True email from student the night before the rewrite is due:
Hey Professor, for our group paper I'm using a rolling stone article because i got it from the academic search complete off the library's page... Doesnt that work?
Thanks,
Clueless
You can't make this shit up!
ugg! If this kid shows me one more wikipedia article and asks if he can use it for the extra credit assignment, I'll scream. I keep pointing to where it says "popular science magazine such as..." in the assignment, but he keeps going to wikipedia. The terms "bookstore" and "library" have been repeated over and over and over. I've said "This is a convenient, but mediocre encyclopedia. It is not an acceptable source." He just keeps changing the topic, but not the source.
ReplyDeleteHe's an idiot. Flunk him
ReplyDeletePerhaps I've got Grading Rage.
No, no. He's an idiot. Flunk him.
Was this kid wanting to submit the article as his own work or use it as a research source? I've had students use the source "eCheat.com" as a viable research source. I'm not kidding. I also once had a student hand in a five page paper in which three whole pages were taken verbatim from a published essay. Her defense? "I put quotation marks around those three pages."
ReplyDeleteIn case you doubt me, I present to you eCheat.com, where "It's Not Cheating, It's Collaborating." (Nice comma splice in their header, no?)
ReplyDeletehttp://echeat.com/
OK, it was a while ago (and a high school class) but my classic example was a student who passed in a print out of Encarta ('memba that?) but then cut off the bottom third of the last page -- which contained the automatically included copyright notice.
ReplyDeleteThat's right folks, he handed in literally 2 & 2/3 pages.
Or, from the reference citation file:
The Bible. (c) a long time ago. Written by: Alot of guys.
Have at them ...
The syntax leaves absolutely no doubt in my mind that this came from a college student. No doubt.
ReplyDeleteArrgh! I have term papers coming in a month from now - with their bibliographies and such in two weeks. If anyone cites Erowid or Wikipedia, I will chew them a new asshole. The former is a pile of blather by fools who value their drug experiences over their neurons - the latter is a steaming pile of crap masquerading as an encyclopedia.
ReplyDeleteI discuss the final paper (in passing) EVERY week and am relentless with "no news sites, no Wikipedia" and... guess what? They still ask and very innocently, too.
ReplyDeleteMust. Not. Use. Heat. Vision.
Mine are working on evaluating their sources for the research paper. I have told them repeatedly that the sources must be scholarly and academic. They have an online librarian at their disposal and a series of exercises which demonstrate how to find credible sources. And yet still a quarter of them have presented me with source summaries and evaluations which state, "This would not be a very good source for an academic to use."
ReplyDeleteYou are all so hard on Wikipedia but it's an excellent math reference. My CS professor is fine with me using the Wikipedia math portal. Mathematicians have put a great deal of time into composing all these topics and I don't agree that it's "a steaming pile of crap."
ReplyDeleteDr. D - if the heat vision isn't on the table, just make like Alice in Dilbert and use the Fist of Death. I tell my students point blank not to use Wikipedia. My hope is that half of them might actually listen. Yes, I dare to dream.
ReplyDeleteUm, I hate to be the contrarian, but if a student turned in a paper with multiple references, and one of them was from "Rolling Stone," and it was appropriate and salient, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
ReplyDeleteBut it sounds like this was his only reference? In which case I understand the hullaballoo. ; )
The biggest problem is that I already looked at the draft, read the material from "Rolling Stone," and explained that it was not an academic source for this paper. This was arguing with me, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteIronically, the night that the outline and references were due, the library hosted a workshop on evaluating sources. I offered an extension on the assignment if people attended. . . .
So the group paper was submitted today -- complete with "Rolling Stone" as a source. I didn't bother to respond to the email because, obviously, my feedback is meaningless. Instead, I did what any reasonable person would do under similar circumstances. I drank.
@Snarkywombats -- Erowid actually has some really great content. For example, Erowid hosts the complete Hoffman Archive of peer-reviewed research papers about LSD, which was compiled by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. As far as Erowid's original content goes...well, that's another story, but don't damn the entire source.
ReplyDeleteThe next level of complexity is trying to get students to understand that not everything in a peer-reviewed academic journal is an "article reporting on original research" -- which is what I want my students to find and examine, early in the semester, so they understand what I'm asking them to do, on a much smaller scale, later on. I don't really mind explaining the difference between such articles and book reviews, presidents' addresses, obituaries, reviews of the literature (the hardest), etc. the first or second or even third time, since this is a new concept for most of them, but the fourth, fifth, etc. repetitions get a bit frustrating. One does wonder whether they're listening.
ReplyDeleteAnd I was amused by the student who told her group members, during an in-class source check, that their articles weren't "original" because they carried a copyright notice. Apparently the university's intensive efforts to define copyright and discourage illegal downloading had sunk in more completely (albeit in somewhat garbled form) than my own explanations of original research and peer review.
P.S. For the actual research paper, I would accept Rolling Stone as a source, but only if there were *also* scholarly articles in the bibliography. I treat solid articles from respectable popular periodicals as welcome extras, but extras nonetheless.
I hate to poke my head up, but there are TONS of fantastic articles in Rolling Stone, that while maybe not referenced in the same way as a trad journal, certainly every bit as valid as an academic source, especially around politics and the environment.
ReplyDeleteFab
Yeah, hell, even Playboy had some pretty kickass political articles too...or, at least in the 1970s issues that I, uh, found in a box in the garage at my parent's place...
ReplyDeletePoopiehead: Never use fuck books as scholarly references. It just doesn't look good. (I've actually written precisely that on a student's paper.)
ReplyDeletePrissy Prof: This kid is an idiot. My condolences to you, when you have to read his full paper.