In “Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name)” by Brent Staples
In “Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name)” Brent Staples, 2010, asserts that there exists a problem in education where critical thinking is no longer taking place and results in student plagiarism. The author cites college professors and one study in particular that revealed that students who copied often did not learn. Staples is attempting to draw attention to this serious problem in academia to increase awareness of the true mission of education. The author is addressing parents, teachers, and policymakers in the hopes that they will sense the urgency of this matter. A teacher at a well-known eastern university felt plagiarism was turning him into a cop. He begins the semester collecting evidence, in the form of an in-class essay that gives him a sense of how well students think and write. He looks back at the samples later when students turn in papers that feature their own, less-than-perfect prose alongside expertly written passages lifted verbatim from the Web. it is a failing offense and could lead me to file a complaint with the university, which could lead to them being put on probation or being asked to leave.
Not everyone who gets caught knows enough about what they did to be remorseful. Recently, for example, a student who plagiarized a sizable chunk of a paper essentially told my friend to keep his shirt on, and that what he'd done was no big deal. Beyond that, the student said, he would be ashamed to go home to the family with an F. Like many other professors, he no longer sees traditional term papers as a valid index of student competence. To get an accurate, Internet-free reading of how much students have learned, he gives them written assignments in class - where they can be watched. These kinds of precautions are no longer unusual in the college world. As Contrary to modern opinion, downloading is not original thinking. Many schools now require incoming students to take online tutorials explaining plagiarism and how to avoid it. Nationally, discussions about plagiarism tend to focus on questions of ethics. But as David Pritchard, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me recently: "The big sleeping dog here is not the moral issue. The problem is that kids don't learn if they don't do the work."
Prof. Pritchard and his colleagues illustrated the point in a study of cheating behavior by M.I.T. students who used an online system to complete homework. The students who were found to have copied the most answers from others started out with the same strong math and physics skills as their harder-working classmates. But by skipping the actual work in homework, they fell behind in understanding and became significantly more likely to fail. The Pritchard axiom - that repetitive cheating undermines learning - has ominous implications for a world in which even junior high school students cut and paste from the Internet instead of producing their own writing. If we look closely at plagiarism practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don't think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thoughts. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.
They become like rap musicians who construct what they describe as new
works by "sampling" (which is to say, cutting and pasting) beats and
refrains from the works of others. This habit of mind is already pervasive in
the culture and will be difficult to roll back. But parents, teachers, and
policymakers need to understand that this is not just a matter of personal style
or generational expression. It's a question of whether we can preserve the
methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically
and originally.