News Item
"The New York Times" featured Dyson's psychology professor Terence Hines' piece "Cheating Goes Global as U.S. Students Outsource College Papers”
The purchase of term papers in college is a problem. My own solution is to require that students turn in a significant first draft of their paper at least six weeks before the final version is due.
I read and edit the drafts for content as well as for English usage and then return them. At the end of the term each student must turn in a final version of the paper as well as the edited first draft. This system has several benefits.
It makes it very difficult (but probably not impossible) to turn in a purchased or otherwise plagiarized paper. Each student gets detailed individual comments on his or her paper that are ideally used to improve the final version.
The students get a feeling for how the peer-review process works in academic journal publishing.
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