Sunday, March 11, 2007
Another Slacker Tool
Midterms, major papers, little papers . . . teachers beware! The plagiarism goblins are out and about in full force. Students are masters at cut and paste these days. Now a days, I also find they are superheroes of formatting tricks. This video clip was sent to me by a friend as a "laugher," but it's also good information for an educator to know. Yeah, it's pretty much common sense, but it never ceases to amaze me to what short cuts students will go in their learning process. Are there still the overachiever kids out there who think learning is fun?
And, why do we even consider those students "overachievers"? Shouldn't best quality be the norm? Hmmmm, just a few thoughts before I dive into grading papers today (on my non-contracted, non-paid time).
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What amazes me is that students don't believe me when I tell them that I can tell is their margins are wrong or if the font is large. I try to explain to them that I look at properly formatted text all of the time and I know what it looks like, but they still try to artificially lengthen their papers. I do see less cut-n-paste problems in composition courses because we deal with so many drafts and frequently write and revise in class, but I've seen way too much of it in the writing center.
What is really fun to explain, though, is how I finding searching for suspected plagiarism as being like a dare that I can't back down from. That seems to instill a little fear once they understand that I see it as a challenge that I will win.
This clip might be something to use with students, though. This semester, in a mini-unit on authors and audiences, I assigned some articles that complicate the idea of plagiarism and the way universities perceive it. One of the articles I used is: Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty." College English 57.7 (November 1995): 708-36. You can find it in JSTOR.
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