Okay, so first I am very scarce, dear readers. And then I pop back in periodically, write, and disappear again. And now I am blogging “shop”: in this case, something for the teachers among you.
Those of you who teach (especially in colleges) know that plagiarism is a serious problem, and teaching students what it is and how to avoid it is not as simple or straightforward as one might think. Students often do not know they are plagiarizing, by not citing or using sources correctly, and simply showing them the MLA works cited format in a writing handbook is not enough. We’ve all caught students who plagiarized part of even the most carefully-constructed assignment, at one time or another. Mike, at Vitia,suggests forcing students to quickly produce an essay by plagirizing net sources, in order to show them how not to plagizrize. Here, he describes the assignment in an entry wonderfully entitled “Let’s Plagirize,” and here, he gives a follow-up report. I think it is a cool idea with a lot of possibilities for adaptation in different fields of study.
5 comments ↓
Boy, I could tell stories of high schoolers turning in freshly printed web pages for their essays–with the blue hyperlinks still on there. That is a great idea about plagiarizing first in order to teach against it. I am going to file that one away for a rainy day.
Hi Matt!
Sorry your comment got sucked out by Spam Karma for a bit.
Safely reinstated now.
Anyway–wow, they leave the hyperlinks in? Not too savvy, high school kids, eh?
I wonder if writing will become a classroom-only exercise, in order to weed out those that create an essay Frankenstein-style. It’s a shame, but I’m sure something will happen to sort out all of this. It usually does.
Yikes– in-class essays are a nightmare. So badly written. So unlike what gets written elsewhere. So I assign them for some exams, but I detest reading them.
It’s not just in college though. In my high school, mainly because our access to primary texts was fairly limited, we didn’t really even know what plagiarism was all about, and the company for which I worked insisted more on citations and acknowledgements than on actual attribution, which meant that large bodies of work were technically “plagiarised”. By the same token though, I think that things like the MLA lead to a massive focus on the “technical” angle of plagiarism, without really addressing the core issue of allowing people to express their own ideas and views. The line between inaccurate citation and plagiarism is alarmingly blurred.
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