Journal #3

"A War of Words" By Jim Paterson

The article speaks of combating plagiarism and gives an idea of how to solve the problem rather than pointing fingers at students that do plagiarize. One way of helping to stop plagiarism is to actually teach students how to utilize research and organize it to be used within a paper. As the example given in the article at Blattman Elementary School. The other way suggests uploading all student workinto a database and allow a computer to determine if a student has plagiarized based upon a comparison of works already stored in that database. I think the latter is more of a scare tactic rather than a resolution to the ongoing problem.

Question:
1) What is the incentive for a student to produce a quality paper if they are already prejudged as having plagiarized?
I don't think there is any incentive for students to do quality work. If a student knows that their work will be put under a microscope without it even being read, I think they will do nothing different, because they know they are going to fail anyway. But it may make the student work a bit harder to find information that is more obscure to include into a paper.

2) If teaching students how to do research is successful, then why not teach all students how to do research?
I think many teachers believe that all students know how to do research, paraphrase and cite information from texts and websites. When in reality most do not. Many students nowadays are writing essays in elementary school and are having to cite examples from text. However, students are not taught how to do this. They may end up in high school before they are actually taught how to cite works in a paper. By then it is too late and they struggle with the concept and end up plagiarizing, because it is all they know how to do.