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A zillion years ago when my son was in first grade and computers were still a novelty, he decided to write his spelling words on the computer. The little twerp was using copy and paste to write them the required ten times. When I made him stop, he told me "but my teacher said it was okay". As I said, computers were new and she did not know how he was using it.
Kids have always cheated. We just have to be smarter than them to stop them in their tracks.
The middle school's Civil War Museum exhibit last spring put the kids' papers on display. Ed looked at every paper & saw a huge amount of internet text. Same thing the year before at the Jason Project exhibit. Many papers included downloaded text. A couple of papers were the same paper.
Of course most people didn't notice because they were looking at the crafts projects, not the papers.
Crafts projects are to a middle school what misdirection is to a magician.
Possibly.
2 comments:
Well, nothing new under the sun. When we had to write reports for school, many kids copied material from The World Book and other sources. It would be a joke amongst the students. We once had to read our papers to the class. We would all recognize the same passages and some smart ass (not me) would inevitably remark: "I see you have the World Book too".
I must admit I was tempted to submit plagiarized papers in college. The problem for me was that downloaded papers tend to be terrible. I was sure that there could be only two outcomes: (a) my professors would immediately recognize that it wasn't my work, or, worse yet, (b) they would be fooled and think that it really was my own work.
Tempting as it might be to brag about my own honesty, in reality I was saved by my own pretension.
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