Just so you guys all know. I first wrote this back when I was in Elementary School in 1973. I’m not sure how this joker Marc Parry got a hold of my paper. LOL!

Fortunately all of us old fogeys who try to teach them things don’t even know how to spell Gogl- Googa- Googe-, whatever … let alone know how to use it to search for copied content on the Web.

What I find more problematic, really, is the amount of copying that occurs online. Finding a hit on a paper copied extensively off the Web usually does not yield a single hit, but a collection of identical hits, most without any attribution to an original. Rather than referencing an article of interest they copy it so people will come to their site and see their ads, something a link out would not achieve. The number of ad driven sites on specific topics that survive by just cutting and pasting WIkipedia content (and a few other primary sources) is quite impressive.

Add to that textbook publishers deciding that undergraduate texts don’t need bibliographies because no one reads that part and it will only serve to confuse the students (read, it will save us having to print those 20 pages), and we begin to surround students with really bad examples of how to research topics and write about them.

The trick is to teach students that original thought still matters and not just getting a grade. Getting students to slow down and enjoy the academic journey will stop allot of this behavior.

unfortunately originally thought is very close to no longer mattering
and that’s the problem which is why there is so little of it around now.

I think the only way I can avoid having my students plagiarize would be to make them hand write a paper in class with no written material in front of them. It is disheartening to grade papers when over half of them have plagiarized material, and a quarter were done so intentionally, not because of lack of knowledge regarding citing. I have to wonder if kids are learning anything in high school because they are so unprepared for college.

Ingeniously delicious! Food-bot just might solve world hunger (or at least grad student hunger). Kind of reminds me of this blog post on the Singularity (AI) Movement: http://bit.ly/kFNkIE.

I found the same cultural acceptance of plagiarism among faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM). Several colleagues stumbled upon two instances of apparent plagiarism on the part of several faculty and administrators at the College of Business, USM. We informally asked for a discussion to see if we could have a meeting of minds about the apparent plagiarism. (Plagiarism is rarely cut and dry, as implied in the article.) Dean Harold Doty, President Martha Saunders et al refused. We then undertook efforts to open a discussion following the rules in our Faculty Handbook. They still refused to discuss their actions or follow the Faculty Handbook. Since the documents in question were part of submissions for reaccreditation, we asked the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business to encourage discussions and participate in a dialogue about the documents they received that were copied. They, too, refused. We learned through freedom of information requests that the involved administrators and faculty had, after we asked for a discussion, gotten permission to copy the documents “without proper citation”–their term. They did this to comply with reaccreditation requests from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. So, their approach to plagiarism was to get permission after getting caught. Getting permission, in their view and the AACSB’s, converted plagiarism to acceptable behavior. It is still relevant because one of the plagiarized documents was The Academic Integrity Policy taken without attribution from Syracuse University. The only part not copied by USM was the list of citations Syracuse University used to create its Academic Integrity Policy. And the School of Accountancy, USM, still represents Syracuse University’s Academic Integrity Policy “without proper citation” on its website. In my view, at a minimum, our university missed a wonderful learning opportunity. For details, see http://www.usmnews.net.

Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA
Professor
School of Accountancy
College of Business
University of Southern Mississippi

You have a good point about phrasing questions, except that your samples are not, in the end, the same questions. The first is a research question, which asks students to locate and analyze information. The second is an opinion question, which requires no research.

If one’s learning goals include guiding students to enter into a conversation with the ideas of others — i.e., to act like scholars — then one cannot simply assign essays that ask for opinions informed only by personal opinion and reflection.

True, or at least partly true. Until students have proven themselves capable of personal opinion and reflection, asking them to critically reflect on the words of others often results in works that fail to address the “critically” and “on” bits. Which is to say, I get a room full of perniciously plagiarizing parrots who don’t even have alliteration on their side.

When I ask for opinions, I find I don’t have to tell students to engage with the ideas of others. Most of them simply do just that. If for no other reason than to bolster their arguments against the evil professor who might think less of them for thinking out of turn. It is also an amazingly effective way to find out what students are taking away from my classes by observing what students say in the “tell the professor what they want to hear” component of the work.

However, what might enlighten the point as to where the two versions converge is my failure to include the last sentence I would have included in either case. “Provide three sources that either support or refute your arguments.” (“Sources? But this isn’t a comp class!” they all cry in unison.)

And really, I don’t want them to act like anything except themselves. Acting like scholars is a pretty useless skill for most of them after they graduate. What I do want them to do is to learn how to be open, observant, flexible, and inquisitive so that they can be better prepared for a world that requires constant learning and adaptation to succeed.

I admire Mr. Woloschyn’s IT skills, but the bottom line is he is a liar and a thief. Yes, it is true that many IT companies recruit hackers and other IT crooks with hopes of re-channeling their criminal behavior into something more constructive. Point two, I sincerely doubt that Mr. Woloschyn or any of his Ivy League cohorts are starving. The majority of my students who mooch off of their friends for food and other goodies often own expensive cell phones, iPads, Gucci purses, and so forth. I had a young woman stand up in class and yell at me about the cost of the textbook. I told her to take her $2,000 Luis Vuitton handbag and get the hell out of my class.

Best of luck, lostfreedoms61. I hope your prereqs do help.

One thing this type of development will produce on campuses like mine, where refreshments are already considered a luxury add-on to events, is the disappearance of the reception, hospitality, snack phenomenon altogether. This is too bad, because it’s important to have a chance for informal conviviality associated with a meeting, conference, or other academic gathering. I was at a conference on my campus this weekend for which we scraped hard to be able to offer coffee and pastry to the participants who had come from afar to share their work with us. Sure enough, when I stepped out of the room for a moment, I noticed a student grazing on the free food. What a shame, and what appalling manners.

So he is crashing receptions, recitals, and seminars that he was not invited to or has no interest in. And he calls it ”free food” because there are no tickets being sold and nothing other than a sense of propriety to keep moochers away? Despicable

We had a student crash a retirement reception buffet last year. Bad behavior should not be aided and abetted.

I appreciate your thoughtful response to Lacey Johnson’s article. But I agree with 11179102 and also “gently disagree” with your position. As a first generation student from a poor and rural family, I believe I would have greatly benefited from a first-generation dorm for the first year of my undergraduate studies. Your point that economically disadvantaged students will lose opportunities for networking is, I think, misguided: for the first year of university, most students are simply getting their bearings, learning how to study, and navigating the potentially intimidating territory of university life. It is far above the abilities of many students, regardless of social class, to make meaningful connections for future employment at this stage of collegiate work. Further, those students who are sophisticated enough to establish potentially useful social networks that will lead to employment or social advantages down the line very often do so as part of sororities and fraternities–almost by default (because of both cost and the social elitism of most residential Greek systems) middle- and upper-class students whose parents also successfully navigated these channels and can provide guidance.Many first generation students arrive on campus with no idea of how the university works, and finding one’s way around campus–and especially finding resources appropriate to their needs–is already daunting. A dorm where these types of information were made not simply available but *normal* could provide a much-needed sense of safety in the always humbling and sometimes (for those accustomed to the embarrassment of food stamps, AFDC, and simply being poor) completely demoralizing act of reaching out for help. One year in a dormitory socializing students to university life in a supportive environment, where they aren’t the silent and unacknowledged economic minority, could do a world of good. Anecdotally, as a first-year student at a land-grant state university, I was housed with an upper-class sorority member whose life experiences were night and day compared to mine. I spent that first semester feeling ashamed of my (extremely limited) wardrobe, my regional speech patterns, and my obvious poverty. The only thing I gained was a palpable sense of relief when she moved out to live in her sorority for the second semester. And without a centralized support structure, I *never* learned that there was an office specifically geared towards students from lower-class backgrounds at my university. Had I known, I absolutely would have taken advantage of the services.

Dr. Kahlenberg: Like many others, I have read and followed your work in recent years with great appreciation and with great respect. I was first generation.  I did not attend a large, land-grant institution; instead I attended a small, “eastern selective” as the top tier undergraduate colleges were referred to during the 1970′s and 80′s.

I have mixed feelings about this proposal – on the one hand, I believe it is imperative that first generation students receive appropriate levels of support and orientation to college.  On that matter, I believe we are in agreement.  Whether or not a residence hall specifically designated for First Generation students is helpful or detrimental to their ability to gain the greatest benefit from being on campus is an open question, one whose answer depends strongly on the individual.  For some of us, having a place to which we can “retreat” is important as we transition from one demographic category to another.  For others of us, “jumping in full-fledged” is more appropriate.  For that reason, I think we should reserve judgment about the value of this residential experience at the U of KY or any other institution that tries out this type of living arrangement.  I think we need to continue to learn more about what can help students achieve the greatest benefit based on their developmental readiness (yes, I am a psychologist by training) for different types of living and learning environments.

I think your commentary raises several valid concerns and highlights the paradox or irony of the situation.  We recognize the need for special services to support first generation students but we also want to be sure they are integrated into the campus community as if they were no different than anyone else so that they can maximize the acquistion of “cultural and social capital” offered by colleges.  That was the paradox we struggled with in terms of race when I was in college during the 1970′s.  Both then and now, the often unspoken assumption about students like us was that we were “in need” as opposed to being “capable.”

Perhaps part of the difficulty is that we imagine all first generation students are relatively the same, that is, that we share the same talents and deficiencies in roughly the same degree.  The academy once thought that all African-American and Hispanic students were relatively similar in that same way.  Yet, my experience shows me that there is diversity within any demographic cohort and it is for that reason that I believe we should view the residence hall as one option among several to support first generation students.

When all is said and done, as I indicated in a post to the original article, it is important to think in terms of what we can do to improve the student educational experience as we learn from what works and what does not work.  For my part, I am willing to support the idea of a residence hall for first generation students as long as it is voluntary and has clear, structured programming (rather than relying on “black box” impact.)  While it may change the way it occurs, I don’t think that will undercut the arguments you have advanced in support of greater socio-economic diversity on college campuses.