Friday @ the Center
April 9, 2010
Discouraging Plagiarism
Tomorrow’s Professor, from Stanford University, is a useful e-publication with excellent advice on teaching and learning to which anyone can subscribe. Here’s an excerpt from a recent posting on discouraging plagiarism: “An assignment such as, ‘Write a 15-page paper on Dante's Inferno’ or ‘write a 10-page paper on the financial failures of the Stock Market in 1987' is unfortunately an invitation, especially for students who are short of time, to go to the Web where papers that suit the requirement can be purchased. . .
In some courses, instructors locate a free student paper from their discipline on the Web and ask their students to read it and critique it as a small-group activity in class or as a threaded discussion on a class web site. This exercise lets students know that you're aware of what is available, and it gives them a chance to be thoughtful about the quality of the free papers.
Instructors can lessen the temptations of students to commit fraud by avoiding traditional assignments. [One way to do so is] to use the activities and conversations in your own class as a basis for assignments or to use novel assignment structures. . . . Link activities and discussions from the classroom to small tasks that may . . . become part of larger assignments.” With the Dante paper assignment, for example, I might assign a particular critical essay that must be summarized and critiqued at one point before being employed in the student’s analysis of the poem.
Click here to review SPU’s procedures for dealing with student plagiarism.
TOY Award: School of Business and Economics
--the second in a series featuring this year’s eight nominees for the SPU Faculty Teacher of the Year award--
| Dr. Lisa Surdyk was selected by her peers as the Teacher of the Year in the School of Business and Economics, an honor that she also received in 1997. A faculty member since 1991, Lisa taught Principles of Macroeconomics, Intermediate Macroeconomics, Managerial Economics, and Political Economy, working with both undergraduate and graduate students. She loved to teach and worked hard to develop in her craft, constantly revising and reworking her courses, and spending many hours meeting one-on-one with her students. During the past year, she served as the chair of SBE’s faculty development committee, helping others to become skilled teacher-scholars. Just 13 days after she taught her final macroeconomics course, Lisa died on Dec. 6, 2009. |  Dr. Lisa Surdyk |
Headline of the Week:
Outsourced Grading Comes to Colleges
Happy Teaching,
Susan Susan VanZanten |
