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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.2883  Saturday, 22 December 2001

From:           Al Magary <al@magary.com>
Date:           Friday, 21 Dec 2001 00:16:53 -0800
Subject:        Re: Plagiarism

For longer papers, wouldn’t it be useful for teachers to routinely
review (or put students on notice that review might be demanded at any
time) the work-in-progress materials, such as note cards, bibliography,
outline, first draft?  I’m not a teacher, and my own college days were
well before the PC and Internet, but it strikes me that it would be
difficult for a student who purchased a paper online (or otherwise cut
and pasted it from the web) to fabricate the working papers.
Admittedly, this wouldn’t catch plagiarism of quotes or swatches, only
entire papers.

My two daughters go to an academic HS, and one is bound for Berkeley
astrophysics, so I worry about their academic environment with this
apparent increase in plagiarism arising from the ease of Internet
research and availability of papers for purchase, not to mention the
facility of word processing.  I imagine the problem may be worse in HS,
though students don’t seem to do as much writing in HS as in college.
(Is this a false assumption about college these days?)

A current “Boston Public”-like anecdote from this academic HS:  an oaf
in my daughter’s class applied early to Stanford and this week got
rejected out of hand (most who are not accepted early get deferred to
spring).  The reason was that his essay included some tear jerking prose
about the death of his father...who signed the application!  The essay
cost $700.  The students seem to know about this incident but of course
keep silent.

Al Magary

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