Ah, but as he said earlier if your beliefs about cheating don’t fall in line with his then you’re attitudes belong with the the older generation.
Marc
No offense, brickbacon, but you do not come across as someone who is 22.
Quite frankly, I don’t see how it makes it better that the person isn’t truly “dishonest”, they’re only “lazy.” In fact, that’s worse. They’re liars, and they’re deadbeats, and most of us honest, hard working individuals end up doing THEIR work-AND watching the cheaters get credit. It’s not about life being “fair”, it’s about the cheater being a jackass.
If anyone’s complaining about things not being “fair”, it’s the cheater, who decides blah blah blah, it sucks, why do I have to WORK!!!
And quite frankly, some of these cheaters aren’t that lazy, either. Some of the extremes they go to get out of honest work ends up being twice as difficult as doing the original work in the first place! Why go to all that trouble to cheat-it’s just as much work to do it the right way?
In the end, I think you’re trying to justify something that you KNOW isn’t right.
I despise dishonesty, and I despise laziness.
I’ve been a college student before. Currently in the military.
It’s turtles all the way down. I have no problem citing sources of data or precident. I am annoyed about citing the dead white men (or anyone else’s opinion), because I could make no reason for why their opinion should be any more authoritative than mine unless they are a primary (or at most secondary) source. But if I’m writing what is essentially an opinion piece, I don’t feel any compulsion to bootstrap my opinion by appealing to authority, or to attack a dead white man’s opinion. I’ll make my own case and you can agree or not, as you please. I speak only by way of discourse and nothing in the way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.
The last two lines are a (mis)quote of Montaigne.
I assure you that I didn’t have to work very hard in high school, and I never cheated. Those who do have to work hard had better get used to it. I went to one of the highest rated colleges in the world, and no one I knew there ever cheated. I don’t think anyone ever even thought about cheating. The native intelligence of the cheater is not the point, in fact I think it could be argued that someone cheating to keep from being kicked out of school and forced into a bad situation (like the army when I went to school) has a stronger ethical position vs. someone who cheats because he is a lazy shmuck.
1010011010 did you ever suppose that the requirement for references is to force you to see what other people thought about the subject? That those who got published might, just might, have something useful to say? Any good teacher would not mark you down for arguing against them, assuming you had a reasonable argument, in fact that kind of critical judgement is vitally important in today’s world. So I don’t see what you’re complaining about.
Hoo boy, I can see you’ve never been an editor. People don’t get their opinions published at random, they’ve had to show some smarts, enough to impress someone when they were not known. (Sure, sometimes people slack off after becoming established.)
I saw that attitude all the time when self-published e-books were hot. Someone in my critique group was sure his memoir was great, and basically self-published it. He was a good marketer, but never sold many, because it was just not that good. I’d bet dollars to donuts that if you gave your essay and a published one, without names, to a critic, he could tell whose was whose. I hope you’re learning something about this in real life. I wonder if you think you could run a campaign as well as one of your experienced commanders?
I must say the definition of “smart but lazy” has changed a bit in the last decade.
I remember being that way in University. I didn’t plagerise, though. Instead, I simply sat there the night before an assignment was due and drank too much tea and hammered out the essay at the last minute with whatever books I could get my hands on. Basically I was piecing together a thesis on the fly. One draft only and a hope and a prayer that that it was coheriant enough to be passable. I think I had the “smart” part down as my efforts usually earned me a 65 to 80%. I’ll tell you It was all my work and as halfassed as it was I still earned what I got.
Now it seems the bar for clver has been lowered to say that if you are smart you just have to know how to get your hands on someone elses work.
Of course, essays have several functions for real life uses. In many jobs people have to take various pieces of information from different sources and communicate them to someone in a susinct and logical fashion. Even if it is just an email update.
Reports and summaries require these skills and if you are too lazy to learn it you aren’t going too far before you are discovered.
From time to time I will receive an email and I have to wonder why anyone would hire someone so obviously unskilled as to be unable to communicate a single coherant thought. The worst are those idiots that just copy a whole series of emails and post them in a long four to five page trail with the “FYI” as the body of their email to me.
A simple quick summary paragraph could resolve the situation but they seem incapable of doing just that.
I’m not sure if anyone has come right out and said it, but hiring someone else to write your papers is not technically plagiarism, it’s work for hire.
I made a lot of spending money in college by writing papers for people. I also learned a lot–and it was all stuff that the people who paid me should have been learning.
I continued doing this for awhile when I was a graduate assistant, and it was a possibility that I might have gotten to grade a paper I had actually written. In which case I would have had to give it an F. (Then I would have had to give the money back, since I guaranteed an A or a B.) At the time it was not technically illegal for me to do this, although it was for the student turning it in. In fact I knew a couple of other grad students who were doing the same thing for the same reason, extra money. But then the school came to its senses and made it an expellable offense to write a paper for another student, so I lost that source of income.
However, the experience prepared me for a life of writing stuff that went out with other people’s names on it. I have written editorial pieces that went on the Op-Ed page underneath the byline of a senator, legal memoranda that my boss said, “Okay, put my name on it and send it out to…”, and news articles that went out with totally fake bylines because otherwise it would look like I had written every article in the issue (which I had).
I have a friend who’s argued that I was totally wrong and unethical for the term papers–for 30 years he’s told me this!–but not at all for the second, because that is also how he makes a living. I now think he was right, but I still say the people who hired me to write their term papers (or in the case of my best client, the university’s athletic department, who hired me on behalf of people I never even met, strictly unofficially) were even more unethical, since they were presenting my work as theirs, while I was merely delivering research for an agreed-upon sum.
Getting food from the bread line symbolizes both grading and employment. Without a diploma, your prospects of employment are limited and you’ll have a harder time keeping a roof over your head and food on your table. If you cheat your way to a diploma, you may find that the jobs that are now open to you require skills you never learned, and you’ll struggle - or you might find that writing research papers has no relation to the job at all, and come out ahead.
Correct on both counts. As I said, dropping out is another option for students who don’t want to do school work… as long as (1) they’re old enough and (2) they don’t mind the stigmatism and closed doors that will result from not having a diploma.
Their opinion is more authoritive than your because we can assume that they’re quoted and published because people generally believe them to be knowledgeable on the subject and have interesting, considered and relevant points. Where as you, no offense intended, are no-one.
I used to think like this when I started in University, then one of my tutors explained it bluntly; No-one cares what you think, this not what the exercise is for. The purpose of the average undergraduate paper is to demonstrate that you’ve read, understood and evaluated the arguments put forward by those who know a lot more about it than you. You may come down in one side or another, you can even pronounce them all fools, but that’s not what you’re going to get marked on.
Once you’ve got a degree and further qualifications; that’s when you can start writing academic papers on what you think and people will hopefully be interested. Until then it’s very unlikely you’re going to write anything that’s original, insightful and worth sharing.
Tough, I know. But that’s the purpose of asking you to write the thing, and why it’s important you write it yourself.
I think it’s rare to get a undergraduate paper that’s purely ‘write what you think’. Opinions aren’t hard to have and don’t prove you’ve done a stroke of work. Indeed, any paper that’s pure opinion with no cites or quotes is a very good indicator of “I pulled this paper out my behind and wrote it in half an hour last night.”
Let’s be honest-who would you rather hire:
Person A, who is of average intelligence, but is honest and hard-working.
or
Person B, who is an absolute genius, yet is dishonest and lazy.
I’ll put it bluntly. I’m a programmer, and a dead good one. I’m also over 35. Over the years, I’ve had to go into a program someone else wrote and modify it or fix it. I’ve seen some programs (not enough!) which were very clearly written and others which were total disasters which might take me an hour just to figure out the basics of what the programmer or programmers intended. The assignments I was given when I was in college both 20 years ago for languages and 10 years ago for programming were intended to make sure I could think logically and creatively and wind up a professional who knew what she was doing.
If you want to hire someone to write your programming assignment, fine. Go get an MBA and become the person who hires a programmer to write the applications which will make your company’s day-to-day procedures run like greased lightning. Don’t become a programmer who never grasped the fundamentals which means it’s going to take me a lot of time and swearing to sort out the unholy mess you made or the one who created an application which leaves your users cursing the day you were born. If you are unwilling or unable to do the work, get out of my shop and let me find someone who isn’t.
I know about geniuses; I socialize with them. Some of them are marvelous, competent, honorable individuals who take pride in a job well done; others are a bit lazy or arrogant who expect people to look up to them just because they got a certain number on a test at least once in their lives. The latter aren’t the ones I associate with.
As for the amount of codswollop involved in writing papers, trust me, I’ve been working for over 20 years. While the codswollop may not be “Discuss the underlying social themes in Jane Eyre”, it can be just as irrelevant and meaningless. The only difference is, if you make the boss or client unhappy instead of a teacher, it isn’t your grades that suffer; it’s your salary! :eek: If you’re going to have to write it, and believe me, you will, you may as well make sure you can write it well. Do so well enough, and your salary might even go up, not down.
CJ
If they do mind the stigmatism (I’ve got that in my left eye…) then they’ll just have to get over their problem with doing school work. Not doing the work and getting the diploma anyway may be possible for some lucky cheaters, but it is never a fair or moral option. A high school diploma is certification that a person has mastered certain skills taught in school. If they have not demonstrated mastery of these skills, they shouldn’t have the piece of paper that indicates that they have.
If a job doesn’t require mastery of all those skills, the employer shouldn’t limit his hires to people who have a high school diploma. Unfortunately, what should be and what is aren’t always the same. 
It would be just as easy to force me to read what other people thought by making certain sources assigned reading. Actually, that would be a better way to go about ensuring what you’ve suggested. So the whole “cite three sources in your paper” not only has the potential to disrupt the flow of a paper to meet an artifical requirement, it also does nothing to ensure good sources are used.
You’re also assuming I don’t like doing reasearch or reading the dead white men. I’d probably do more reading/research than was strictly necessary simply because it’s interesting in and of itself, and because I was trying to find something, anything, that would be relatively easy to wedge into my paper some place to meet the citation requirements.
Useful for what purpose? Useful for the purpose of keeping literary journals in things to publish or people with degrees in English and no temperment to teach in an occupation?
I don’t see any point in making an argument about a novel of fiction. It is, essentially, making shit up. I don’t see the point in referring to someone else’s made up shit to support my own made up shit… or attacking someone else’s made up shit because I think their made up shit is shit, while my made up shit is shinola. Read the book, think about it, talk about it if you want. That’s sufficient. Making kids write an essay or book report, or testing their knowledge of the facts of the book’s plot won’t sneakily force them to get anything more out of the book than they want to get out of it.
I’ve been re-reading a lot of the assigned books from back in highschool. They’re actually pretty entertaining when you’re not reading them with an intent to memorize relevant facts and figures for a latter assignment. I find the destruction of the enjoyment of reading by the school system to be a Bad Thing. The writing assignments are similarly unnatural and unpleasant (to me, anyway). So what exactly is the purpose of milling out citizens that know how to read and write, yet have been conditioned to recieve no enjoyment from these activities?
Do school newspapers count?
Oh, I’m sure they don’t publish the incoherent gibberish from any ol’ yokel off the street corner. For the most part, I can’t see that there’s any other measure beyond the quality of the writing. If you can write well, you can get published. It doesn’t much matter what you write about, provided it’s applicable to the journal.
But would that be because one was inherently better writing than the other… or because one was written in the insitutionalized language of a career writer and one was not?
I haven’t had any of the courses in tactics, strategy, or game theory in addition to not having the real world experience of commanding. Also, you get real world feedback as to the quality of command decisions. I’m skeptical about the applicability of your analogy.
I really don’t see how you get similar feedback on literary analysis short of the actual author calling you up to explain that you are a turnip. Oh, but you could turn around and tell them it was all their subconcious motivation- they don’t really know what their own book is about. Smile. Nod.
It’s always struck me as mental masturbation.
If there are indicators of “I pulled this paper out of my behind and wrote it in half an hour last night”, why reward it? It’s a cliche. The grade is inversely related to the amount of time you put into it.
I’d wager because, in the time crunch, you’re too busy writing like a normal human to try to write like it’s an assignment… because you have to meet an arbitrary and artificial length requirement.
I can understand requiring a certain number of column inches. I don’t quite grasp specifying margins, fonts, and point sizes and demanding 7 pages. What if I’m finished in 6? What if I need 8? What if I only need 2… make shit up for the other 5 pages?
Let’s not get started on publish or perish…
And what’s up with this “dead white men” thing? That shows a very narrow-minded (not to mention incorrect) way of looking at literature and philosophy.
No, the quote three sources argument is to make you go out and find them yourself, and not have them spoonfed to you. Part of paper writing is to prepare at least some of the class for writing papers in college and in future life, and there knowing how to do research is vitally important. Leaving out important references gets your paper rejected. Not knowing about important previous work can make you look really stupid in front of an audience.
I’m not and have never been an English major, but my impression is that articles in journals are written by professors. In Computer Science they are written by professors and researchers in industry. I’ll let someone else argue the inherent worth of research in English lit, but teaching people English lit is a good thing, since it exposes them to books they might never have read otherwise. There are plenty of journals besides English lit ones, and the same principles this assignment is meant to teach apply to them also.
I suspect a test on plot is to force the kid to actually read the book, and not buy the Cliff Notes version. Alas, you are what CP Snow was talking about, the two cultures that hardly ever talk to one another. A novel is not just making things up, it is setting up a situation to examine a part of the world. I’m on the science side, and I can’t stand English majors who pride themselves in knowing nothing about science and who can’t do simple algebra. These are the maroons who keep the astrologers in business. But people on the science side who don’t see any value in literature are just as bad IMO. Also, examining the structure of a novel that works is very useful if you wish to write one.
Well my enjoyment never got destroyed. I read some stuff I didn’t want to read any more of, and also some stuff that led me into wonderful new areas. But do you really think people would read more without high school english?
No. Not unless you get three times as many articles as you can use.
Wrong. Writing quality is but one of the four attributes of a good paper, and one of the easiest to fix up, since the one I’m associated with has professional copy editors. Innovative ideas, logical structure, good results, familiarity with the literature, and interest all count more. The paper written by someone who knows what went before by doing research will always win, since that person won’t propose something already done or done and shot down. None of the people who submit to the journals and conferences I review for are career writers. The best are good writers, though.
Because you often get the guy who knows nothing about nothing tell the world that he’s got all the answers. Actually pretty common for new graduates. Good ones learn to find out what comes before, and that, believe it or not, some people in high positions got there for a reason. Not everything written is much good, but rejecting anything written out of hand is just as dumb as accepting everything. If essays teach students to start using critical judgement, they are valuable. Having someone write it for a student, to get back on topic, shows that the student not only is lazy, but doesn’t even understand the point of the class. Learning should go on forever, but some can’t even learn when they’ve got nothing better to do.
Or, especially for mandatory courses, it shows that the student doesn’t care about the point of the class, even if he understands what it is.
If I blew off or submitted slipshod work if I didn’t care about the subject matter in my job, you can be sure that I’ll be financially punished.
Your point: School is useless, students should be given free grades so that they can get good jobs, because they “could have anyway” if they cared about it
My point: The world does not owe you anything. If you’re not interested in your job, don’t expect to get paid. The “free grade” attitude in a job is a sign of poor work ethic - we all hate our jobs to a certain degree. We all think some of the regulations/working standards are bullshit. Does that mean that we are allowed to blow it off? Of course not.
The same with employers - if they see that you “blow off” stuff that you dislike, (ie. cheat on it because you can’t be bothered to study), what assurance do they have that you won’t do the same in the workplace?
What are these jobs you think shouldn’t require a high school diploma, but do anyway? It’s not like every job requires a diploma. There are plenty that don’t. They aren’t good jobs, but I don’t think anyone who refuses to demonstrate the minimal mastery of basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills (not to mention the willingness to show up and do work that may not be personally interesting!) needed to graduate from high school is in any position to expect a good job. It isn’t difficult to graduate with a D-average.