Copy, paste

The NY Times has an article (found here*) about plagiarism. It is quite a bit "Kids these days!", but also raises some valid points: one of specific interest is that it's been shown that students who cheat don't learn as much and/or don't retain knowledge as well.

Which - well, of course. If you're not actually working with the assigned material, you're not going to learn it as well. If I'm told to write a paper on, say, Hamlet, or on the theory of general relativity, I can do one of two things. Option A is to sit down, and read through Hamlet or Einstein, take notes on important points and themes, find a core idea, and work things into that while writing a paper, turning the ideas around in my head and toying with them until they fit. Or, I can take option B, and buy a paper from the internet, put my name on it, and turn it in.

Now, I never even tried to cheat during college. I say this not out of some sense of moral superiority, but if nothing else, there was the fact that you really couldn't cheat at St. John's. I'm sure you could try - I could have downloaded a paper on Dante instead of writing it myself. But those papers are turned in after months of sitting in class discussing things. You're actively engaged with the material long before any papers are due, so if you suddenly hand in an essay that sounds nothing like the way you speak, nor anything close to the ideas you've discussed in class, your professor will notice.

So that's where I'm coming from, and that's why I find it a little baffling that the professor referred to in the article is resorting to in-class writing assignments, so that he has a baseline to compare later papers to, so as to better look out for plagiarism. Wouldn't that time be better spent just discussing the material with the students? Surely "I know that Student A has a great eye for picking up on the broad themes in a given work, and Student B tends more to pick at little details, trying to find great meaning in the flourishes" is just as effective, if not more than basing your judgement on a handwritten essay forced out in a 60-minute class session?

*It has occurred to me that Facebook doesn't import links in notes, so if you're reading this via Facebook: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/opinion/13tue4.html?ref=opinion