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revdorothyl at 05:37pm on 13/05/2008
revdorothyl at 05:37pm on 13/05/2008My boss forwarded this item from the online version of The Chronicle of Higher Education, just for the sheer horror/humor of it (a fictional conversation set in 2030, leading my boss to adopt the voice of a super-ignorant PhD of the future and exclaim, "Dude! That's like . . . 10 years from now!"):
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/05/2008051301c/careers.html?utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
Just makes me want to go "aaaghh!", because way too many of the students I and my colleagues have taught in college classes over the past ten years seem to be not only plagiarizing badly (appalling as that is), but also in many cases plagiarizing with a bit more finesse, and doing it all as a matter of course.
I feel like joining the "Old College Curmudgeons' Club" (O.C.C.C. for short), with the other grumpy 'old' men and women who gripe about what a college education used to be about, before college became exclusively about vocational training and learning how to be a better liar than the next person.
Oh, alright, I admit it -- I used to 'lie like a rug' in college about some things (trying to seem smarter and more experienced and better than I actually felt myself to be). But to take someone else's work and thoughts and claim it for my own . . . ? It never occurred to me to cheat myself (and lower the standards of my work, to be honest) like that.
But then, my options for plagiarism were limited to books in the library and anything that might've been written by some idiotic fellow student. With the internet, it's a whole new deal.
Perhaps what upsets me most is that, in my work on big reference projects for the publishing house, I too frequently find that people with Ph.D.'s who have actual teaching jobs at respectable institutions of higher learning are willing to turn in other people's work as their own, and that by and large it's too much trouble to call them on it, so we just re-write the articles for them, paying them for work they didn't do and letting them take credit in print for work our editors have actually done.
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/05/2008051301c/careers.html?utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
Just makes me want to go "aaaghh!", because way too many of the students I and my colleagues have taught in college classes over the past ten years seem to be not only plagiarizing badly (appalling as that is), but also in many cases plagiarizing with a bit more finesse, and doing it all as a matter of course.
I feel like joining the "Old College Curmudgeons' Club" (O.C.C.C. for short), with the other grumpy 'old' men and women who gripe about what a college education used to be about, before college became exclusively about vocational training and learning how to be a better liar than the next person.
Oh, alright, I admit it -- I used to 'lie like a rug' in college about some things (trying to seem smarter and more experienced and better than I actually felt myself to be). But to take someone else's work and thoughts and claim it for my own . . . ? It never occurred to me to cheat myself (and lower the standards of my work, to be honest) like that.
But then, my options for plagiarism were limited to books in the library and anything that might've been written by some idiotic fellow student. With the internet, it's a whole new deal.
Perhaps what upsets me most is that, in my work on big reference projects for the publishing house, I too frequently find that people with Ph.D.'s who have actual teaching jobs at respectable institutions of higher learning are willing to turn in other people's work as their own, and that by and large it's too much trouble to call them on it, so we just re-write the articles for them, paying them for work they didn't do and letting them take credit in print for work our editors have actually done.
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