Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Back to Work

On Wednesday, I am going back in to work. A group of English teachers have decided to get together to discuss the on-going struggle with plagiarism that we seem to encounter so often. In the current era of easy availability of electronic forms of information combined with the cut and paste function of browsers and word processing programs, students often find it simpler to just lift entire paragraphs (or more) from an online source, rather than read, take notes, and incorporate the information into their own compositions. In some cases, the cause for this is dishonesty. In some cases, the cause for this is laziness. In some cases, the cause for this is ignorance. We are hoping to develop a department policy on plagiarism (i.e., procedures and penalties) and some instruction that will combat the last cause.

So, after two days of responsibility-free bliss, it's back to thinking about learning the churlen, tomorrow.

3 comments:

comoprozac said...

R deals with this all the time. It's easier to check if students submit their papers electronically. She copies and pastes sections of the papers into Google to find the plagiarized work.

comoprozac said...

This is what plagiarism looks like.

AMVB said...

I missed seeing that on Boing Boing - thanks Comoprozac. Reda, good luck with this today. I'm curious to hear what you all come up with.

Anon AMVB