So there isn’t a series, and it isn’t really fortunate nor an event, but I’m writing about it anyway.

On an impromptu quiz, a student misspelled ‘atmosphere’ as ‘atmospie’. Wouldn’t that be nice to have an atmosphere that tasted like pie? Mmmmm. The only problem? It would soon be gone because I’d eat it all! I love pie.

I’m grading papers… again. This is a compilation of things I wanted to write on them.

The assignment asked you to find a severe weather event for an area, give a brief overview of the climatology of severe weather in the area, and then describe a single extraordinary event and how it impacted the community. [ed. - the actual assignment was more detailed, but I've outlied the important points] You gave no climatology at all, that was an important part of the assignment. It was unfortunate for you that the brief severe weather overview was worth a substantial percentage of the grade. I appreciated you skipping that because it kept me from reading another paragraph of your intensely poor grammar [ed. - which the assignment specified would be graded]. Your understanding of meteorology, even being in an introductory weather and climate class, is at a fifth grade level. You do not understand the difference between a warm and cold front, a high pressure system and low pressure system, nor even a topic as simple as east and west. Your examination of the event - that you chose - was taken almost directly from one website, albeit a good one, though that was probably just luck. In your almost direct copying, you did manage to use the thesaurus on a few of the longer words - hopefully by using Microsoft Word and choosing the first word it suggested - and to change the sentence structure when it suited you. Though you did cite your reference [ed. - yes, just one]. The organizational structure of your paper, as with many other aspects, mirrors your source. However, in your putrid attempt to summarize the meteorological condition which led to the event you chose, you failed; perhaps due to above said lack of understanding of things a college student should know, like the difference between east and west. Overall, if a first grader had written this, it would have received two gold stars. However, since basic literacy should be a prerequisite for graduation from high school - something I am presupposing you did, even though your performance on this assignment leads me to believe otherwise - and graduation from high school [or a G.E.D.] is a prerequisite for college, you will be failing this assignment. This will dramatically lower you grade since you seem to have done well on the previous exams and homework assignments - which obviously did not accurately judge the expertise of the students. I hope you actually pass this class so I don’t have to read your papers next semester.

The internet and the decline of academic honesty is a one post blog written by a supposed concerned professor. In it, she argues that the Internet has fundamentally changed higher education; that the widespread “borrowing” of information has increased to a point that over half of all students should be caught for some sort of academic cheating.

Washington Post editor Jason Johnson says that Cut-and-Paste Is a Skill, Too. He admits to plaugiarizing on the day he wrote the article, and says that he was rewarded for it. I wonder if he told the intellectual property lawyers employed by the paper. They know about it now though, so either they don’t care or he was telling a little white lie to make a point. I hope it’s the latter, but wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

Dave Munger of Cognitive daily picks up the story and asks, Should we ban term papers and embrace plagiarism?. Since I’m in the middle of grading term papers right now, the answer to a shortened question, “should we ban term papers?” is a resounding “YES!” I hate them. I hate doing them; I hate grading them. In my opinion, they’re pointless. However, we should never embrace plagiarism. If the point of education is the accumulation and production of knowledge, then cut-and-paste has no place. If education is only a means to an end, then paste away. I think today that a college-level education has become seen almost as a 13th grade (in the US educational system). What does someone do after high school? They go to college of course. Why? Because that’s just what’s done. Add to it that more jobs are requiring a college education, not for any good reason either. College is seen as something that needs to be done in order to get a good job. And that’s a pity.

College should be a place to learn about subjects that interest the student. They shouldn’t be forced to take any class that they don’t want to take. I suspect that if it wasn’t required, the course I TA would have very few or maybe even no students in it. Of course, I recognize the need to have required courses. But couldn’t all incoming first-year students be required to take an English composition class? And maybe an educational ethics class? Then when someone gets caught blatently plagiarizing, we could kick them out of school easily. Cut down on the paperwork so it isn’t a chore for the instructor. As it stands now, I agree with the concerned professor - over half of all students will plagiarize on a given assignment. And that’s sad. It’s sad that students don’t see value in doing their own work, and it’s sad that professors don’t do anything about it. But just imagine of all cheaters were expelled, wouldn’t that leave only those that should have got into college in the first place? I would argue it does. By removing the lower cruft of students, it will increase the value of the degree for those that complete it. College will cease to be thought of as a 13th grade and that’s a good thing.

I know universities will never expel 50% of their students. It seems that the mantra is “the more students the better”. Since I did my undergraduate work at a small liberal arts college, I know this isn’t the case. My largest class, an introductory chemistry class needed to graduate, had about 50 students. My largest class in my major my senior year had 8. Bigger isn’t better. Last semester I was a TA for a class of 150. Even as a TA, I had no hope of actually knowing how much a student has learned in the class - except relying on multiple choice exams, which I don’t think accurately measure the amount of learned knowlege (though that’s another subject entirely).

So what is the solution? Students seem not to care that they are cheating. Instructors don’t seem to want to bother reporting these cases. And the administration doesn’t want to lose half its student population every semester. The simple answer is to just fail the students in that class and make them take it over again. However, it seems that this doesn’t pose that great of a problem to a large percentage of students. A better way is needed to assess student knowledge while simultaneously teaching them that cheating will not be tolerated.

The solution has to embrace the Internet; it’s not going anywhere and students will continue to use it as a resource - good or bad. I don’t think services that check for plagiarism are the answer. That is a reactive solution. What is needed is a proactive solution that teaches students that plagiarism is not okay, and it’s necessary to do your own work - even when you get out of college and have to do real work. I don’t have the answer, but it needs to be answered soon.

I came into work today to find out that the instructor of a class I TA is sick and he wants me to teach class. Since 2 hours is not enough for me to effectively create a lecture, I decided to try a “fun” activity. The class would be split into small groups and would choose a topic to “research” and present a short presentation to the class. The only problem… how many students would show up for class? There are about 50 currently enrolled in the class, and that would be too many for my “fun” activity idea.

Luckily (I guess), there were only 15 at the start of class. A few more wandered in after a few minutes. It was an interesting exercise. I’m not sure of the success of the activity; I don’t know if they learned more or less today than on days with a traditional lecture. Anyhoo, I think I’m going to try to convince the instructor to make the presentation they gave worth a fair amount in their final grade - about the same as a regular homework. I suspect that the students did about the same amount of work in class today as they did outside of class for a recently turned in homework assignment.