Anti-Climacus

In the spirit of getting to 'x' out tabs in my browser, Dean Dad on plagiarism and the reasons for assigning papers in the first place. Wholeheartedly agree:

I had a professor once who said that there are two philosophies of teaching: you can cover, or you can uncover. In the age of rampant information, I see the “covering” function as less relevant, and the “uncovering” function as far more. But students aren’t going to learn to uncover what’s going on in an argument unless they spend serious time engaging with them. And that means forgetting about copy-and-paste for a while and actually doing the work. I won’t get fit by paying someone to exercise for me; I won’t get smarter by paying someone to think for me. Sometimes you have to do it yourself. And some students need that pointed out. That was true before the web, and it’s just as true now.

Like Dean Dad, I had a professor in grad school who made a similar argument, about the continuing relevance of instruction in humanities and social science topics like political theory. The text of most every work is out there, even if it hasn't been translated into English in 400 years. It's conceivable that a motivated student could go out and read all those texts on their own, and possible (though less likely) that they could make some approximate sense of them. If, as an academic, you believe your marginal advantage is knowing what Book III of the Republic says, and your job as an instructor is to tell your students what it says, you've put yourself right into the crosshairs of the argument that the humanities are irrelevant. The marginal advantage of an academic is the ability to organize and connect knowledge, and do so faster and more efficiently than one's students--and those are the skills one is trying to transfer, through the medium of works that repay close attention.

On the subject of plagiarism: I've dealt with it as an instructor of record, and it was not a pleasant experience. But it was also obvious, and lazy, and was caught using a method I informed the class I would use should I ever come across something suspicious (the highly technical 'google search'). Students really do underestimate the extent to which it's obvious they have given me work they did not produce, even one of the kids who never talked in a class of 45, as happened in my case. (Hint: really good papers raise flags at least as much as really bad ones, probably more; and why go through the effort of plagiarizing or paying someone for a B?)

Open question: has anyone used turnitin or a similar service with good results?