>
>Talk about reading things according to your own experience. I
>hadn't even considered this as the subject matter. I was thinking of
>student plagiarism, which I do think is on the increase (I will omit
>any anecdotal evidence, to protect the innocence and the damned).
I too assumed this thread to be about student plagiarism which was certainly
a serious problem before I retired, and had been for many years. My own
solution was to ask so many questions in the assignment that the student
would, with any luck, be priced out of the racket by needing a
custom-written paper to answer them.
Despite those efforts, I sometimes had the feeling that for many students
the problem was that no one had ever explained the rules to them. The most
exasperating case I ever had involved a paper in Roman history that began
"Chapter 8. Hannibal"
A glance at the bibliography revealed an impressive array of Greek and Latin
sources that no one could imagine had ever come to the attention of the
inner city youth who turned the paper in and it was easily identified as a
chapter from the Cambridge Ancient History. But when faced with my
complaint, the student replied that he had read a number of things and
picked out the very best one he could find and spend endless hours typing it
up correctly and painstakingly copying in the Greek letters and he didn't
understand why I was complaining about it.
To this day, I ask myself--could he really have believed that was what I
meant by asking him to write a term paper? Rather than attempt an original
offering, the student dropped the class and I never had a chance to learn
the answer.
Jo Ann
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