Teach42

Bah. Articles like this one really tick me off. The Seattle Times has an article entitle Educators blame Internet for rise in student cheating. I’m sorry, but what a cop out. The article talks about two distinctly different issues but lumps them together; copying selections from web sites without crediting the original author and downloading an entire paper and turning it in as your own work.

First of all, the biggest problem here is the same problem that many teachers have as well. They use clip art without permission, they could care less about software licensing, they download music from the internet without paying for it and they use lesson plans from other teachers without giving credit to the original author. Need I go on? Teachers aren’t so different from students. It’s a nationwide problem. We’ve been led to believe that if we’re using someone else’s ideas, that we’re doing something wrong. There is nothing wrong with copying a section of a website and pasting it into a research paper. So long as they put quotes around it and cite where they got it. Tools like Furl make that a breeze. In fact, I think we should be ENCOURAGING students to be doing that. When you get right down to it, it’s called research! Let’s say the assignment is “Identify what it is about the Great Gatsby that’s so great.” There may be thousands of people who have done the exact same assignment. From a students’ perspective, if people have already done the exact same assignment and the information is readily available, shouldn’t they just research some possible answers and base their paper on that? The problem is that teachers are discouraging their students from researching the topic if it wasn’t supposed to be a research paper! Why on earth would we be training our students to equate research with plagarism? I hope someone will explain to me just how different an aritcle in an Educational Journal is from an essay written by a student somewhere else that thoroughly covers his topic and cites his sources.

Teachers should be showing students how to find other students’ essays. Then they should be teaching them how to critically analyze them, quote them, cite them and use them in their own paper.

At the end of the article, they finally address this a bit.

Van Belle typically introduces his students to Internet sites that offer canned essays. He uses it as an opportunity to critique bad writing and to let students know that he knows about these sites. He’s had bright students who find perverse pleasure in trying to beat the system. He’s had struggling students who turn to plagiarism out of desperation.

But as an academic, he’s also aware that scholarship is built on other people’s words and ideas. The challenge for teachers, he said, is to help students distinguish between scholarship and cheating.

Did you hear that? The difference between scholarship and cheating. What’s wrong with drawing up the ideas of those who came before you? We all do it on a daily basis. It’s just a matter of making sure you give credit where it’s due.

Now let’s consider students who copy an entire eassy and turn it in as their own. There are hundreds of thousands of teachers out there. And yes, many of them use the same books for class. And yes, many of them assign the exact same topics for papers. If teachers aren’t able to take the time to come up with original assignments, why do we expect students to come up with original answers? The easiest way to prevent a student from turning in a paper that they downlaoded off the internet is to assign them topics that aren’t out there! Compare the Great Gatsby to a character in a movie that came out recently. Or ask them to think about about what aspects of “Big Brother” they see in their own school. I remember a speaker once told me that if you assign a second grader to find 5 facts about cheetahs, they’ll do a google search on the subject and copy and paste their answers. If you tell them to pretend that they’re a cheetah and to write about what they’re morning would be like, then they have to take those 5 facts, think about them and put them into their own words.

Saying that the internet is responsible for students cheating is a cop out. Teachers creating situations that almost encourage students to cheat is the greater problem. In the real world, when you have a problem you find ways to solve it. Sounds to me like that’s what many students are doing. They just need to learn that they need to give credit where credit is due, and that it’s OK for them to do so.

Over the past four years, McCabe has surveyed more than 70,000 students at 120 high schools and colleges. He found that 95 percent of high-school and college students admit to some form of academic cheating. About 60 percent of high-school students said on an anonymous questionnaire that they’d copied material from other sources into their own work. Forty-five percent of college students who responded to an Internet survey said they’d copied material.

The question that I haven’t heard an answer to is, “Why didn’t you just cite your source instead of taking credit for the work as your own?” How many of those students think that it would have been acceptable to give credit to the original author for those passages? It’s a sad situation we’ve created for ourselves.

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