September 29, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:So I'm reading through this
So I'm reading through this Washington Post article on cheating. And I'm horrified, because it says one survey showed that 3/4 of high school students cheat, which blows me away. I've never cheated on anything, as far as I can recall, and if my friends did, they didn't share it with me. How did we get to the point where this is possible? Students in my high school who were caught cheating were suspended or expelled -- and the reason for the disciplinary action showed up on your transcript. And the teachers knew who was cheating, because they had us for an hour and a half every day. Copious in-class writing assignments meant that students who tried to pass off someone else's work as theirs ran a high risk of the teacher picking out the ringer.
But that's not the point. As I was reading, I came across this truly bizarre phrase:
Even if students are caught, the consequences can be negligible. At some colleges, students who plagiarize are expelled. But a high school student caught plagiarizing may just get a zero for that particular assignment. Often, he or she will be given a chance to make it up for at least partial credit. And there's no mention of it on the all-important transcript that gets sent to colleges. At Bardstown High School in Kentucky last year, 118 seniors were caught copying and pasting from the Internet. Sometimes entire short stories were lifted. The punishment? One essay on the evils of plagiarism. No National Honor Society memberships were pulled, and one of those caught cheating remained the class valedictorian.Plagiarism--a derivative of the Latin word for kidnapping--literally means to steal someone else's words or ideas and take credit for them. According to the rules of scholarship, if you borrow someone else's words, you put them in quotation marks. If you use someone else's idea, you acknowledge it in your essay or in a footnote, even if it came from the revisionist southern-partisan.com.
What does this mean? Are there students who believe it's okay to plagiarize as long as their source is a much-reviled regionalist journal? Do the "rules of scholarship" refer specifically to Southern Partisan magazine, or is it included in a larger category of Magazines You Might Have Thought You Don't Have to Footnote Because They're On the Wrong Side of History? And is The Nation on that list? Is the cheating epidemic we're currently undergoing centered around a failure to accurately identify the sources of potentially revisionist material? Do America's students not know how to correctly cite internet references containing hyphens?
There's no other reference to Southern Partisan in the article. It's just a random aside, appearing from nowhere, referring to nothing, making no sense.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 29, 2002 12:00 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>