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No Subject
FYI
--Eric
And for those who aren't on Rhetnt-L & want to catch up on the rest
of thread that inspires this week's cafe, see:
http://www.missouri.edu/~rhetnet/gpww/
[gpww = grading, plagiarism, and webbed writing]
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from Tari:
OOPS: I made an error in last week's cafe announcement: At one point
I said that the Selfe and Wahlstrom article we discussed last week was in
the August 1995 _Computers and Composition_. The date was really August
1985, and I got it right elsewhere in the post, but I apologize to those
who were using the printed source rather than reading the article from the
web and thus had to hunt around figuring out which one I really meant.
Feel free to bring your wet noodles to this week's cafe.
*************************************************************
Please come to Netoric's Tuesday Cafe Discussion
for
August 6, 1996
8:00 p.m. EDT
in Netoric's Tuesday Cafe on MediaMOO
Topic:
Linking-Cheating-Grading:
Plagiarism, Ownership, and Assessing Web Skills
OR
Mick Doherty's Quandary
To join us:
Telnet to MediaMOO at purple-crayon.media.mit.edu 8888
connect guest OR connect your character if you have one
@go Tuesday
If you're new to Netoric and/or MOOing,
Netoric's Information and MOOhelpsheet is available from
Netoric's Home Page:
http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/siering/netoric.html
(Note that Netoric's home page also has logs of Netoric events!)
**************************************************************
Today Mick Doherty posted to Rhetnet an interesting situation
that has come up his classroom, and since it ties in with any
number of discussions we've had lately, providing us with a
good "real classroom" example to challenge our theories and our
sometimes-idealistic notions about sharing, collaborating,
cheating, plagiarizing, netiquette, ownership of work, academic
honesty and politeness, and so on, we asked Mick to bring it
to this week's cafe. Here is Mick's original post, with his
story and his questions, which we'll take up at the cafe.
From: Mick Doherty
To: Multiple recipients of list RHETNT-L
Subject: Grading, Plagiarism, Webbed Writing and ...
... every other damn thing we talk about on this list all came to a head for
me today. I have had a fascinating thing happen in my Writing to the WWW
class, and I would appreciate feedback on it.
Last week I gave a "quiz" -- "open-web," as it were -- in which students were
essentially responsible for showing that they knew how to code. The
"content" of the quiz was all available one or two links from our class
syllaweb -- and if they'd done the reading (and this class has kept up) they
knew that. Providing definitions for terms meant going to find them
elsewhere, and building an unnumbered list, or a table, or whatever ... get
the idea?
And, because I am vehemently anti-grading, I give them a re-write
opportunity; do the quiz over after you get the initial score. This is where
the problem came in. One of my more affable students, who had done okay on
the initial quiz, just sort of hung out and watched his classmates re-write
theirs for a week; then right before the "final deadline" (ugh) for the
re-write he threw up a page where he linked to various answers his
*classmates* had come up with -- essentially picking the bext answer to each
of the ten coding-response tasks.
Given that we've spent a great deal of time wokring through ownership issues
(we read Lunford, Rickly, Salvo and West -- etc.) I have to admit I was
somewhat nonplussed at first, and ended up thinking he was quite clever. I
know he knows how to do the coding tasks; he knows I know it; he put up a
site that challenged everything we think about academia.
Some of his classmates, one in particular, are not happy, though others
simply said "Oh! Wish I'd thought of that!" or were eager to find out if
*they8d* written anything good enough to be linked to. ;-) I will include one
negative response and ask you all -- how, if at all, should I respond? Class
ends in three days -- and the "final exam" (structured similarly to this
quiz) is on Thursday ...
-----------------------
I think what [name] did was deplorable. This was a quiz not a regular web
assignment. No I do not think it was approriate for him to do what he did. I
think he sould get a zero for the quiz and be set to the J-board. Some might
consider this a creative attempt at doing the quiz, but I say it is worong.
If I understand this correctly he didn ot even ask the permission of the
people he was copying from. I don't care if the links into the page, after
the quizes have been graded especially, but it is wrong in this situattion
for the simple fact that [name] was taking the quiz along with us. This fact
changes everything. I and a lot of people spent a lot of time on the quiz.
What [name] and any one else for that matter did, was tantamount to sitting
together in a traditional classroom and discussing a traditional test among
themselves and then handing individual papers is and saying the worked on it
individally.
THIS IS CHEATING
I worked dammed hard for the grade that I got and I would like to see [name]
punished for what he did instead of being made a celerbity.
Yes it boils down to grades. If we were not being graded I mostl likely would
not care, or at least not be this harsh. But grades are important. We as a
societ put a high stock in them. To get into a graduate school depends on
grades. To get a good job after graduation depends on grades, yes Experience
is a big factor as well as the school that you go to, but the bottom line is
grades. I have heard plenty recruters for companys say that given a chonce
between a MIT C and an RPI A they would most likely take the MIT C. I think
grades suck and should not be used to evealuate a student, but the rest of
society does not think so. If they did there woudl not be a big infasis
placed on the Class Validictoraian or the Salutatorian .....
We go to RPI becasue we want to get a good job. We are competing with a world
economy now. The future is going to be tougher than it ever was with
lagitimate competition. In such a sitauation cheating should not be
sanctioned as it is being in this situation. [name] shoudl pay for cheating,
like so many BETTER students have had to in the past for doing a lot less.
[student name]
And yes that last line was ment as an insult because I am pissed off like no
one woudl imagine.
..
[end of Mick's post]
See you at the cafe!
* * * N E T O R I C * * *
Tuesday Cafe -- Electronic Conferences -- CMC Workshops
---------------------------------------------------------------
| Tari Fanderclai | Greg Siering |
| Boston, MA | Ball State University |
| tari@ucet.ufl.edu | 00gjsiering@bsuvc.bsu.edu |
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