it's 5:30 am, and I'm reading PD headlines online...
... something must be changing, however slowly, in the partnership between the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com -- I hope this isn't just a fluke. (I found this randomly, because I have Google News set up as my homepage, with a custom search for the Plain Dealer, and was shocked to see a March 11 datestamp when I flipped my laptop open this morning. I do not always get up this early on Saturdays, though.)
The story that caught my interest this morning, after reading the top story about the search for a new CEO of the Cleveland Public Schools, is OU grad finds evidence of plagiarism. I'm shocked at the notion of several students plagiarizing Master's theses. Some faculty members somewhere were definitely lax in reading their students' drafts, and teaching them about academic integrity and proper syntax!
I know we need to do a better job about teaching students to avoid plagiarism (and by "we", I mean the teaching profession generally, rather than the faculty at Case specifically). I still have a copy somewhere of a very slim orange booklet that I was given in 8th grade English class, about how to do a research paper, which was mostly about how to acknowledge sources -- but based on the questions I have answered over the past few years from sophomores about whether they need to include references in their papers, or how to do so, to trust that they are being properly educated on this subject in their high school English classes, which is really a shame. Why is it that students these days are not all competent in this skill by the time they reach college?
I suspect that I see this in part because we admit students to Case who may have outstanding quantitative skills, but may only have earned Bs and an occasional C in high-school English. This is one problem with using grades, though -- it is hard to know what the person assigning the grade considers an acceptable performance to earn a B or a C. Another teacher might give a student a B for a well-argued essay which has a few problems with the formatting or specificity of its citations, thinking that it is most important that students learn to express themselves clearly. Such a teacher might not give what I consider sufficient weight to assessing the student's ability to cite sources well. I have no way of knowing that when I evaluate a student's transcript, as a member of an admissions committee. I suppose the lesson is that I should not assume what my students have already learned, when they come into my classroom.
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