Ten years ago there was no such thing as Wikipedia. That probably meant that a lot more High School and College term papers were legitimate.
January 16, 20112 CommentsRSS feed for comments on this post. Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time. |
I’m surprised to hear that Dan. My own belief is that Wikipedia makes catching the cheats easier. Not that cheating wasn’t widespread before – I could go to the library and copy things from the encyclopedias or books on the topic. It just required more effort.
However, with Wikipedia and Google, a teacher suspicious of plagiarism would have an easy time to check if her students were honest or not. And if several students use the same source (like Wikipedia), it would become obvious that there was some cheating.
The only thing that bothers me with Wikipedia is that people consider it a reputable source to the extent that there has been discussions of citing Wikipedia in reports and class papers. The drawback is someone can edit the article once it is cited, and the peer review or editorial process might not be strictly enforced.
Comment by sriksrid — January 17, 2011 @ 9:59 pm
I hear from various teachers that they’re always catching kids using Wikipedia. I mean, if you’re dumb enough to try, you’re not smart enough to think that the teacher will figure it out.
Comment by admin — January 17, 2011 @ 10:03 pm