In his July 26 column, “Plagiarism and the disappearance of academic standards,” Jay Mathews bemoaned the state of undergraduate writing. How right he is. In my 25-year experience teaching freshman English at a community college, I have finally grasped the futility of assigning composition students the required research paper and expecting great things. I also find myself acting more and more as the plagiarism police and less as a teacher.
Besides, the online universe presents students with a cornucopia of goodies to make committing plagiarism almost too seductive to resist. I am tempted to forgo assigning a formal research paper. Instead, why not engage in a dialogue with a student who has done a preliminary online search on a subject about why the student chose certain sources and what the student would tend to gain from reading (really reading) them for a research assignment? Then, the student could write up the results of our dialogue and hand that in.
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