Well, I just read the Kirk McDermid paper mentioned in my previous
message. It does raise some rhetorical, ethical and motivational issues
frankly, and is worth reading for this reason. It shows the weaknesses
of the predominant arguments, and suggests areas to look for productive
strategies that argue grounds other than "it's high risk behavior" and
"it's unethical"-- 1) helping honest students learn to navigate the
minefield of citation, and 2) adjusting grading rubrics. We already
know a lot about the first since that is our area of specialization, but
I have not heard much in our literature about the second tactic
...carefully designing our rubrics and arguments about evaluation in
order to reduce the potential reward for undetected plagiarism and
increase the potential reward for honest research writing -- . McDermid
is claiming a more effective rubric would effectively argue (or imply)
that it is not worth the little effort it takes to plagiarize, and would
promote ethical use of sources as being well worth the student's greater
effort. However, the paper ends before it presents well argued
solutions about how to develop a grading rubric that effectively deters
plagiarism. He seems to want to save that for his presentation (I
suppose he's using the rhetorical tactic of generating suspense...). --
I guess if you are interested in this you will have to write the
alternative endings of this paper yourselves, as I am sure there are
many effective strategies used among us. Yet I do wish we could get
more field research that would analyze (not just theorize) whether or
not certain ways of evaluating writing, and talking to students about
our evaluation strategies, really can reduce the motive to plagiarize.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Tania S. Smith
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Communication & Culture
University of Calgary
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~smit
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