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It strikes me that perhaps the simplest way to kill plagiarism is to simply require a handwritten rough draft. Take the copy/paste convenience out of cheating,
by Millennium 12y ago
It strikes me that perhaps the simplest way to kill plagiarism is to simply require a handwritten rough draft. Take the copy/paste convenience out of cheating, and far fewer students will cheat: writing your own thoughts is a lot less tedious than hand-copying someone else's. It also has the bonus of ensuring that at least some minimal editing has taken place, over the course of writing the paper a second time.
Students with disabilities that prevent writing a draft by hand -actually missing the dominant hand or not having use of it, or arthritis in the wrists, or carpal tunnel syndrome, or whatever- will need accommodations, of course. No solution will catch everyone. But it should still radically shrink the pool of copied (and copyable) papers.
- pavel_lishin 12y agoI'd wager that most people here would go ahead and write their paper on their computers, then recreate a plausible handwritten rough draft afterwards. And that seems about as difficult as recreating one for an essay you didn't write.
- emeraldd 12y agoA reasonable alternative to this would be to require a hardcopy draft with visible editing marks as a draft. Going to paper at least once helps alot in the editing process.
- iak8god 12y agoHardcopy or not, making students iterate over their work with feedback at each step, is the right way to do this. Make submitting drafts and responding to feedback part of the grade. The only problem that this is a lot of work for the instructor, who increasingly is an adjunct with little experience running all over town to teach six courses just to make ends meet.
- mcherm 12y agoI write about 50 times faster on keyboard than in handwriting. Why should I be penalized in this fashion?
- ape4 12y agolow tech is sometimes the best tech ;)