..or however that goes.

What with two sons in college, twenty-plus years after I was there, in the days before the internet, one of the things I’m always interested in is how professors are dealing with the threat and fact of internet plagiarism – buying papers off the internet, and so on.

Last semester, one of my sons knew a girl who paid a guy almost two hundred dollars to write a paper for her. He gives her a finished paper, she turns it in, the professor notes some rather elevated language, Googles one sentence of the paper, and there it is – originally written by a guy from Northwestern.

(So, the guy she paid, just turned around, spent probably thirty bucks, downloaded the paper, and pocketed the rest)

(And yes, there are programs, that many universities are using that do this systematically, I believe)

Busted. With consequences, never fear.

This semester, same son was telling me about the requirements for another class – he had to buy two biographies, one of Napoleon, the other of Lenin (among other texts). I couldn’t quite figure out why, because this is not an upper-level class. Then he tells me about the paper – write a comparison/contrast of the two figures. Paper must include (although is not limited to), citations and quotes from both books. My first reaction was – well, that’s kind of strange, but then I decided the professor must be doing this, once again, as a way of diminishing the chances of internet plagiarism.

(Last year, when my middle son was still in high school, one of his teachers gave over chunks of class time – this was block schedule, so there was lots of it – to make kids work on their research papers right there in class in front of her. She openly said it was to make internet plagiarism more difficult. Honors class, I might add.)

Teaching is difficult in so many ways, and always has been, but it seems as if this kind of technology is making real teaching and education even more so. . In a way, I would hate it, but in a way, it intrigues me, not just as a challenge to more creative teaching, but as a game I’d be absolutely determined to win. Outfox me? Hah!