Michael Gurstein wrote:
However, doesn't all this discussion about various mechanical ways of capturing the plargiarizing miscreants say some interesting things about the state of academe where: * student assessment is so ritualized and depersonalized that digitally encoded performances (e.g. student essays/reports) can be substituted one for the other (apparently seamlessly) subject only to mechanical (policing) review ... * assessments are of student presentation/re-presentation of infinitely reproducible (and in a digital age) completely depersonalized "information" rather than the rather more context (and individual) specific "knowledge".
Actually, my discussion of how I detect plagiarism, and that of other people on the list specifically has to do with assessments which are *not* "ritualized and depersonalized".
Surely what is important is that students can construct a useful argument, judiciously select and cogently deploy information from the infinite information warehouse on the Net (or elsewhere) rather than find this or that clever way of restating (in their own words) whatever is the content of the subject they are discussing.
Students' ability to construct an argument is exactly what is at issue. The examples of plagiarism I have encountered are not merely students plugging in others' words and then constructing an argument around them, but borrowing others' arguments whole cloth and thereby *not* demonstrating skills or knowledge. I am able to catch this precisely because I design assignments that encourage students to gather data, apply theory, and work with ideas in order to better understand them. So I don't really see how you can read this discussion as somehow reflecting a degraded state of academe, which is how your argument came across. And while the discussion may have centered on "mechanics," the underlying pedagogical issues go well beyond that. My original purposes in designing assignments the way I do were pedagogical; it is a side benefit that those assignments are also difficult to plagiarize. In addition, I don't think it takes much at all in terms of time or resources to detect plagiarism and to get students to understand the difference between gathering others' words and synthesizing something out of them on the one hand, and representing others' thoughts as their own, on the other. It could well be that I am not catching all of the plagiarism in my classes, but I am relatively confident that I am, and almost entirely through assignment design. _________________________________ Lori Kendall Assistant Professor of Sociology Purchase College-SUNY lori.kendall@purchase.edu