paul Wolfowitz may have known this by 1998 to get the Iraq Liberation Act and then used it during Bush v. Gore to influence Scalia to stop the vote counting and then to make Gore go away and not run again. Pakistan and India may have known this too by 1998 as well as China. They may all have used it. The above is speculation.
By OldAtlantic | Mar 24, 2007 11:35:43 PM | Request Removal
Assignment design can actually mitigate the issue considerably without abandoning the principle of the research project. Requiring students to do the work in stages, for example, rather than simply having one big due date, allows you to see the learning process happening and is better for students as well. Asking original questions -- instead of just saying pick a a character in Jane Eyre and write about their development -- about specific components of a work, or juxtaposing works that arent usually connected makes it much, much harder to use plagiarized material. Some teachers have gone to in-class essays, though that doesnt work as well for some disciplines. Ive had to give up some old favorite assignments because of plagiarism, but Ive developed some new ones that work nicely and actually push students in new and useful ways.
By jdresner | Mar 25, 2007 5:11:50 AM | Request Removal
While it is no great mystery that the dictates of a term paper are under siege, the solution of letting the barbarians through the gates seems rash and irresponsible. I need to evaluate the work of each individual student on its own merits. Not simply that one had access to the internet and the other did not.
By rsp40 | Mar 25, 2007 5:31:10 AM | Request Removal
I am a middle school science teacher and I feel it is a must to teach kids to cut and paste the right way. These kids have real skill at locating and processing information and it needs to be fostered, not discouraged. The issue these days is kids turning in papers from multiple sources that do not agree in tense and voice. These problems aside, the question is are these kids learning as much as we did by going around the library looking for books? The answer, it seems to me, is yes.
By rjpeeps | Mar 25, 2007 9:38:08 AM | Request Removal
At its essence, plagiarism is the failure of the writer to cite his/her source and to give credit where it is due. How seriously plagiarism is taken depends on the context--in academe, for example, where ones ideas are considered a commodity, it is a serious offense--one is taking credit for thinking not his/her own. However in the corporate community where language is vetted by attorneys for content and clarity, templates are a staple--paraphrasing could be catastrophic to the company. If the writer thinks of the term paper as --give me a fve page paper on Jane Eyre due in three weeks--then I agree with him. However, a well crafted research assignment that allows the student to ask questions pertinent to him/her with with guidelines to mark the research process is a valuable entity in creative thinking. Whats missing from the discussion of this article is the validity of the sources used--cutting and pasting from a invalid source is not only a waste of time but a waste of mental effort on the part of the student and teaches the what matters in research is form, not thought.
By refischer1 | Mar 25, 2007 10:40:28 AM | Request Removal
I envision that the groundwork for a return to the literacy monopoly of the Dark Ages is underway. Mr Johnson needs to acknowledge that he is advocating a complete elimination of the purpose of education. The presence of calculators in mathmatics and science classes has caused a similar epidemic of ignorance among younger people. God helps America.
By eb11x | Mar 25, 2007 11:05:21 AM | Request Removal
For 33 years, I have been collecting the wisdom of others, adding I hope my own, and ending up with state of the art corporate deal documents. As a mergers and acquisitions and securities lawyer, I want clauses that have passed the test of time and litigation. Im sure my colleagues and I have contributed a lot to others in fact, I know it. We once wrote the state of the art S-14 for one-bank holding company formation and them watched every other major firm in our state copy our merger agreement word for word, including a strategically placed typo. And, I think, our collective clients are all the better for our involuntary sharing.
By clsvail | Mar 25, 2007 11:47:47 AM | Request Removal
Hmmm. Mr. Johnson, you say *My transfer from education to the world of business has reminded me just how important it is to be able to synthesize content from multiple sources, put structure around it and edit it into a coherent, single-voiced whole. * I contend that you have described what has always been the research paper. It was when I was in 4th grade doing my first research paper and in post graduate school doing my last research paper. Research papers and analytical papers are not necessarily the same although they can be assigned at the same time. The key is not whether the research is done via books or the computer but how that material is put together and subsequently analyzed to come up with something new. Now that is the hard part of the internet because really, how much of what we do really results in something truly new. When it does those people receive awards and recognition such as with the Nobel Prizes. Maybe the next assignment is to come up with your own analysis and compare and contrast your results with those you find on the Internet. That might combine research, analysis and reassessment which is what we like to think of as *critical thinking skills.*
By KarenLS | Mar 25, 2007 12:01:48 PM | Request Removal
Jason, I don*t need cut and paste experts. I need young college grads who have a working vocabulary, can spell, posess analytical skills, and are able to compose concise, effective communications such as letters and various memoranda. One would think that a college grad, today, would enter the work force with these basic skills? I should post on*line some of the cover letters I receive from applicants. Amazing, that these kids received a degree.
By jshinn1046 | Mar 25, 2007 12:40:22 PM | Request Removal
Unfortunately, most schools fail to recognize that any skills have been used at all, and an entire paper can be discarded because of a few lines repeated from another source without quotation marks. First of all, on the students part this is a failure to follow simple directions, and deserves a chip taken out of the overall score for that reason alone. How hard is it to learn how to click your mouse and create a simple footnote in an MS-Word document? How hard is it to use quotation marks to distinguish another authors words from your own? What I read in Johnsons article is an apologetic for flat-out laziness, which IS a character issue and is most definitely on the rise in the classroom. Further, this is not a simple distinction between different kinds of skills to be evaluated. It doesnt matter what premium you put on synthesizing--and any of the best Ph.D. dissertations certainly involve and depend on that skill to some extent--the point is whether or not a student is giving due credit to someone elses blood, sweat and tears spent in far-flung archives or is simply taking his or her decent grade and running. If your neighbor helped you build the deck on the back of your house and your friends came over and complimented you on what a wonderful job you did, would you not demure and say that Fred next door also worked on it? Is that not a moral issue? Go ahead, keep making it easier for students to not have to improve their language and communication skills. Keep the hoary old hippie attitude rolling that form and rules dont matter, man, its like, does the message get across. All youre doing is allowing the social darwinism to work even more powerfully, because people ARE impressed by stellar form in written communication, and the fewer and fewer people who possess that skill are going to appear infinitely more credible in the ideas they present than the lunkheads who write their emails to the prof using all lower-case letters just like eighth-grade girls on MySpace do. THAT SAID, on the teachers part, you just need a little imagination in your assignments. There are numerous research assignments that can be constructed for which cut-and-paste off Wicki-idiot will not work. God bless the internet in this regard, because the number of original source documents published on institutional websites is increasing exponentially. Doing anything American? Check out the Library of Congresss astonishing American Memory project online. Have your students work with those kinds of documents, and not with secondary sources. The assignments I give are virtually impossible to plagiarize, even in degree. Besides, the students are learning hardcore research when they work with source documents. Stop letting the tail wag the dog! Were the adults in this equation.
By mcdooley | Mar 25, 2007 12:49:38 PM | Request Removal
I feel sorry for those who have to take History exams. Poor things, they are condemned to regurgitate the history of what happened before their existence as told to, or opined by, writers whose research and publishing efforts too often have proven false, copied, or saturated by their own version of events, truth not withstanding.
By vicsoir | Mar 25, 2007 1:48:04 PM | Request Removal
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