Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Plagiarism in High Schools
The Washington Post has a interesting (and worrying) article about the problems of plagiarism in US high schools. It reports:
The Washington Post has a interesting (and worrying) article about the problems of plagiarism in US high schools. It reports:
The scourge of cheating that has frustrated university professors for years is now just as much a concern with younger students. More than half of [US] high-schoolers admitted plagiarizing from the Internet in a 2001 national survey of 4,500 students conducted by Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University professor. Teachers such as Malone have been saddened by the deception and grown weary from the hours they spend fighting it -- reading everything with a cynical eye, using Google to hunt for suspect phrases, negotiating with students who deny wrongdoing. So they have turned in large numbers to computerized sleuthing tools. Last year, after Malone caught the identical papers and initiated an ethics committee, Wootton began using software called turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection device invented for universities but now licensed to 12 percent of U.S. high schools, including nearly 200 in Maryland, Virginia and the District. The software compares a student's essay to all the text on the publicly available Internet, a vast library of books and academic journals and the 10 million essays already turned in to the service. Matching text shows up underlined, and the teacher can link to the writing it mirrors.I agree, that plagiarism is concerning and on the rise, but is the answer really more effective tools to catch students? Is this not treating the symptom rather than the disease? If students are caught but still don't feel they've done anything wrong, then what exactly have we achieved as educators? The answer, as always, strikes me as teaching people to care about critical thinking and to value their own ideas, opinions and respect each others. Or am I living in a little bubble of ungrounded optimism thinking that if people understood why plagiarism was bad, they wouldn't do it?
[Posted by Unknown] [11:29 am]
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