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My daughter the HS teacher had an interesting conversation with a student.


JerrySTL

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2 minutes ago, JerrySTL said:

She caught a student plagiarizing a paper word for word. At first the student denied it even though my daughter had a copy of the original paper. The student finally broke down and said that she didn't think that it would be plagiarized as she paid a lot of money for the paper on the internet.

Can you get a diploma off the internet?  She seems on a good path towards success!

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2 hours ago, JerrySTL said:

She caught a student plagiarizing a paper word for word. At first the student denied it even though my daughter had a copy of the original paper. The student finally broke down and said that she didn't think that it would be plagiarized as she paid a lot of money for the paper on the internet.

Dear god we're doomed.

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11 hours ago, shootingstar said:

I agree. glad Jerry's daughter spoke to her about it...meaning she noticed.  

It angered 2 siblings studying pharmacy for their degrees...which is highly competitive in lst yr. 

I did a research paper in college, the topic dealt with nuclear energy. We had to look at the NY times front page from the day we were born and do a paper on a  story. Went to the library to find it on microfiche :)  oh the days. To print a copy it might of been 10 cents, or maybe 25. Not sure how it is now but researching something back then was work. This was 1994 and digital media was just becoming a thing. And I recall my professor saying bibliography references were in the works for citing digital media i.e. CDROM. Anywho, I had to turn in two copies of the paper. The professor said one copy is to grade and return, the second copy was kept by the school and entered in a national archive IIRC. This way if someone does a paper on a similar topic, mine could be referenced to see if it was copied. Trust me, you didn't want to copy mine unless you wanted a solid C :D

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4 minutes ago, bikeman564™ said:

I did a research paper in college, the topic dealt with nuclear energy. We had to look at the NY times front page from the day we were born and do a paper on a  story. Went to the library to find it on microfiche :)  oh the days. To print a copy it might of been 10 cents, or maybe 25. Not sure how it is now but researching something back then was work. This was 1994 and digital media was just becoming a thing. And I recall my professor saying bibliography references were in the works for citing digital media i.e. CDROM. Anywho, I had to turn in two copies of the paper. The professor said one copy is to grade and return, the second copy was kept by the school and entered in a national archive IIRC. This way if someone does a paper on a similar topic, mine could be referenced to see if it was copied. Trust me, you didn't want to copy mine unless you wanted a solid C :D

The perfect paper for a penny-pinching underachiever! A “C” will give me a passing grade and it won’t cost me a lot.  Win-win

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Just now, Parsnip Totin Jack said:

The perfect paper for a penny-pinching underachiever! A “C” will give me a passing grade and it won’t cost me a lot.  Win-win

True. Actually a C paper for most people is probably worth more than an A paper. If I turned in an award winning paper the teach be like :scratchhead:

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3 hours ago, bikeman564™ said:

I did a research paper in college, the topic dealt with nuclear energy. We had to look at the NY times front page from the day we were born and do a paper on a  story. Went to the library to find it on microfiche :)  oh the days. To print a copy it might of been 10 cents, or maybe 25. Not sure how it is now but researching something back then was work. This was 1994 and digital media was just becoming a thing. And I recall my professor saying bibliography references were in the works for citing digital media i.e. CDROM. Anywho, I had to turn in two copies of the paper. The professor said one copy is to grade and return, the second copy was kept by the school and entered in a national archive IIRC. This way if someone does a paper on a similar topic, mine could be referenced to see if it was copied. Trust me, you didn't want to copy mine unless you wanted a solid C :D

Our organization does having some new microfiche machine scanner installed recently ...more compact and tabletop style, to pull up image on computer screen. The information only exists for us in that format .. It is in the Archives dept. and a place for public to walk-in, etc.

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3 hours ago, Parsnip Totin Jack said:

The perfect paper for a penny-pinching underachiever! A “C” will give me a passing grade and it won’t cost me a lot.  Win-win

I would say it would also help throw off the hounds from the plagiarism trail, but ahspose nowadays the database would include everything.

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4 hours ago, bikeman564™ said:

you wanted a solid C :D

I’d take a solid C and original work any day.

After my school district started using the Google suite, I could run the plagiarism check on student work submitted in Docs. But I didn’t really need to use the checker because the copied text would be in a different font style or size or grayscale. Most of the time a student who copied said the source material is exactly what they knew and wanted to say, but they had a hard time coming up with the words. I get that. Then I’d have to explain that if they have control over a subject, then they have words to talk about it. And I’d show them how to cite long passages and add original commentary in their own voice. It’s hard to own up to the truth that “I’m still trying to understand this” when the teacher (the school)  has an inflexible timeline and that essay is due. Especially if getting a C is out of the question for them. 

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2 minutes ago, MoseySusan said:

I’d take a solid C and original work any day.

After my school district started using the Google suite, I could run the plagiarism check on student work submitted in Docs. But I didn’t really need to use the checker because the copied text would be in a different font style or size or grayscale. Most of the time a student who copied said the source material is exactly what they knew and wanted to say, but they had a hard time coming up with the words. I get that. Then I’d have to explain that if they have control over a subject, then they have words to talk about it. And I’d show them how to cite long passages and add original commentary in their own voice. It’s hard to own up to the truth that “I’m still trying to understand this” when the teacher (the school)  has an inflexible timeline and that essay is due. Especially if getting a C is out of the question for them. 

We had a set of Encyclopedias at home.  It was wicked easy to use that as a source for many reports.  

It seems kids always had things like Cliffs Notes or "test banks" or Kurt Vonnegut to help, but I guess it has just become so quick and easy that it is rampant? Of course, I had less than an hour of homework a day back in HS (which I did in homeroom or between classes).  I guess if I had 3 hours a night, I'd be looking for shortcuts too? :dontknow:

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5 minutes ago, Fret Buzz said:

 I guess if I had 3 hours a night, I'd be looking for shortcuts too? :dontknow:

One of my debaters was doing homework for her Honors 9 English class while at practice. She was supposed to copy and respond to key passages from Jane Eyre, which she just looked up on the internet without having read the book. When I said she was probably missing important context, she replied that she wished she had time to read the book because it sounded kind of cool from the quotes she found on the internet. 
 

Having the time to learn would be a game changer. Teenage students’ number one criticism of school is too much homework and too much busyness. I agree. Of course I add too much standardized testing. We would all like to see authentic work of learning, flexible time schedules, smaller class sizes, and authentic performance assessments of content mastery. And let go of the letter grades in favor of quality descriptors. Time and again, the research into letter grades shows they are assigned with subjective criteria. 

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3 minutes ago, MoseySusan said:

One of my debaters was doing homework for her Honors 9 English class while at practice. She was supposed to copy and respond to key passages from Jane Eyre, which she just looked up on the internet without having read the book. When I said she was probably missing important context, she replied that she wished she had time to read the book because it sounded kind of cool from the quotes she found on the internet. 
 

Having the time to learn would be a game changer. Teenage students’ number one criticism of school is too much homework and too much busyness. I agree. Of course I add too much standardized testing. We would all like to see authentic work of learning, flexible time schedules, smaller class sizes, and authentic performance assessments of content mastery. And let go of the letter grades in favor of quality descriptors. Time and again, the research into letter grades shows they are assigned with subjective criteria. 

I took two composition classes, post HS. They mainly consisted of reading old works, and comparing the similarities & such. I never was good at it :( But I did read some good stuff IMO, Glass Managerie, Street Car Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There were others. One I did not care for was Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. There was a reference to this book in the movie Honeymoon in Vegas, and I understood it :D

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17 hours ago, bikeman564™ said:

F

Not sure if that even works anymore. 

Our friend works in a grade school.  One day we were talking and I said just flunk the person.  'Nope... we don't do that.'    I found out it was nearly inpossible to flunk and be left back to repeat the year again.  They just pass.

We are doomed...  

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2 minutes ago, bikeman564™ said:

Glass Managerie, Street Car Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There were others. One I did not care for was Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

These texts are about 1/3 the length of Jane Eyre, and the student had two weeks to read it before the class moved on to the next classic novel. Probably David Copperfield… 

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31 minutes ago, Fret Buzz said:

We had a set of Encyclopedias at home.  It was wicked easy to use that as a source for many reports.  

It seems kids always had things like Cliffs Notes or "test banks" or Kurt Vonnegut to help, but I guess it has just become so quick and easy that it is rampant? Of course, I had less than an hour of homework a day back in HS (which I did in homeroom or between classes).  I guess if I had 3 hours a night, I'd be looking for shortcuts too? :dontknow:

I found it quite interesting that my memories of our childhood encyclopedia were WorldBook or some top end, but perusing them lately they were pretty bad cheap knockoffs. :(

 

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1 minute ago, MoseySusan said:

@bikeman564™, what’s the confusion? 
 

We could continue in the status quo with 19th century school practices that don’t  address life in the 21st century, or we can shift to practices that recognize the reality of the learning process and human growth and development.

not confused, just the act of copying material off the internet in lieu of reading the book.

Sometimes now I'll use others' words because it is what I want to say. But I put in quotes & cite the source.

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10 minutes ago, Bikeguy said:

Not sure if that even works anymore. 

Our friend works in a grade school.  One day we were talking and I said just flunk the person.  'Nope... we don't do that.'    I found out it was nearly inpossible to flunk and be left back to repeat the year again.  They just pass.

We are doomed...  

Doomed yes. There are times when you need to know what you're doing, and there is no moving on.

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15 minutes ago, bikeman564™ said:

what you're doing, and there is no moving on.

Research into “holding a student back” from their peer group shows that it’s ineffective. What does improve learning outcomes for students who need more time is targeted intervention and a smaller group. 

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3 hours ago, MoseySusan said:

It’s not 1935 anymore. We are not doomed if a student takes a few more months to learn.

I'd bet in 1935 students did better than this.

0%: Not a single student proficient in math at 19 Minnesota schools

Outrage on Twitter after Baltimore reveals zero students proficient in math across 23 schools: ‘FAILURE'

Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools –

There seems to be a pattern here..   I sure Google can find me more...  I gave up.  

Yeah... we are doomed.  

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10 minutes ago, Bikeguy said:

I'd bet in 1935 students did better than this.

It is a heck of a good question.  Certainly fewer students were "educated" back then (percentage wise), and what they taught was certainly different in many ways as well, and not readily comparable across multiple counties/states/nations like it might be today.  

Remember when "graduating high school" was a big event as many folks never graduated? Then it became graduating college and all the "first in my family to go" or later "first to graduate from college" as well as women moving into the ranks of graduates - both HS and college - until now being by far the larger percentage of graduates.  It's evolved a lot in 100 years.  I'd love to hear a good way to compare the apples of now to the oranges of then.

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59 minutes ago, Bikeguy said:

There seems to be a pattern here.

Test results taking over our conversation about what it means to be educated? I agree. 
 

In 1935, 8th grade was the end of compulsory schooling in the US. Students then chose whether to continue to high school, trade school, or start working. And schools in many states were still segregated. 

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1 hour ago, MoseySusan said:

Test results taking over our conversation about what it means to be educated? I agree. 
 

In 1935, 8th grade was the end of compulsory schooling in the US. Students then chose whether to continue to high school, trade school, or start working. And schools in many states were still segregated. 

I would always recommend to student that they finish/graduate successfully from high school.   Always make that attempt. 

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On 3/23/2023 at 3:07 PM, JerrySTL said:

She caught a student plagiarizing a paper word for word. At first the student denied it even though my daughter had a copy of the original paper. The student finally broke down and said that she didn't think that it would be plagiarized as she paid a lot of money for the paper on the internet.

Not surprising to me, a retired high school teacher, though the student STILL had to know it wasn't a legitimate move.

I once had a gifted and talented student in an Honors Chemistry class who wasn't working hard enough.  I had a talk with him and he said it was all a matter of luck where you ended up in life.

He said his father was a lazy, poorly-performing, insurance salesman and, to prod him to quit his job, his company reassigned him to a rural, low-populated area where he wouldn't get much business.

Then, a Maryland construction company called Rouse and Company bought up farmland in that agent's territory - strategically located midway between Baltimore and Washington - and decided to build an entire city from scratch: Columbia, Maryland, which quickly thrived with thousands of homes filled with higher-income families, excellent restaurants, great public schools, a great semi-outdoor concert hall (I first saw the Eagles, Yes, Judy Collins, and others there) and the largest mall in the state. Today it has a population of 105,000.

The boy's father became wealthy.

I asked him if his father had the math skills to do the job and he answered, "Yes."

I pointed out that, during his life, opportunities would present themselves to him and he could only take advantage of them if he had the skills needed and his generation would need even better skills than his father's and my generation.

He worked a little harder, but I don't think he was convinced.  I have no idea how he ended up: he'd be in his 50's now.

 

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2 hours ago, MickinMD said:

Not surprising to me, a retired high school teacher, though the student STILL had to know it wasn't a legitimate move.

I once had a gifted and talented student in an Honors Chemistry class who wasn't working hard enough.  I had a talk with him and he said it was all a matter of luck where you ended up in life.

He said his father was a lazy, poorly-performing, insurance salesman and, to prod him to quit his job, his company reassigned him to a rural, low-populated area where he wouldn't get much business.

Then, a Maryland construction company called Rouse and Company bought up farmland in that agent's territory - strategically located midway between Baltimore and Washington - and decided to build an entire city from scratch: Columbia, Maryland, which quickly thrived with thousands of homes filled with higher-income families, excellent restaurants, great public schools, a great semi-outdoor concert hall (I first saw the Eagles, Yes, Judy Collins, and others there) and the largest mall in the state. Today it has a population of 105,000.

The boy's father became wealthy.

I asked him if his father had the math skills to do the job and he answered, "Yes."

I pointed out that, during his life, opportunities would present themselves to him and he could only take advantage of them if he had the skills needed and his generation would need even better skills than his father's and my generation.

He worked a little harder, but I don't think he was convinced.  I have no idea how he ended up: he'd be in his 50's now.

I know some forumites here, might even challenge you Mick.  ie. education is not necessary.  I live in a province, that has a much higher high school drop-out rate than ie. Ontario or B.C. Why?  Because during boom times, and needed raw labour to work in oil and gas where you need tough souls to do some of the physical work, it was fast money.

What a bunch of bullcrap that education really is not necessary.  I've given this story before:  dearie's son dropped out of high school in his final yr.  So dearie and his ex were very disappointed and said to him:  go find a job. 

So son went several thousand km. west and got jobs working restaurants and hotel catering. He got a girl pregnant (and ended up paying child custody until kid was adult. The couple never married/lived together.).  He started to enjoy cooking and wondered about being a chef.

So he returned to high school and finished courses online. Graduated. While working, he also took evening courses in culinary skills at Toronto college when he returned. Married a different woman who graduated from college and was/is highly motivated.  Anyway he oversaw non-profit restaurant for hard to employ youth for a few yrs. in Toronto and then he ran kitchen for pub.  Then he got his own butcher-sandwich shop and the rest is history with dearie doing accounting.

Of course, it was dearie who did the complex financial analysis and formulae, multiple spreadsheets. Not son. So dearie took months slowly to teach son remotely how to understand it, where to input ..He gave it all over to son. And then dearie died.

I cannot even BEGIN to emphasize how critical it is for every able child to graduate from high school. To have critical skills to even talk and refine analytical skills to self-help how to distinguish misinformation from real reliable sources of information.

PLUS talk to professionals.....lawyer, health care at a level and understand those professionals yourself, so you don't get hosed.  It is myself and siblings with our level of education to assist my parents.

End of story. Do not put down education.  And AI is gonna make some people even dumber. It will because they won't understand what is AI in the first place.

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On 3/24/2023 at 7:30 AM, bikeman564™ said:

If I turned in an award winning paper the teach be like :scratchhead:

My middle daughter in her freshman year in college turned in a paper, and the professor gave her an F.  When she asked him why, he said "This paper is far too well-written for a college freshman.  You must have plagiarized it, and for doing so you get an F."  Of course she protested but he wouldn't listen.

So my daughter gathered up several papers she'd written in high school, complete with the grades marked on them, and set up another meeting with the professor.  She showed the papers which clearly showed her ability - but not only that - they also showed the continuity of her style and thought, and why she had graduated first in her class.

Grudgingly, he agreed that she had not plagiarized her paper.

And for writing a paper that was so remarkably good that by his own admission no freshman could have written it, he gave her an A- . :angry:

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