Mike's Reading Notes #6

I am very big on academic honesty because I feel it is a direct reflection of a student’s character. If part of my job as a teacher is to help students grow academically, I would like to make sure that it can help them grow as a person outside of class as well.

One point that I was very happy to see early on in the assigned reading for TT was to have a class period specific to defining plagiarism and walking students through correct and incorrect ways of doing things. I have had classmates get into trouble in the past because of plagiarism, and in majority of the cases, it was inadvertent due to improper citation of someone else’s material. I don’t personally know if this exists at NDSU, but I think it’s great if a university has a freshman course that deals with things such as proper citation when writing. What sources do people in class like to use to check for plagiarism? I think the idea of turning in sources with the paper is good in theory, but that also seems like you would be solely responsible for deforestation somewhere by requiring that much paper for an assignment. As far as cheating on exams and other things, I think Lang gave the single best piece of advice out of all the reading for this week: In order to prevent cheating and academic dishonesty, give students the opportunity to do well in class through a variety of different assignments (Lang 202). My question for the class is what assignments would you use to achieve this? I feel you can’t just arbitrarily assign things, so while I feel this is outstanding advice, I also feel it would be quite a challenge for an educator to accomplish.

Going along with what I said about Lang’s advice on cheating, I also feel it is difficult to write a test that effectively asses a student’s ability to understand and apply their knowledge, rather than just memorize it and forget it after the test is over. I also fear the entire class doing poorly on a test I wrote. Was it my delivery of information or are they just a lazy generation that doesn’t know how to prepare for a test? With regards to types of test, I absolutely loathe multiple choice tests. This is because I often feel an answer has more to it than A, B, C, or D. However, I do see the practical necessity of multiple choice tests and scan-trons with very large classes considering there are only so many hours in a day that can be spent grading. I am a big fan of essay and short answer tests for the purpose getting students to put their thoughts down on paper and to bring concepts together in order to answer a question. I think the thing I would struggle with is asking the right questions to spur thinking and connections between information.