Evidential Post #4 Ed Wesly
The problem of plagiarizing via the web is just way too easy, and many students take advantage of the ease of Google research to turn in papers that are so obviously not theirs. My colleague across the aisle from me at Harrington College of Design will go the extra nine yards to check, especially if the assignment is radically different from anything that she had received from the student previously.
The way she checks is how the students usally and simply get the material; Google it. She’ll Google the topic, and like in a case that just happened last sememster, the plagiarized source is usually in the top 5 hits. There are software programs designed to do the checking for you, especially easy if the paper is received in electronic format. This site gives a ton of them:
http://www.web-miner.com/plagiarism#tools
What happened to the student? According to the Student Handbook, anyone caught plagiarizing not only fails the assignment, but the class! Although this sounds harsh, it is a not uncommon view, viz. this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/jobs/2002/05/2002051401c.htm
The author discusses his history with the problem, and came up with these possible solutions:
1. Fail her for the course?
2. Fail the paper but allow her to remain in the course, on the condition that she signs an acknowledgment of the plagiarism that will remain in her file until graduation?
3. Give her the opportunity to rewrite the paper, and penalize the final grade by a full letter?
Being the nice guy that I am, I would go with option 3, since that makes it more work for the student, since they do have to do the research and learn the lesson to be learned there. It might also be acknowledged that it’s like the punishment of writing lines and lines of “I will not…”, a fair trade for not having the stigma of being a plagiarist and the failure F grade hanging over their academic and job heads. (This will go down in your permanent record.)
Monday, June 4, 2007
Site of the Week #1 (found)
Site of the Week #1, 4/16/07
http://www.photographymuseum.com/
This is the root of the photo-historical sites in my opinion. The gentleman who runs this site was my photo history instructor at the University of Illinois way back when. He was born in the same year that I was, so he was an undergraduate teaching the class, which didn’t win him any points in academia but he had been collecting photographs since high school and even at that point had amassed a quality collection and had some esoteric photo catalogs and books published in facsimile format. So he knows his onions.
Mr. Wm. B Becker (how 19th century!) has a very well organized site, images are decently large resolutions (having stolen many for PowerPoints for my own classes) and a great selection of links.
NB This si a reconstruction of what I must have wrote originally, as I couldn’t find it on my cuip.net account or in my files, spread over 3 computers!)
http://www.photographymuseum.com/
This is the root of the photo-historical sites in my opinion. The gentleman who runs this site was my photo history instructor at the University of Illinois way back when. He was born in the same year that I was, so he was an undergraduate teaching the class, which didn’t win him any points in academia but he had been collecting photographs since high school and even at that point had amassed a quality collection and had some esoteric photo catalogs and books published in facsimile format. So he knows his onions.
Mr. Wm. B Becker (how 19th century!) has a very well organized site, images are decently large resolutions (having stolen many for PowerPoints for my own classes) and a great selection of links.
NB This si a reconstruction of what I must have wrote originally, as I couldn’t find it on my cuip.net account or in my files, spread over 3 computers!)
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