As it sat, I was absolutely able to turn out the paper you describe at the end of your comment. My term research paper was chock full of mixed primary and secondary sources, with analysis and commentary, with literature review providing the glue that stuck it all together. All of that is made incredibly simple thanks to the resources we have available to us today, if only the student knows how to utilize those resources.

In the same way, I wrote my wife’s master thesis and almost all of her masters-level papers. She was incredibly stressed about the masters program she was involved in due to work and pregnancy, so I took her work on independently. None of it was particularly difficult for the reasons I’ve outlined.  The masters thesis was a particularly good example of the kind of writing you claim cannot be done with this process. It heavily relied on critical evaluation of literature on the topic that related to the problem I was writing about. I utilized my “resources” to provide a strong foundation of methodical research and focused the entire paper on the single problem being discussed. Everything was fairly simply padded out to fit the requirements and I followed the format required by her university. That took me longer than an afternoon, but not by any wide margin. Many of the students worked on their thesis over the course of the entire program, while mine was finished within the first two weeks of class.

* I have lived and worked through the research-resource transition wrought by computers and the internet, and the physical and mental overhead have indeed been enormously reduced–I rarely need to go to a library (there’s a university library a five-minute walk from my door) to find what I need for journalism. I would still need library resources for academic or more specialized projects, though–and many of them would actually be print. And while the clip-and-adapt process that worked for your term paper might be sufficient for some kinds of journalism, it wouldn’t fly in an assignment that mixed primary and secondary sources and that required analysis and commentary as well as review-of-literature reporting.

So… um… What am I paying for exactly?

Personally, I’d rather hang out post-apocalypse with a “math-ignorant” farmer rather than a financial analyst who’s a whiz with numbers.

Numbers are great, but food and water are a bit more important in the grand scheme of things :).

Of course, that would require an apocalypse to actually happen, which I place on my “fearful of happening in my lifetime” list somewhere a bit below “no more grand slam breakfast at dennys”.

In most cases, we push our kids to stay in school and get degrees, even though they are no longer guarantees of a safe future, because we have no practical alternative. They treat degrees as mere coupons to trade against money because that’s what degrees have become for the majority of workers.  Of course they don’t want to spend years of effort and learning if it means they’ll live hand to mouth and end up working in a totally unrelated field to make ends meet.

If we had a job market and employers that overwhelmingly rewarded genuine knowledge, creativity and insight,  then it would make more sense for students to invest in those qualities.

I had the entire semester to create one 15 page research paper, based on whatever topic I liked (as long as it was cleared with the instructor). That was the main assignment worth almost the entire grade for the class, with the only other assignment being a small amount of writing required on a book (The House on Mango Street).

I looked at the course outline, submitted my research topic immediately and finished up the silly book report assignment in the first couple days of class.

Upon receipt of the “OK” to do my research paper on my selected topic, I immediately set to work. Later that afternoon I was finished with my 15 page paper. It took virtually no effort to do. I was able to find a mountain of scientific journals and books to quote from and back up my project with a simple google book search/the college library online system. I never even had to leave my desk. For example, I’d search a basic idea or topic through google book search and up would pop results from books on the subject, with previews of the page the particular words/quote were on. As long as the section of the book appeared to be on-topic and concise I was able to rip a quote straight out, use the book information to create a quick APA citation, and I was done. In some cases I didn’t even have to read or find the journal – I’d see how a different journal/article/book was using an original source to synthesize information, and I’d rip their citation and utilize it in my own work, knowing that someone else had already vetted the resource and determined it to fall in line with the material they were typing about in a research paper similar to my own. I utilized this to make my paper massively researched with minimal effort. No plagiarism was required, I just wrote my main topic paragraph with a handful of key points (based on a subject I already knew something about), then went and found quotes/journals that agreed with my points and slapped the references in.

I waited two months to actually turn the paper in, to avoid any accusation of cheating etc (they don’t expect you to have finished your entire semester-long  research paper in an afternoon). It actually took me longer to read and write a book report for that silly book than it did for me to finish the main culminating assignment. In-class participation etc was not required, it was only to help you hone your paper and learn how to do the various research required. The instructor stamped the paper as A+ work and I went about my business.

It was an absolutely laughable class.

Many teachers expressed puzzlement at my being very apt and avidly interested in physics/chem while being such a dunce in math. Hello?? Aimlessly calculating rows after rows of  equations, or parroting multiplication tables is awful. With physics, at least, we were counting something and it was FUN.

Every college has an honor code. You can’t be accredited without one. Cheating was rare when I was an undergraduate as well. It was rare in the classes I TA’d in graduate school. It was rare in my first job, at a tier 4 college.

Then I took a number of years off in a research position before returning to teaching at a top 75 liberal arts college. Now it is not rare.

When I was a student, no one would dream of not handing in an assignment on time, even if they were unable to complete it fully. Last semester, I taught an upper division class in which the majority of the class did not hand in a single assignment the entire semester.

I’ve used the same concept inventory to pre and post test my introductory classes since I started teaching in the early 90′s. Back then, I could pretty reliably get 60% gains. Now, in a good year, I get 20%, using essentially the same research based techniques to teach the same material.

Other people at other institutions tell me they are seeing similar changes in their student population. My personal impression (for which I have no data other than personal observation) is that all of these effects scale with the number of years a student has spent under No Child Left Behind in K-12.

That doesn’t especially surprise me. My job, when I was a research scientist, involved the study of cognitive development in middle school science. I spent a lot of time observing middle school classrooms. One of the things I observed is that the entire school came to a screeching halt in March, and until the end of April (when the tests came), every day was spent in test prep. They were drilled in strategies for gaming standardized tests, like an SAT prep class. They had pep rallies about how great they were going to do. When the test was over, so was school. There’s obviously nothing more you can do that is useful so every day is field day, trips to the zoo, ice cream Tuesday, whatever.

My wife teaches music in K-5 and has observed content teachers feeding kids answers (by saying things like “are you sure you want to choose that?). Last year, our local school district had a cheating scandal that resulted in the firing of over 170 teachers. With that many teachers involved, I’m pretty confident that they were subject to pressure from higher up and are basically scapegoats. 170 people don’t spontaneously and independently come up with the same conspiracy.

It is no longer possible to give a child an F in K-12. Too many people’s jobs are on the line. And too many parents are intent on resume building. I’ve observed children being given opportunities to hand in assignments months late, to get a do-over on a test just because they asked (or their mommy did), to do an “extra credit report (cribbed from Wikipedia)” to make up for all the assignments they didn’t do, anything and everything to pull out a grade.

You want to call it a culture? Ok, I’m game. But it is a global culture, not a local one. We have taught a generation of children that the only thing that matters is passing the test and getting the grade. Why? Because we’ve determined that this is the basis on which teachers will be allowed to keep their jobs. Because parents have determined that little Suzie’s life will be blighted forever unless the mean teacher participates in pumping up her resume so she can get into the best college and become a famous doctor.

Are you surprised that kids cheat and cut corners? This is what they’ve been taught to do their entire lives. They’ve been taught that school is just a bunch of hoops to jump through and it is the jumping through that is important, not the learning. They’ve been taught that passing the test is the ONLY important thing. They’ve been taught that procrastination has no consequences and there’s always a chance to pull it out at the end.

NCLB is now 11 years old. That means my students this year have been learning those lessons for almost their entire academic careers. You think that’s going to change by sticking a couple of proctors in a room? The thing about culture is that it is a very large ship and will not turn on a dime. We’ve spent 11 year building this culture. It is going to take at least as long to unbuild it.

And I don’t want to blame it all on NCLB either. Most of my class, especially in large lectures, spent the bulk of their time on their phones and computers at the same time as being in class. Clifford Nass, at Stanford, has shown that such habitual media multitasking results in degraded performance on all the tasks as well as long term degradation in the ability to handle complex abstract reasoning. I don’t have control over that culture either.

I’m not a writer, to any significant degree. I would never dream of instructing Cory on the finer points of how to write a novel. And it burns my butt that people who are not in the school environment  themselves seem to think that because they went to school 20 years ago, they are experts on how to teach. If you haven’t done it (a lot), you’re not.

Exhortations to “change the culture” (with a self-satisfied smirk at how one has brilliantly pointed out the solution to the clueless teachers) are useless. How? Provide specifics. Do some research. Read Michael Cole on cultural psychology. You may come away a great deal less sanguine about the merits of your own brilliance. Cultural influence on psyhcology is mostly subconscious and extraordinarily resistant to manipulation.

So you want to put procotrs in the room. How many will you need to insure that a 300 person test doesn’t have students texting answers to each other? That’s hard to see. And even if you have, have you changed the culture into one in which students don’t want to cheat, or one in which the existence of cheating is accepted and one should expect surveillance?  And is a surveillance state a “healthy school culture” and “authentic learning?” I don’t think so.

Yes, and they’ll be the first to die when the apocalypse comes…

My (combined) elementary/middle school used a modified PA+phone system so that the ‘bell’ was that wobbly kind of tele ring from the big desk business phones. So one time someone hit the wrong button and a bit of a phone conversation was broadcast across the school; it was probably only like 3 seconds of something terribly mundane but I distinctly remember everyone was all rilled up for the rest of the day and the teacher had such an uphill climb.

My highschool on the other hand had a mono-tone bleep that reminded me of a massively slowed down runner’s start, and some others that were supposed to have some meaning but were so rarely used they just ended up making the PA announcements anyways.
Both places were built/remodeled in the 90′s 

I also have a hard time with facial expressions (among other non-verbal communications) and consider myself to have mild Asperger’s. However, I consider my command of English to be quite good – though I tend to speak in simple terms because I usually can’t think of particularly eloquent vocabulary off the top of my head. I learned English the usual way, but gained my better command of it through reading loads of books and watching well-written TV and movies (British TV and movies are particularly good for this purpose).

I think for those like us, immersion is the only way to really learn a language. I had the chance for immersion in Thailand, but was not forced to use the language frequently, because the people I normally dealt with spoke English and I didn’t really talk to strangers (as I tend not to here in the US – I don’t do small talk).

I’m not sure if most people realize that the people at the top of the class (including those studious Asians) are all cheating beyond belief, with very few exceptions.

Cheating was almost nonexistent. (There was occasional plagiarism, but there are some good tools for rooting that out and giving those students failing grades.)

And here’s the thing – we never got a lecture about ‘learning for learning’s sake’ or ‘the satisfaction of mastery’. That was implied by the culture of the university, and it worked, *even in the business school*.

What I’m saying is, the problem isn’t with your students, it’s with your culture. (But that’s hard to change! Yes. Yes it is. But it also works.)

Yeah. You tell them that. That’ll show them.

I teach a physics lab where assignments are at least as much reflective on the growth of their thought processes as on the physics itself and grades depend to a large extent on how much change they experience between their starting and ending states.

About half my students are handing in 20% of their assignments and one student, cross registered from a neighboring campus, didn’t even bother to get a local computer account so he could SEE the assignments until three weeks into the semester.

Oh, and I have a cheating case from a year and a half ago (wherein the student was caught because she wrote on her test paper “We have the same professor. Don’t copy me verbatim) that has yet to come to a hearing and, if I have to guess, never will. The administration doesn’t want to deal with it.

The solution to everything is easy when viewed by people who don’t have to actually deal with the problem day after day. Just change their attitude! Isn’t that obvious? Good thing we have a sci fi author to point that out else we might have missed it.

Schools kill creativity and curiosity and destroy talent in the interest of producing obedient citizens who take whatever’s in the books for truth, don’t question authority and are highly trained in selling themselves out for the goodies (grades, and later money).

The practice of turning children into prisoners, calling it “normal” and blaming the kids who don’t make good prisoners, is sickening. 

Call me radical, I fully support unschooling. Look it up.

And it’s wasn’t just academic honesty that was being encouraged by my course design–it was academic competence. A non-trivial proportion of my students really seemed to not understand the difference between copying and paraphrasing, really didn’t understand the point of documentation, and didn’t know how to present evidence in a way that made it clear who was saying what and where a reader could go to read more. They had only the most tenuous idea of where the materials in their books came from, how they might navigate the, um, web of research and commentary in the middle of which they were sitting. So plagiarism-prevention can be seen as a side effect of a properly designed research paper course.

The high school I went to still had physical bells in the hallways, but they weren’t used. Occasionally something would go wrong and they’d start ringing at a completely random time.

In school they teach you to be quite , never copy, memorize everything, act normal, write trite crap, and hate math.

I love education but our priorities have been fucked for a while now and with online resources are moving towards the absurd.

[...] and their presence meant that the course had to be designed as much around plagiarism prevention/avoidance as the positive matters of finding, vetting, organizing, and writing up the answer(s) to a modest question.

This may be an ill-received question, but – why, other than any risks associated with failing to enforce university/department policy?

As an undergrad, all my worst bouts of absenteeism, procrastination, and academic dishonesty – never plagiarism, of course, but lying to get exemptions or extensions, and so forth – were driven by the pervasive ill effects of designing courses around maintaining the attention, effort, and compliance of the lowest common denominator: plagiarizers and otherwise. And I know for certain that this is and was not at all uncommon, particularly in the humanities, where 70+% of the students in a given course were non-humanities students filling a graduation requirement, and typical faculty quality was >>> than typical student quality. To the point, even, that I would be surprised if separating out and estimating the contribution of such demotivation to student misbehavior and deception were a tractable problem in most cases.

So why bother? I fully understand and sympathize with how insulting and deplorable plagiarism is, but the scope of its impact is undeniably limited – no one’s being ripped off or prevented from learning, other than the idiot himself – and aggressive prevention in particular has a host of associated spillover harms that impact faculty and interested, competent, non-dickhead students, by themselves and in their ability to naturally and productively interact with each other. What would the harm be of just…ignoring it unless it jumps out at you, and then failing them hard?

Since when were grammar drills, vocab lists and stilted dialogue the way any human brain is built to learn language?

You seem to have learned your first language well enough.  You can speak, you can type, you can understand and respond.

So why does academia insist on trying – and failing so very often – to teach new languages with methods and materials that don’t work because they don’t fit the human brain?

You could try Birkenbihl’s Method as exemplified by SpeakEZLanguages.com and PimsleurApproach.com.

…But why not engage with a person or a community, or better yet, travel to a place where speaking and understanding your new target language is facilitated in the same way any child learns a first mother tongue?

Bon Voyage!

1) Making the students submit a draft and basing part of the grade on how well they respond to comments makes plagiarism more inconvenient, in the very least.  Even if they start with someone else’s material they’ve still got to rework it.

2) Students have no idea how easy it is to google a phrase that looks plagiarized and find the original source.  None whatsoever.  Those who got nailed usually took their punishment quietly, but if I had to do it again I’d emphasize up front how likely it is that one will get caught and how pathetic it will be.